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By Lesley Blanch
$22.50
By Rachel Corrie
$16.29
$17
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The president’s talents as a communicator were in desperate need in Arizona, where he spoke Wednesday at the memorial for the victims of the shooting in Tucson. (Full text and video after the jump)
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AP / James Palka
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — There is one commentator whose words should enlighten us on the meaning of Saturday’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the savage murders that took the lives of, among others, a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl. The person is Giffords herself.
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Photo from Rep. Giffords' Facebook page
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Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head Saturday, on Facebook lists her favorite quote as this line from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in, ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” (more)
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By Ruth Marcus — If you programmed a computer to generate a speech laden with cliches; solemnly vowing to achieve the unobjectionable; and all but devoid of substance, it would have come up with something approximating John Boehner’s remarks.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Alas for all of us and for American conservatism in particular, the new Republican majority that took control of the House on Wednesday is embarked on an experiment in government by abstractions.
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AP / Sebastian Scheiner
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By Juan Cole — As the decade draws to a close, it is clear that the bright hopes inspired by Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech have markedly faded, and the disappointments have outweighed achievements in the most important arena for contemporary American foreign policy.
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The author who gained national attention last month by selling his self-published “Pedophile’s Guide to Love & Pleasure” on Amazon has been arrested on obscenity charges. Authorities are concerned that the book advocates illegal behavior, a familiar challenge to free speech protections.
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AP / Susan Walsh
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By Chris Hedges — One hundred and thirty-one men and women, many of them military veterans wearing old fatigues, formed a single, silent line. Under a heavy snowfall and to the slow beat of a drum, they walked to the White House fence. They stood there until they were arrested.
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AP / Greg Baker
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By Steven Hill — China is experimenting with representative democracy. Cynics say “don’t hold your breath,” but they fail to consider a new generation of Chinese citizens and leaders who are developing different sensibilities than their forebears.
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By Eugene Robinson — Do we want the people who run Amazon, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter or perhaps even—shudder—Microsoft, Apple or Google making political decisions on our behalf?
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Chris Hedges — Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — We are about to enter a two-year period in which the Beltway Republicans will always blame Obama’s America first—you know, the America that happens to disagree with much of the conservative agenda, the America from which they want to “take back” the country, as if the rest of us represent an alien force.
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AP
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By Chris Hedges — The country suffers an impoverishment of ideas and analysis at a moment when we desperately need radical voices to make sense of the corporate destruction of the global economy and the ecosystem.
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Steven Borowiec
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By Steven Borowiec — The potentially explosive G-20 meeting in Seoul was smothered before anything spectacular could happen.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The lame-duck session of Congress that kicks off this week will test whether Democrats have spines made of Play-Doh, and whether President Obama has decided to pretend that capitulation is conciliation.
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By Richard Reeves — It may not get much done, but the first session of the 112th Congress, convening in January, will be fun to watch.
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Flickr / Bruce McKay (CC-BY-SA)
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By Deanne Stillman — Why Sarah Palin is no grizzly and how she and her sister travelers will wipe out the real thing.
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Flickr / Fibonacci Blue (CC-BY)
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By Stanley Kutler — While our media wizards report a groundswell of anger against the president, tea party candidates and financiers appear to be as bothered by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt as those of Barack Obama.
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We’ve been trying to ignore a certain Senate candidate, but her latest display is so shocking (as the audience gasps during this debate confirm), it simply must be witnessed.
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Chris Hedges talks about his new book, how he came to write it, and what we can expect from the collapse of the liberal establishment.
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By Ruth Marcus — I’m not a witch. But if I were, the first spell I’d cast would be to turn House Minority Leader John Boehner into British Prime Minister David Cameron.
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AP / Kathy Willens
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Carl Paladino has made a joke of the New York governor’s race, but on Sunday the tea party candidate showed he could be hateful as well. Speaking to a group of Orthodox Jews just days after it was reported that two teenagers and an adult were tortured nearby in the Bronx for being gay, Paladino said children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking homosexuality is “equally valid.” (continued)
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Flickr / k763 (CC-BY)
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By Ruth Marcus — I don’t know if there’s a hell, but if it exists, the Rev. Fred Phelps and other members of the Westboro Baptist Church deserve a place. In this world, their repulsive actions are shielded by the Constitution.
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Photo illustration based on the poster by James Montgomery Flagg
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The defense secretary warned Duke University, and anyone else who would listen, about a growing divide between the public and the military that has created a minority class of professional military workers and a detached, if vaguely supportive, civilian population.
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By Eugene Robinson — Boy, one thing I really hate is when American judges try to impose harsh Islamic sharia law. You know, with all those grisly lashings, stonings and beheadings. What’s that you say? No such thing is happening, and you wonder where I got such a crazy idea? Why, Newt Gingrich told me.
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It’s hard to believe that it has already been a year since President Obama’s last back-to-school speech—the one that got certain detractors in a tizzy about his purported plans to brainwash America’s youth with dangerous socialist messages.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama decided this week to raise the stakes in this fall’s election by making the choice about something instead of nothing but anger.
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White House / Chuck Kennedy
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With unemployment still rising and the American infrastructure getting no less crumbly, President Obama is set to announce a six-year plan to build roads and create jobs, starting with a $50 billion investment. That’s assuming Congress gets on board the recovery train.
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By Eugene Robinson — Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they’re ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans—for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt.
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The Truthdig columnist begins this speech to the Veterans for Peace convention by saying, “Physical courage is something you see on a battlefield. Moral courage you almost never see.”
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — By insisting Tuesday evening that “it’s time to turn the page,” President Obama was talking about more than the Iraq War, and doing much more than reviving one of his most effective slogans from the 2008 campaign.
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Today on the list: The guide to killing goyim, more evidence of Glenn Beck’s self-obsession, and proof that bears do not make the safest pets.
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Flickr / Giorgio Montersino (CC-BY-SA)
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By Stanley Kutler — Once he tasted the realities of political life, Thomas Jefferson had harsh words for the free press. What would he have made of the irresponsible, shoddy, pernicious zeal that passes for news today?
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White House
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The president began his address to the nation on the end of combat operations in Iraq by acknowledging that “this historic moment comes at a time of great uncertainty for many Americans.”
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Flickr / Emil Kepko (CC-BY)
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By Arthur Blaustein — I have a dream that the Yalie son of a Houston oil magnate can walk hand in hand with the daughter of a Wall Street hedge fund operator on the white sands of Southampton while evading inheritance taxes.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama’s address to the nation on Iraq this week underscores the agony of his presidency, and its core political problem. In a democracy, separating governing from “politicking” is impossible.
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By Eugene Robinson — No puffed-up huckster like Glenn Beck could ever diminish the importance of the 1963 March on Washington or the impact of King’s unforgettable words.
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Glenn Beck is holding a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s dream speech. Our friends at Brave New Films send this video lowlight reel to remind us why Beck shouldn’t dare stand anywhere near King’s legacy.
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By Ruth Marcus — We need to do something about tax expenditures, those spending programs disguised as tax breaks that cost us close to $1.2 trillion a year.
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By Ruth Marcus — The man who would be speaker outlined his agenda Tuesday in a speech to the City Club of Cleveland: economic policy reduced to, literally, five easy tweets.
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Flickr / slobug (CC-BY-SA)
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The former presidential candidate says opposition to building a mosque near Ground Zero “is all about hate and Islamaphobia” and that the “justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer.” (Full statement after the jump).
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There’s almost too much crazy going on here to cope, but Media Matters does a bang-up job of explaining how Sarah Palin (who told Dr. Laura N-Word “don’t retreat ... reload!”) and Glenn Beck are planning to “reclaim the civil rights movement” with a rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “dream” speech.
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Today on the list: Pop as porn redux, what college freshmen don’t know, a CNN anchor argues on behalf of “Ground Zero mosque” bigots, and why President Obama’s speech on the matter was actually quite shrewd.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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President Obama has come out strongly in defense of controversial plans to erect a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City. Muslims, the president said, have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else.
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AP / Javier Galeano
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A week shy of his 84th birthday, Fidel Castro took to the podium Saturday to address the Cuban parliament on the threat of nuclear war, his first such address in more than four years.
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By David Sirota — The instantly famous image of police removing a 29-year-old from Cleveland’s Progressive Field is illustrative of a nation that, for all its pro-Constitution rhetoric, increasingly ignores its founding document.
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Library of Congress / Warren K. Leffler
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Fidel was a no-show and brother Raul kept quiet during Cuba’s annual Revolution Day festivities, leading journalists, analysts and amateur handicappers to puzzle over the larger implications. The Guardian reports “bafflement among the 90,000-strong crowd” that turned out to hear speeches.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there’s no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African-Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.
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By Eugene Robinson — When the nation’s leading civil rights organization passed a resolution condemning displays of racism by tea party activists, leaders of the movement reacted with umbrage so thick you could cut it with a knife—then demonstrated that the NAACP’s allegation was entirely justified.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Good for the NAACP. We need an honest conversation about the role of race and racism in the tea party. Thanks to a resolution passed this week at the venerable organization’s national convention, we’ll get it.
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Bank of America Lied to Homeowners and Rewarded Foreclosures, Ex-Employees Say
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