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By John Gray $24.00
By Carl Oglesby $16.50
$20
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Barack Obama’s campaign promise of change did not include a pledge to transform American conservatism. But one of his presidency’s major legacies may be a revolution on the American right in which older, more secular forms of politics displace religious activism.
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 U.S. Department of Justice
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The Justice Department, as expected, has decided to file a lawsuit seeking to shut down Arizona’s SB 1070, a move that is likely to launch immigration even further into this year’s election debate as conservatives rally around anti-immigrant sentiment in scrounging for votes.
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 Wikimedia Commons/Joan Garvin
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Sarah Silverman’s no shrinking violet, as she recently demonstrated once again by launching a direct hit on the Murdochian empire that is Fox News, calling the cable news channel “a 24-hour-a-day racism engine” ... (continued)
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 youtube.com
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Now that we’ve gotten the inevitable tea party pun out of the way, here’s the newsy bit: According to the astute analysis of Salon’s Gabriel Winant, the relationship between the GOP’s powers that be and certain sachet-carrying members of the tea party ... (continued)
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By Eugene Robinson — Rand Paul’s stunning victory in Kentucky demonstrates that the tea party movement does not intend to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.
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 AP / Ed Reinke
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By Robert Scheer — Tuesday’s election results were pretty good for progressives. The retirement of that windbag chameleon Sen. Arlen Specter is long overdue, and pro-labor forces were able to push Sen. Blanche Lincoln into a runoff in Arkansas. Even the big tea party win in Kentucky has its bright side.
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 youtube.com
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Roger Ebert isn’t exactly known for his political commentary, but he, like many adult members of the media elite, takes to Twitter to air some of his thoughts on matters not always pertaining to the movies. A group of tea-party-friendly Twitterheads apparently didn’t like what he had to say. (continued)
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 Flickr / Center for the Study of Ethics
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Bob Bennett, three-term Republican senator from Utah, has been ousted from running for re-election by the conservative tea party movement after he was deemed unfit (he supported health care reform). Bennett came in third at the state Republican convention in Salt Lake City.
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 Colorlines.com
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The push to criminalize undocumented immigrants, as seen most poignantly in the recent legislation adopted in Arizona, is growing. Many more states are seeing anti-immigrant bills introduced in their legislatures, backed by the far-right group Federation for American Immigration Reform.
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By David Sirota — “I Want My Country Back”—this ubiquitous tea party mantra belongs next to Nike’s “Just Do It” on Ad Age’s list of the most transcendent idioms.
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 AP / Charles Dharapak
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Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s political prospects took a sharp downward turn after he man-hugged President Barack Obama in February 2009. And the emergence of the tea party movement—not to mention the boost it has given Crist’s main rival for election to the U.S. Senate ... (continued)
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 AP / David Duprey
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By Marcia Alesan Dawkins — We can infer that Lloyd Marcus may be winking at us—saying that African-American may still equal un-American. After all, if African-American actually meant American and if race didn’t matter, then Marcus wouldn’t have to make the gesture. Let’s think about it.
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Suddenly, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is under the microscope for maybe, potentially, being gay! What’s a conservative Southern senator to do? Well, as Stephen Colbert points out, hanging around with Sen. Joe Lieberman might help, but releasing a (straight) sex tape would be even better.
Posted on Apr 23, 2010
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Both parties stand to lose if they accept the laughable notion that the media-created protest movement known as the tea party is the voice of true populism.
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 Wikimedia Commons / Margaret Bourke-White
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By Yasha Levine, AlterNet —
The members of the Koch family, America’s biggest financial backers of the tea party, would not be the billionaires they are today were it not for the godless empire of the USSR.
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
According to a source close to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, they have already drawn up a list of possible candidates for the additional two horsemen, a list which includes Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter and the entire Cheney family.
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 nytimes.com
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Tea party members are often depicted as anti-Democrat reactionaries or scoffed at as holding incoherent, outside-reality positions. But a new feature by The New York Times lets supporters speak for themselves, sharing their concerns for the country and what the tea party means to them.
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The SEC has taken its first action against Goldman Sachs for alleged investor fraud—will it help efforts for financial reform and regulation? Or will the financial giant just be slapped with a fine and then allowed to continue business as usual?
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A crowd of tea party types pitched camp in Washington, D.C., for a “tax day” demonstration Thursday, waving their usual socialism-themed signage and talking smack about their three least favorite people on Capitol Hill: President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
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 Flickr / Lee Jordan (CC-BY-SA)
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Assuming a new CBS News/New York Times poll is accurate, tea partyers are older, whiter (just 1 percent are black), angrier and better-educated than your average American. And if you count only those who have actually gone to a rally or given money, you’re talking about 4 percent of the population. (continued)
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Here we have singer Lloyd Marcus, who would like everyone to know, as he announced during this performance at a Boston-area tea party rally on Wednesday, that he is “not an African-American.” Well, you might ask, what does that make him?
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By Chris Hedges — Ernest Logan Bell, a 25-year-old Marine Corps veteran walking 90 miles to make a point, is the new face of the resistance. He is young, at home in the culture of the military, deeply suspicious of the federal government, disgusted by the liberal elite, unable to find work and angry.
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 Flickr / the pragmatic
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Bart Stupak, the Michigan congressman who led the charge against President Obama’s health care bill on the grounds that it might allow tax money to pay for abortions, has decided he will not run for re-election in 2010.
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Monte Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons —
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 Flickr user JenvanW (CC-BY)
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It costs about $1.36 million to win a seat in the House of Representatives and about twice that in the Senate. Democrats are finding that when it comes to raising that kind of cash, it’s good to be in the majority.
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Bill Maher was his usual irreverent self on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show,” praising House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “balls” in the health care reform saga and riffing on the infamous “death panel” controversy in ways Sarah Palin most definitely won’t appreciate.
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By Joe Conason — When the Department of Homeland Security released a cautiously worded report on the potential dangers of right-wing extremism last April, the talk-radio wingnuts and certain Republican lawmakers went into spasms of indignation.
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David Letterman didn’t exactly lob any hardballs in his interview with Idaho tea party activist Pam Stout on Tuesday night’s show, opting instead to have a light and informative exchange on Stout’s own history and where she believes the movement might be headed ... (continued)
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By Eugene Robinson — It is disingenuous for mainstream purveyors of incendiary far-right rhetoric to dismiss groups such as the Hutaree militia by saying that there are “crazies on both sides.” This simply is not true.
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 AP / Jae C. Hong
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By Chris Hedges — Fritz Stern wrote “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous.
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 AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Stanley Kutler — Thanks to Newt Gingrich’s loose lips, the cat is out of the bag: The Republican Party, answering the call of a large part of its following, will continue its subtle and not-so-subtle uses of the “race card.”
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What happened to bubbly blond Victoria Jackson after her run on “Saturday Night Live”? Well, for her latest act she’s become a tea party demonstrator and she thinks the president’s a communist. “I watch Glenn Beck, and he has taught me well,” she tells Fox News’ Steve Doocy, adding, “Progressive is the new word for communist.”
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 Flickr / Studio d'Xavier
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Cap and trade was all the rage back in 2009, with the market-driven system of curbing emissions seen as a dominant force in addressing global warming problems. Now the concept has seemingly fallen out of favor.
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 AP / Ross D. Franklin
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By Eugene Robinson — Let’s not pretend anymore that the tea party movement is harmless. Even Sarah Palin is making comments that could have lethal consequences, such as “Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!”
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 AP / Haraz N. Ghanbari
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By Robert Scheer — Boy, the Republicans know how to make Barack Obama look good. What are they going to do now, threaten to repeal a law that forces insurance companies to cover the sick? Or block the provision that allows you to keep your out-of-work kids on your policy until they are 26?
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 AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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After months of partisan bickering, “Obamacare” paranoia and tea-party whimsy, President Obama made the health care reform bill law on Tuesday, signing it with studied deliberation as Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others from among Fox News’ most beloved federal officials looked on.
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 Flickr / ajagendorf25
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Tea party loyalists may be situated at the right side of the political spectrum, but that doesn’t mean the upstart political movement is an adjunct to the Republican Party, no siree. As it evolves, the loosely unified conservative coalition may be moving farther away from the GOP’s orbit.
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By Eugene Robinson — On Sunday, as comprehensive health care reform was becoming a reality, some people couldn’t bear what they saw.
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Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney made a stop on his book tour for a somewhat awkward chat with a mustachioed gent and a flaxen-haired She-publican from the right-leaning Newsmax.com, during which he signaled his disapproval of big government, his firm support of free-market principles and his concerns about a potential tea party spinoff from the GOP.
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 AP / Ben Margot
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By Chris Hedges — Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying. How do we fight back?
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 Flickr / Gage Skidmore
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A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center outlines a surge in extremist “patriot” groups in the U.S. The center claims that the number of right-wing extremist groups increased by 250 percent in 2009.
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 governor.state.tx.us
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Rick Perry, already Texas’ longest-serving governor, has survived primary challenges from a popular senator and an insurgent tea party candidate. Debra Medina had hoped to spoil the Republican race, but the tea partyer (whom we recently called out) was able to grab only about 17 percent of the vote.
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By David Sirota — Speaking to the Conservative CPAC conference, Glenn Beck expressed sympathy for the anti-tax terrorist kamikaze pilot and called for the eradication of progressivism. The mob cheered.
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 AP / Pat Sullivan
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By Yasha Levine and Mark Ames —
Ron Paul protégé Debra Medina is shaking up the Texas gubernatorial race, but scratch the surface of this rising tea party star and you’ll find a Bush-style big-government hypocrite.
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Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune —
Posted on Feb 23, 2010
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The former Joint Chiefs chairman and secretary of state says he has no regrets about endorsing Barack Obama and defends the president from his frenemy Dick Cheney.
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 AP / Jack Plunkett
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Authorities continue to investigate why Joe Stack of Texas flew his small airplane into the Austin offices of the IRS, but based on early reports and a tirade the attacker posted on the Internet, it had something to do with taxes, big government, corporate crime and bailouts. (continued)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If you want to be honest, face these facts: At this moment, President Obama is losing, Democrats are losing and liberals are losing.
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John Cole, The Scranton Times-Tribune —
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