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By David Kipen $10.20
By Baratunde Thurston $24.99
$23
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 AP / Adel Hana
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U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash., has criticized the White House, Israel and even his congressional colleagues after three trips to the Gaza Strip, commenting on the lack of action by the international community and the ignorance that most U.S. politicians have toward the plight of the Palestinians.
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 Flickr / samirluther
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Thanks to the lousy weather pummeling the nation’s capital, Congress is taking some time off. The House canceled all business pending bluer skies, while the Senate convened for a whole five minutes Monday. As of this posting, there is a 100 percent chance of snow in the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday.
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 AP / Jeffrey M. Boan
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Taking an ambulatory cue from the Freedom Riders of the civil rights era, four immigrant students—three of whom are undocumented—are walking from downtown Miami to Washington, D.C., in a four-month protest against the Obama administration’s inaction on legislation that could give legal status to immigrants.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Here’s a story you may have missed because it flies in the face of the dreary conventional wisdom: When advocates of public programs take on the right-wing anti-government crowd directly, the government-haters lose.
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After an extended vacation, Jon Stewart returned to his “Daily Show” anchor’s desk Monday—and not a moment too soon, as the national epidemic of crazitude hasn’t calmed down since he left, especially when it comes to the subject of health care reform.
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 Flickr / dbking
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An 88-year-old anti-Semite shot up the U.S. Holocaust Museum on Wednesday, killing a security guard in the process. President Obama said in response “we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism.” Sure, but how about getting a little vigilant against guns?
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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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 seattlepi.nwsource.com
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Fourth time’s the charm? Barack Obama’s two official picks to serve as commerce secretary both had to drop out. Another candidate withdrew her name before it was ever announced. Now the president is reported to have offered the job to former Washington Gov. Gary Locke. So who is he?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama’s visit with House and Senate Republicans this week was useful for setting a new tone and a refreshing break from the Bush administration’s habit of consulting almost no one. But it was a sideshow to the main battle over how to improve the economy, which is among Democrats.
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Was Barack Obama’s inauguration moment more important than, say, Martin Luther King Jr.’s finest hour? How about the moon landing? A brazen John Oliver takes to the streets of Washington, D.C., during Obama’s big day to take advantage of the good will of fellow revelers—and to steal a kiss or two—in this memorable “Daily Show” clip.
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 AP photo
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Truthdig normally celebrates Martin Luther King Day by remembering the more complex, more subversive King—the man who railed against America as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and “a society gone mad on war.” But a day before America inaugurates its first black president, we have other things on our mind.
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By Eugene Robinson — Our nation’s capital will survive the financial meltdown, the deepening recession and the plethora of foreign crises from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Whether Washington will survive Tuesday’s inauguration, however, is an open question.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — While Republicans are looking inward and focusing on appeals to the party’s activist base, Obama wants Democrats to concentrate their energies on recently acquired political terrain and the new converts who were central to his party’s sweep last year.
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 Flickr / SteelCityHobbies
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The auto industry bailout would have no chance of passing without the muscle of the Big Three’s unionized work force. Yet you can’t turn around without hearing someone trash autoworkers for the terrible crime of trying to earn a decent living.
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By David Sirota — Judging by the proliferation of capital letters in the e-mail correspondence I receive, many seem worried that Barack Obama may not deliver the promised “change we can believe in.”
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By Marie Cocco — At the earliest, it is likely to be at least February or March before the first dollar of an Obama recovery plan is felt. This is a national disgrace.
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On Thursday night, Attorney General Michael Mukasey suddenly collapsed while making a speech at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. He was rushed to George Washington University Hospital for treatment.
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 Flickr / Center for American Progress Action Fund
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House Democrats are serious about going green. To prove it, they just ousted auto hawk John Dingell from his perch as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California liberal and occasional Dingell foe, supplied the boot.
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Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City —
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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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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 Marie Cocco — Conservatives fear a “period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy” should Barack Obama and the Democrats sweep in November, but the voters care more about competent government than ideology.
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By Eugene Robinson — Grouchiness, twitchiness and haughtiness didn’t help John McCain in Wednesday’s debate, but what he said hurt him more than how he said it.
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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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 blogspot.com
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Two Latin American leaders, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, expelled the U.S. ambassadors to their nations after claiming that the American embassies in both countries were supporting rebel groups aimed at toppling their governments. Salvador Allende and Jacobo Arbenz were unavailable for comment.
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There’s a great deal riding on this November’s presidential election—and, clearly, not just for Americans. Link TV has put together a new feature called “Dear American Voter” to tell those who will be able to cast their vote in the U.S. what their choices might represent for the rest of the world.
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 commons.wikimedia.org
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The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Washington, D.C., overreached with its handgun ban and must allow residents to keep guns in their homes. While it is considered a major pronouncement on the Second Amendment, it will take time, lawsuits and possibly even more rulings from the high court before the decision’s full impact is known.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak, file
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By Chris Hedges — Washington has become Versailles. We are ruled, entertained and informed by courtiers.
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — War doesn’t pay, nor does imperial ambition. This proposition should be evident to anyone who has paid attention to the fivefold increase in the price of oil since George W. Bush took office. The principle of nonintervention is neither liberal nor conservative in orientation, and at the inception of the Republic it was accepted as a commonsense.
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 flickr/hyku
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Veteran journalist and “Meet the Press” moderator Tim Russert died Friday of an apparent heart attack while recording voice-overs for Sunday’s show, according to NBC. Russert, 58, was also the network’s Washington bureau chief and had grilled politicians and public figures on “Meet the Press” since 1991.
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Author and columnist David Sirota braves the Colbert treatment to talk about his (Sirota’s) latest book, “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington,” and to brazenly assert that, “People are angry with the status quo—they think the establishment isn’t working for them, and frankly, it’s not.”
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Author Stephen King made an appearance last month at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where he discussed, among other things, the importance of literacy. As King put it: “I don’t want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don’t, then you’ve got, the Army, Iraq, I don’t know, something like that.”
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By David Sirota — Congress is ravaged by a disease inside the Washington Beltway inhibiting emotions like compassion and integrity. As the housing crisis intensifies, this malady is getting worse.
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There’s a new Jewish lobby in town, one that hopes to reclaim American Jews’ proud progressive tradition and counter the right-wingers who have managed to intimidate Washington in the name of the Jewish community. Unlike like-minded advocacy groups, J Street hopes to raise gobs of money in order to support lawmakers who take a more enlightened view, including a call for a more peaceful approach to American and Israeli foreign policy.
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass Thursday in a venue different from his customary surroundings, leading a service at the Washington Nationals baseball stadium on the latest stop of his American tour.
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 treehugger.com
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Following the string of economic crises across the globe, financial elites are planning to meet in Washington this weekend to address how to resolve the problems of global capitalism. Notably missing from the proceedings is any representative from the developing world.
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 Flickr / gTarded
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The shocking truth about FAA plane inspections was revealed Thursday when three inspectors told a congressional hearing their supervisors ignored their concerns about the safety of Southwest planes and reprimanded them for raising questions.
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 Washington Post / Karen Ballard
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A recently declassified memo shines the spotlight once again on John “Take Them to the Point of Death” Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor and once deputy legal counsel in the Justice Department.
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After throwing the first pitch of the 2001 World Series, President Bush said he “felt the raw emotion” of the fans. The same could be said for his latest trip to the mound, where he endured the boos of thousands.
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 flickr.com
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In response to the strengthening of ties between Hugo Chavez and recently elected Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government, Condoleezza Rice will skip the country on a two-day trip to South America. The snub further underscores a divide between the U.S.‘s traditional Latin American allies and a growing movement in opposition to U.S. policy in the region.
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By Marie Cocco — Elections do matter. Some people who win office really do keep campaign promises. And legislation the public wants—but which the politicians, by and large, don’t—actually can be enacted, even if the kicking and screaming can practically be heard coming from behind those infamously closed doors.
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 AP photo / Hadi Mizban
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By Scott Ritter — As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I find myself thinking back on how we got ourselves into this predicament. ... As I examine where we are today and contemplate our future and those who are positioning themselves to play a role in Iraq, it seems to me that there is at least one such incident, a dinner party I attended at the home of Ahmed Chalabi in June 1998 that is worthy of a more public illumination.
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 aoc.gov
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All three presidential candidates are scheduled to be back in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. A Republican senator has proposed a yearlong ban on earmarks and, shocking though it may seem, John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are apparently on board with the idea. Their colleagues in the Senate, however, are somewhat less enthusiastic.
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 diggersrealm.com
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His rise in New York politics was meteoric, and now Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s fall from grace looks to be just as spectacular: On Monday, The New York Times reported that Spitzer had been a client of an international prostitution ring called the Emperors Club, in which he was known by the alias “Client-9.”
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With a win in the Maine caucuses, Barack Obama has scored four lopsided victories in a row and the map favors him for weeks to come. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, responded to her troubles by replacing her campaign manager. Clinton now has to hold back Obama’s momentum long enough to win the big states weeks from now, a strategy that did not help Rudy Guiliani.
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 AP photo / Rick Bowmer
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Amid speculation that a long road might be in store for Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the tide turned in Obama’s favor Saturday with Nebraska and Washington state caucus victories and a big win in the Louisiana primary.
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 huffingtonpost.com
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It’s hard to limit oneself to just a couple dozen names, slogans and events representing the worst of the Bush years, but that’s what the folks at The Huffington Post have done for a postering campaign designed to promote Democratic candidates and shame Team Bush for its transgressions.
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 news.bbc.co.uk
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The Supreme Court will rule on the Second Amendment for the first time since 1939, when it examines whether a handgun ban in Washington, D.C., is constitutional. A decision is expected next summer, so expect to see a lot of tap dancing from the candidates, particularly those who’ve changed their minds about gun violence or suddenly discovered a love of hunting.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Bill Boyarsky — America’s political correspondents are enchanted with Clinton, but their passion might fade when voters start asking her hard questions about her hawkish view of the Iraq war.
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 washingtonpost.com
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It sounds far-fetched, but a number of protesters swear they’ve spotted robotic insects hovering around anti-war rallies. The government denies deploying robot spies, but it’s known that the U.S. military has had robotic flies, such as the one above, since World War II.
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