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By Stanley Kutler
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By Morris Berman
$10.80
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By Marie Cocco — This week marks a decade since a consortium of state attorneys general negotiated the landmark settlement of lawsuits against tobacco companies. The results are in: Cigarette consumption has declined by 28 percent in the past 10 years.
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AP photo / Kiichiro Sato, file
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By Chris Hedges — The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. If Barack Obama continues to turn to the elites who created the mess, if he does not radically redirect the nation’s resources to assist the working class and the poor, we will become a third-world country.
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By Regina Marler — A new volume of the late poet’s correspondence sheds fresh light on the anguish and art of Sylvia Plath.
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By Marie Cocco — It is time to stop kidding ourselves. This wasn’t a breakthrough year for American women in politics. It was a brutal one.
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By Ellen Goodman — Sen. Robert Byrd, 91, announced that he will give up the chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee to Sen. Daniel Inouye, 84. The torch has passed to a new generation.
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Flickr / Brave New Films
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By Marie Cocco — The giant discounter is the only store where hard-squeezed consumers can afford to buy anything, and so it has kept posting sales gains amid the retail bloodbath.
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An unabashed triumph, Morrison’s new novel is a gloriously poetic and incantatory retelling of America’s tragic and redemptive story.
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By Ellen Goodman — Have you ever seen a transformation this fast? Think of it as evolution on steroids. But don’t think Sarah Palin will go quietly into that good Arctic night.
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speaker.gov
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Nancy Pelosi isn’t as showy as some of her predecessors, but according to a profile in the Politico, the most powerful woman in American political history is firmly in control of her domain. Tom “the Hammer” DeLay says she is “the most powerful speaker in a generation—she will be able to do anything she wants.” As one anonymous lawmaker put it, “Whatever Nancy wants, Nancy gets.”
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By Joe Conason — Writing a postmortem for John McCain’s presidential candidacy would be premature. But if and when that moment comes next week, toxic staff infection will be listed as a primary cause of death.
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By Marie Cocco — My computer will allow a letter to be displayed at a maximum 500 percent of its normal size. That isn’t big enough for a capital “H” that conveys the towering hypocrisies of the Sarah Palin political wardrobe malfunction.
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By Ellen Goodman — While gay marriage is losing its stigma, abortion is once again retreating to the closet.
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Sarah Palin was supposed to attract women to the GOP ticket, but her charm hasn’t worked with the Feminist Majority, which is running this ad to tell voters that “a McCain and Palin win hurts women.”
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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. — The key to understanding how John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate was provided by The New York Times last weekend when it described an episode in which he “tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table.”
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By Marie Cocco — There is something about Sarah Palin that gnaws at me, and it isn’t that the Republican vice presidential nominee has wilted under the soft light shone upon her by CBS’ Katie Couric.
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Flickr / bobster1985
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So much for Sarah Palin the reformer: The Alaska governor took home more than $25,000 in gifts during her less than two years in office, including “honorific tributes, expensive artwork and free travel for a family member.” Bombshells like that are rocking the right wing, along with Palin’s embarrassing interviews, which have prompted conservative columnist Kathleen Parker to declare, “My cringe reflex is exhausted.”
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Collage: Flickr / transplanted mountaineer / buddhakiwi
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Barack Obama is depending more and more on a Rocky Mountain victory and, according to a new poll, Sarah Palin may have just given him a boost there. It seems the Alaska governor’s growing unpopularity among independent voters has helped Obama to a seven-point lead in the Centennial State.
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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 Ellen Goodman — Three weeks after the nomination of the Candidate From Nowhere, one week after the robo-interview with Charlie Gibson and days after the “Saturday Night Live” skit, there is still a flood tide of women choking on the possibility that Hillary Clinton paved the way for Sarah Palin.
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By Marie Cocco — The great lipstick-on-a-pig campaign imbroglio, if we are lucky, will mark the moment Republicans jumped the shark with their cries of alleged sexism toward vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
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AP photo / Al Grillo
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By Chris Hedges — Sarah Palin may be a governor and a vice presidential candidate, but in the hyper-masculine world of the Christian right, she is subservient to a male hierarchy that claims to speak for God.
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Tina Fey returns to “Saturday Night Live” to play the Alaska governor side by side with Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton, who offers to lend the media a pair.
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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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By Ellen Goodman — Let us remember that Republicans had long targeted working mothers as the centerpiece of the culture wars. Now their heroine is the in-your-face governor who once said: “To any critics who say a woman can’t think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I’d just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave.”
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AP photo / Jose Luis Magana
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In Friday’s New York Times article about whether Hillary Clinton will go to the mat against Sarah Palin, a woman delegate at the GOP convention says, “I just bet Hillary was watching Sarah’s speech on TV Wednesday night and cheering, ‘You go, girl!’ ” Really?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Once upon a time, John McCain promised to be a different kind of politician and a different kind of Republican. McCain wants voters to remember that man. But that man has disappeared.
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By Eugene Robinson — Talk about role reversal. The Republican Party, which scoffs at the nonsense of “identity politics,” has staked everything on the compelling life stories of its presidential and vice presidential candidates.
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By Marie Cocco — Here is what we have gotten with John McCain’s vice presidential selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, picked in part for her extreme anti-abortion credentials: an exquisite endorsement of the pro-choice argument.
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By Ellen Goodman — Pregnancy is indeed private, but the Republican meeting in St. Paul, Minn., would put decisions about pregnancy in the hands of the government and replace sex information with disinformation. No, you don’t have to pass judgment on a 17-year-old to pass judgment on these unrelenting policymakers.
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain and his supporters have been lecturing us about the grave and urgent dangers our country faces—Islamic fundamentalism, the resurgence of Russia and other geopolitical threats. In a menacing world, McCain says, he will keep America safe. So, at 72 and with a history of cancer, how could McCain choose a vice presidential nominee who has, let’s face it, zero experience in foreign affairs?
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AP photo / Stephan Savoia
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Normally we try not to pay too much attention to what’s happening to the wombs of America’s teenagers, but Bristol Palin, 17, happens to be the daughter of John McCain’s VP pick. Sarah Palin thinks the government should meddle in the reproductive health of women, but in the case of her daughter, she asks for privacy.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week’s Republican convention against John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate—for the very same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush’s selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.
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AP photo / Ted S. Warren
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By Bill Boyarsky — In a speech that rose beyond the occasion, Sen. Barack Obama changed the dynamics of the presidential campaign. With fire in his eyes and politeness thankfully forgotten, he finally put Sen. John McCain on the defensive, most notably mocking the Republican’s claim that he’s best suited to be commander in chief.
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teamsugar.com
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Q: What move can steal both a news cycle and droves of Hillary-supporting Democratic voters? A: The McCain campaign announcing Friday, just 12 hours after Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver, that his running mate will be Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — In 1948, a young Minneapolis mayor electrified Democratic delegates gathered in Philadelphia with a bold endorsement of President Harry Truman’s civil rights policies and the “promise of a land where all men are free and equal.”
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By Ellen Goodman — Democrats have provided nearly all the drama of this campaign season, an 18-month run, a narrative with two compelling leads, a race between two people to open the door of history. A door that could only admit one at a time.
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Hillary Clinton brought down the Pepsi Center Tuesday night with a ringing endorsement of Barack Obama. If her supporters were waiting for her blessing to back the nominee, they got a mandate instead. Update: Olbermann and Dowd differ.
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By Marie Cocco — If there is a political job more fraught with peril than running to become the next commander in chief, surely it is being cast as cheerleader in chief.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Will the Party of Clinton ever become the Party of Obama? It has now been more than two months since Barack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination, yet here we are, still fascinated with Bill and Hillary Clinton and what they’re up to. Why?
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By Ellen Goodman — Let me begin by raising a glass of champagne to the official closing of the math gap. It turns out that girls do not lack the math gene. Nor are they math-phobic. Nor is there any “intrinsic” difference—thank you, Larry Summers—between the abilities of girls and boys to succeed in the numbers business.
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By Marie Cocco — From the people who brought you the Terri Schiavo spectacle, the stem-cell research stalemate and the atrocious waste of tax money on abstinence-only sex education that has been shown not to work, comes a sequel: a proposal to redefine abortion to include some of the most common forms of birth control.
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In “Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies,” Barbara Slavin, a leading Middle East reporter for USA Today, offers a refreshingly nuanced and revelatory taxonomy of power within theocratic Iran that sheds light on its leaders and their ambitions.
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westminster.gov.uk
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By Gbemisola Olujobi — Why do so many in the global health establishment insist on viewing the AIDS crisis in Africa through the lens of a 19th century stereotype?
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The percentage of women in their prime earning years who work has gone down, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers cut across demographics, and have more to do with a sluggish economy and a lack of opportunity than a rekindled interest in child rearing. As one congressional economist told The New York Times, “A woman gets laid off and she stays home for six months with her kids. ... She doesn’t admit that she is staying home because she could not get another acceptable job.”
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A plan to legalize sex work in time for South Africa’s 2010 World Cup has many in the country upset. While supporters believe criminalization puts women in harm’s way, religious groups and others argue that “family values” trump the interests of both the national economy and individual workers.
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Imagine this happening in the U.S.: Forty-seven people, including the bride, are killed on their way to a wedding after an airstrike on “militants” goes off course. Of course, this happened not in the U.S. but in Afghanistan, and, of course, the attack’s civilian toll was initially denied by the U.S. military.
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By Ellen Goodman — One of the expressions my grandmother uttered with feeling and frequency was that “one man should have one baby.” I never knew if this was a wish or a curse, but I’m pretty sure she never imagined Thomas Beatie.
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msnbc.com
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An ongoing Swedish study has shown that 70-year-olds are more likely now to have sex—and women to have orgasms—than in any decade since the 1970s. Sixty-eight percent of married men and 56% of married women reported having sex after turning 70, an increase of about 15% in both cases.
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By Marie Cocco — Somewhere along Barack Obama’s winding road through the red states, he lost me. It happened when he talked about abortion seekers who are “feeling blue.”
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Bank of America Lied to Homeowners and Rewarded Foreclosures, Ex-Employees Say
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