Saturday, May 03, 2008

Hillary's 'Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy'

By Brent Budowsky
May 3, 2008

Wonder why Clinton confidant Terry McAuliffe sings the praises of Fox News with the hilarious compliment that they are the most fair of the cable networks?

Read on.

'Beware the Terrible Simplifiers'

By Bill Moyers
May 3, 2008

“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.”

Read on.

Friday, May 02, 2008

Sending Felons Off to War

By Ivan Eland
May 2, 2008

According to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, from 2006 to 2007 the Army more than doubled its felonious recruits and the Marine Corps increased its share by more than two-thirds.

Read on.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

The Right's America-Hating Preacher

By Robert Parry
May 2, 2008

One of the advantages that the American Right has achieved from investing tens of billions of dollars in media – from talk radio and cable TV, to print and the Internet – is the ability to define what is and what isn’t a “scandal,” a powerful factor in determining who wins national elections.

By comparison, American progressives have short-changed their own investments in media. The disparity leads to the spectacle of Democratic presidential candidates submitting to questioning on Fox News while no one would expect a Republican leader to undergo interrogation from, say, the DailyKos.

Read on.

Reagan's Bargain/Charlie Wilson's War

By Peter W. Dickson
May 1, 2008

What’s left out of a movie about history often interests only a few experts in the field. However, the recent release of one that chronicles the successful sub rosa American effort to bleed the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s may prove to be an exception.

“Charlie Wilson’s War,” which stars Tom Hanks, tells the story of a hard-drinking, womanizing Texas congressman who nudged Congress and the Reagan administration to give more arms, especially high-tech Stinger missiles, to shoot down Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Read on.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Abu Ghraib Film Obscures Truth

By Sam Provance
April 30, 2008

I had pinned great hope on that. It didn’t turn out that way.

Read on.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Halliburton Bribe Case Haunts Cheney

By Jason Leopold
April 29, 2008

Dick Cheney’s tenure at Halliburton ended eight years ago, but a federal investigation of alleged bribes from a company subsidiary to Nigerian officials lingers from the Cheney era, raising questions about what the Vice President knew or should have known.

In its quarterly filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 25, Halliburton said the Justice Department was widening its probe to determine whether Kellogg Brown & Root paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to win a $5 billion construction contract for the Bonny Island natural gas liquefaction plant.

Read on.

Truth or Neo-Consequences

By Morgan Strong
April 29, 2008

An obscure academic dispute – over whether Israeli archeology sought to obscure the land’s last two millennia of history and promote a continual Jewish claim of ownership – has shown again how tensions in the Middle East can reverberate in unlikely ways in the United States.

The dispute centered on whether Barnard College should grant tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American-born scholar of anthropology who, in the 1990s, challenged the scientific integrity of what she saw as the Israeli use of archeology in a politically motivated way to justify Jewish settlements on territory that had belonged to Palestinians.

Read on.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Fastened to a Dying Animal

By Phil Rockstroh
April 29, 2008

Here in this crumbling empire once known as the American Republic, here in a nation that, at present, for all practical purposes, only produces Cheetos and killer drones, whose architecture is being winnowed down to thriving rural meth houses and foreclosed upon suburban mchouses, whose corrupt corporate culture has bequeathed upon our suffering planet dying oceans and the hyper-caffeinated tsunami of Red Bull Capitalism -- the essential question confronts us -- how does one retain (not retail) one's humanity amid the catastrophic machinery and inane accouterment of our age?

Read on.

TV Networks Silenced Anti-War Voices

By Jeff Cohen
April 28, 2008

In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers – no real threat, cost, instability.

But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.


Read on.