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The Price of Health Reform: Abortion Rights?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Mother Jones - By Rachel Morris - Nov. 10 (News Report) - Will health care reform come at the cost of abortion rights? The Democrats? historic health care bill squeaked through the House on Saturday only after pro-life forces scored a major victory. Despite months of wrangling over the public option and the price tag, in the end the legislation's fate turned on an eleventh-hour push by conservative Democrats to broaden the bill's existing limits on government funding of abortion, in the form of an amendment authored by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.). Here?s what happened and what it means:

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Obama's Big Power Play

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Mother Jones - By Kate Sheppard - Nov. 06 (Interview) - President Barack Obama likes to point out that when President Dwight Eisenhower built the federal highway system in the 1950s, he created a network that fueled postwar America?s economic rise. Now Obama?s administration wants to do the same for the green economy with the smart grid?a system of interlocking technologies that could transform the way we use electricity. By receiving real-time data on their energy use, consumers could save big on their power bills by running appliances when electricity is cheapest, rather than during peak demand periods when it?s most expensive. Power distributors could use the system to transport excess energy from one region to another, instead of simply allowing it to go to waste as they do ...

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22 Things Dick Cheney Can't Recall About the Plame Case

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Nick Baumann - Oct. 31 (Opinion) - Notes from former Vice President Dick Cheney's interview with the FBI about the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity were finally released on Friday afternoon after a lengthy legal battle. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued the Justice Department last year to obtain the interview notes; a judge finally ordered their release on October 1. In the interview, Cheney demonstrated a behavior common among Bush administration officials under investigation: he couldn't remember much of anything. Here's a non-comprehensive list of 22 things Dick Cheney claimed he couldn't recall about the Plame case, in the order they appear in the FBI's notes:

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On Tape: Bolton Backs Israeli Nuke Strike On Iran?

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Nick Baumann - Oct. 17 (Comment) - During a little-noticed speech at the University of Chicago on Tuesday, John Bolton suggested a way to resolve the controversy over Iran?s nuclear program: Israel should launch a nuclear attack on Iran. Speaking to the University Republicans and the Chicago Friends of Israel, Bolton, George W. Bush?s hawkish ambassador to the United Nations, said, "Unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran?s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future." Bolton has repeatedly declared that Iran?s nuclear program is unacceptable. Given that he holds this position, his contention that the only way to prevent a nuclear Iran is with a nuclear attack appears to be a backdoor endorsement of just such a strike. ...

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Lindsey Graham: Not a Nuclear Wussypants

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Kate Sheppard - Oct. 16 (News Report) - When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called for legislation last week to cap carbon emissions, he revived hopes that a cap-and-trade measure could pass the Senate this year. (He also got branded a "wussypants" by tea party protesters for his trouble.) But

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The Empire Strikes Back

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Kevin Drum - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - AHIP, the insurance industry trade group, has apparently decided to hop off the healthcare reform bandwagon. After months of claiming that they were on board, they released a report on Monday claiming that current proposals would raise insurance costs for middle class families by about $4,000 more than otherwise projected over the next decade.

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We Geezers Got Our Single-Payer Plan. Now Go Get Your Own.

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:56:18 -0700

Mother Jones - Oct. 05 -

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Is Copenhagen Dead?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Corn - Sep. 28 (News Report) - Is the Obama administration giving up on reaching a comprehensive international climate change agreement this year? A statement released on Friday by John Podesta, who headed Barack Obama's presidential transition, is a big hint that the White House is looking to dramatically downplay expectations.

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Video: 20,000 Detergent Bottles Under the Sea

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Sam Baldwin, Andy Kroll, Taylor Wiles - Sep. 27 (News Report) - After a month spent studying the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a vortex of waste twice the size of Texas in the North Pacific Ocean where there's a 36-to-1 ratio of plastic to plankton, the scientists behind Project Kaisei offered tours of their vessel and talked with Mother Jones' Sam Baldwin, Andy Kroll, and Taylor Wiles about finding lawn chairs and laundry baskets floating a thousand miles at sea.

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Obama on Climate: Is He Even Trying?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Bill McKibben - Sep. 24 (Opinion) - For those of us who care desperately about the climate, President Obama’s speech on Tuesday—the first to the world body by this most admired of world leaders—was a dud, a towering disappointment. Coming at the beginning of what the UN has dubbed “climate week,” the speech marked the beginning of a three-month push towards the global climate conference at Copenhagen. Obama used it mostly to downplay expectations. And it’s those downplayed expectations that may prove to be tragically self-fulfilling.

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The Foreclosure Rescue Mirage

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Andy Kroll - Sep. 13 (Special Report) - The problem is that the Obama administration gave mortgage servicers little more than a heads-up before rolling out its program, leaving companies to play catch-up once HAMP was announced. A vice president at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Mary Coffin, told the Senate banking committee in July that the percentage of loan workout inquiries from borrowers who are current increased from, on average, 5 to 10 percent a month to 40 percent since HAMP was implemented.

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Obama's Speech: The Doctor Is In

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Corn - Sep. 10 (Opinion) - Can a speech change a political dynamic? President Barack Obama and his political wizards obviously hope so. Together they came up with an address that at least on Wednesday night made it seem as if Obama was in charge of the health care reform process--which has not been the case since he handed off the hard work to Congress months ago. Obama finally defined fully the debate, the policy, and the values underlying the need for reform.

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Obama's Afghanistan Contradiction

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Corn - Sep. 04 (News Analysis) - With the war in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama faces a contradiction. He says he wants to win the war but he will not commit to fighting for as long as that might take. This tension between policy and rhetoric was on full display in the White House briefing room earlier this week. On Monday, press secretary Robert Gibbs about Afghanistan and the strategic assessment that had just been completed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander there. Gibbs noted that Obama had yet to see McChrystal?s review, but he said over and over that the Afghanistan war had been "under-resourced" for years by the Bush-Cheney administration and that "it takes a long time to implement" a change in strategy. Asked if the situation in ...

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Bush's Third Term?

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Swanson - Sep. 02 (Opinion) - It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can?t you just picture it? There?s Dubya now, still laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries ...

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A Few Good Kids?

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By David Goodman - Aug. 31 (Investigative Report) - Recruiters hit pay dirt in 2002, when then-Rep. (now Sen.) David Vitter (R-La.) slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding. This little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush's signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft. Students may sign an opt-out form—but not all school districts let them know about it.

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What's Your Water Footprint?

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Josh Harkinson - Aug. 30 (Special Report) - Even as the greenest among us cut our showers short and let our toilets go yellow, we may be blissfully unaware that our household water use accounts for only 6 percent of the water that we consume. The other 94 percent comes from the products we buy, everything from almonds and tomatoes to blue jeans and microchips. (See "Big Gulp.") The average person in the developed world drinks a gallon of water each day but "eats" another 800 gallons. And as Americans, our water consumption per capita is twice the world's average. Each one of us uses enough water annually to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool—four times what someone in Yemen uses.

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Kennedy and Health Care, Then and Now

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Josh Harkinson - Aug. 27 (Opinion) - One of the great and bitter lessons of Senator Edward M. Kennedy's political career is also the most timely for House Democrats: The need to seize the political moment on health care reform.

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Where Do We Go From Here? | Mother Jones

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Nick Baumann - Aug. 26 (Opinion) - Even without Kennedy, the Democrats are at a high-water mark in their political power. For sixty years, the party has tried and failed to bring health care to all Americans. Everyone, inside and outside the party, thinks this year may be health care reform's best chance yet. If Senate Republicans stand firm and filibuster, Democrats' only option to pass health care will be the budget reconciliation process—a parliamentary maneuver that would allow them to pass a bill with a simple majority. Will the Democrats muster the courage to move forward through reconciliation, even in the face of what are sure to be fierce protests from their GOP colleagues?

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The Sheikh Down

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Shane Bauer - Aug. 24 (Special Report) - The US military has never admitted to arming militias in Iraq—or giving anything more than $350 a month to Anbari tribesmen to fight alongside Americans against Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda. But reconstruction payments, sometimes handed out in shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills, have left plenty of extra for the sheikhs to "help themselves as far as security goes," as one Marine officer describes it, or "buy guns," as Eifan's uncle, Sheikh Talib Hasnawi, puts it.

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Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Anna Lenzer - Aug. 23 (Special Report) - THE INTERNET CAFé in the Fijian capital, Suva, was usually open all night long. Dimly lit, with rows of sleek, modern terminals, the place was packed at all hours with teenage boys playing boisterous rounds of video games. But one day soon after I

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Is Blackwater Too Big to Fail?

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - Aug. 21 (Special Report) - It's not just about outsourcing—it's the kind of jobs that are being outsourced to Blackwater that raise questions. Writing in Time, ex-CIA officer Robert Baer points out: It's one thing, albeit often misguided, for the agency to outsource certain tasks to contractors. It's quite another to involve a company like Blackwater in even the planning and training of targeted killings, akin to the CIA going to the mafia to draw up a plan to kill Castro

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Cap-and-trade & Health Care & Insurance Reform I see these two issues as one and the same thing. The first one is to heal our planet, and the second is to heal our human bodies. Also, both issues have to deal with how the 'healing' is delievered and wh

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Foreign policy, EU news, climate, green technology, health. - Aug. 21 (Investigative Report) - Experts and politicians on whether health care reform will trump climate change.

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Will Obama Rethink His Gitmo Plans?

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Libby Lewis - Jul. 30 (News Analysis) - For the first time, a federal judge has ordered a Guantanamo detainee to be freed after finding that the evidence against him was contaminated by torture. This could have important consequences for other Guantanamo cases?as well as the Obama administration?s stated goal of moving as many of those cases as possible into the federal courts.?

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The Cowboys of Kabul

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Daniel Schulman - Jul. 28 (Special Report) - Although their circumstances looked dire, the Spiers were about to become millionaires. By May, Barbara Spier had filed the paperwork to form a new corporation called US Protection and Investigations. Soon, thanks to the contracting sweepstakes that was the war in Afghanistan, she was signing an $8.4 million deal with the Louis Berger Group. The multinational construction and engineering company had landed a $214 million contract to rebuild Afghanistan's infrastructure—roads, water and sanitation, power and dams—from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). USPI's job was to provide security for contractors repairing a 300-mile road stretching from Kabul to Kandahar.

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Will Iraq Be a Global Gas Pump?

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Michael T. Klare - Jul. 17 (Special Report) - Iraq's great hydrocarbon promise has been continually thwarted by war, foreign intervention, sanctions, internal disorder, corruption, and plain old ineptitude. Saddam Hussein did succeed for a time in elevating oil output, in the process raising national income and creating a well-educated middle class. However, his ill-conceived invasions of Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 led to devastating attacks on Iraqi oil facilities, as well as trade embargoes and crippling debt, erasing much of his country's previous economic gains. The trade sanctions imposed by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the wake of the First Gulf War only further eroded the country's oil-production capacity.

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