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Obama's foreign policy report card

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Juan Cole - Oct. 27 (Opinion) - Why can't the administration of President Barack Obama get the word out about its policy successes? President Obama campaigned on an ambitious platform of withdrawing from Iraq, engaging Iran on its nuclear program and persuading the Pakistani government to take on the Taliban and al-Qaida. Despite the charge by critics from both the right and the left in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize that he has accomplished little so far, in fact he has already set in motion significant change on several of these fronts -- despite the enormous domestic tasks that have inevitably preoccupied his administration. Yet you'd never hear about these successes from the mainstream media.

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Fox News isn't even pretending anymore

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

Salon - By Gene Lyons - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - Since Obama’s election, the cable news channel has dropped all but the barest pretense of objectivity.Fox has turned itself into what Anita Dunn recently called “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” Actually, that’s an extremely polite way of putting it. It’s closer to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.”

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The audacity of greed: how private health insurers just blew their cover

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Robert Reich - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - The health-insurance industry has finally revealed itself for what it is. Background: The industry hates the idea that's emerged from the Senate Finance Committee of lowering penalties on younger and healthier people who don't buy insurance. Relying on an analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers, insurers say this means new enrollees will be older and less healthy -- which will drive up costs. And, says the industry, these costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums. Proposed taxes on high-priced "Cadillac" policies will also be passed on to consumers. As a result, premiums will rise faster and higher than the government projects.

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A historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Oct. 08 (Opinion) - this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and -- as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today -- its central purpose is to "legalize suppression" of evidence of American war crimes.

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Fighting against ourselves in Afghanistan

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:34:02 -0700

Salon - Sep. 23 -

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The right's middle-finger spirit of contrarianism

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Garrison Keillor - Sep. 23 (Opinion) - The right is operating in the grand old irreverent American middle-finger spirit of contrarianism. The carful of kids who drive country roads busting mailboxes with baseball bats are expressing the same freewheeling spirit and the computer hackers and graffiti artists and every conscientious rock 'n' roll band for the past 50 years. But the price of being an angry jerk is that nobody wants to invite you over for supper except your mother, and even she feels a little uneasy.

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Glenn Beck and Left-Right confusion

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - Ultimately, Beck himself is just a histrionic intellectual mess: willing to latch onto any hysterical accusations and conspiracy theories that provide some momentary benefit, no matter how contradictory they might be from one moment to the next. His fears, resentments and religious principles seem fixed, but not his political beliefs.

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Is the Internet melting our brains?

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Vincent Rossmeier - Sep. 20 (Review) - By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

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From Blockbuster to blockbusted

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Andrew Leonard - Sep. 16 (Comment) - Blockbuster's problems, in larger part, are of its own making. The company took on too much debt, and was slow to adjust to a changing technology landscape. As the L.A. Times' Ben Fritz reports, "In the second quarter [Blockbuster] lost $39.7 million and saw its revenue decline 22 percent while competitors Netflix and Redbox reported that their revenues grew 20 percent and 110 percent, respectively."

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Who are the undeserving "others" benefiting from expanded government actions?

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - It is true that the federal government embraces redistributive policies and that middle-class income is seized in order that "someone else benefits." But so obviously, that "someone else" who is benefiting is not the poor and lower classes -- who continue to get poorer as the numbers living below the poverty line expand and the rich-poor gap grows in the U.S. to unprecedented proportions. The "someone else" that is benefiting from Washington policies are -- as usual -- the super-rich, the tiny number of huge corporations which literally own and control the Government.

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Uninsured like me

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Michael Lind - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - Now and then a moment occurs that clarifies the nature of American politics like a flash of lightning over a prairie landscape. Such a moment occurred on Sept. 9 during President Obama's televised address to a joint session of Congress about healthcare. As the president explained that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for benefits under the plan he supported, Joe Wilson, a conservative Republican member of Congress from South Carolina, shocked the chamber and the television audience by shouting, "You lie!"

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Obama: Show courage on healthcare

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

Salon - By Robert Reich - Sep. 04 (Opinion) - Congress returns next week to one of the fiercest and most important debates in recent memory -- whether and to what extent the nation will provide healthcare to all Americans, and how we will rein in the soaring costs of healthcare overall. But do not expect unusual courage from this Congress in standing up to demagogic lies and money-toting lobbyists. An unusually large portion is facing close races in 2010, both in primaries and in the general election. Republicans have many primary challenges from the right. A record number of Democrats, who took over Congress in 2006, hail from traditionally Republican or swing states and districts.

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The right way to debate healthcare reform

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

Salon - By Alex Koppelman - Sep. 04 (Comment) - What ended up happening, though, was a civil, reasoned discussion about the current healthcare situation in the U.S., not to mention actual debate about the relative policy merits of the Democratic proposals.

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Beltway Culture, Checks on Journalists & Secrecy Obligations

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

Salon - By Glen Greenwald - Sep. 02 (Opinion) - Establishment journalists have a very significant impact on the world. They enthusiastically believe that to be true when it comes time to building their egos and establishing their own importance, but they instantly and emphatically deny it when it comes time to holding them accountable for what they do (don't you have anything better to do than criticize the media?). Their influence, thankfully, has eroded and continues to erode by the minute, but it's still substantial. That's why entire industries exist, and vast resources are expended by the powerful and wealthy, to manage, manipulate and control what they say.

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Liz Cheney can't handle the truth

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

Salon - By Vincent Rossmeier - Aug. 31 (Opinion) - Liz Cheney, the easily exasperated eldest daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has become a one-woman TV juggernaut in 2009, racking up more airtime than a cloud as she defends her daddy's administration records. And boy, is she wrong. Unlike so many TV pundits who spin and slide around the facts, Cheney makes no fuss about completely ignoring them, and sticking to talking points that have little relation to the truth.

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The hypocrisy of healthcare protestors

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Aug. 13 (Opinion) - In a previous post on my own blog, I questioned the seemingly sudden concern about the perils of "big government" among healthcare reform protestors. Many of these individuals undoubtedly failed to contest (and probably supported) governmental excess

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Obama's healthcare horror

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Camille Paglia - Aug. 12 (Opinion) - Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys. Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation.

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Look who's rallying vs. Obama in Portsmouth

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Joan Walsh - Aug. 11 (Opinion) - I'm sure Obama is ready for the hazing Tuesday, but let's hope the mainstream media calls it what it is: an organized movement to lie about his agenda and link the various strain of paranoia to protest – and perhaps disrupt – his effort at dialogue.

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Conservative Idol: Health Care & the Fox News Incentive

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By David Sirota - Aug. 11 (Review) - To understand how Fox News crosses the line from right-leaning news outlet into partisan propaganda machine (and there is a difference between the two), look no further than exactly how the network is driving (or at least trying to drive) the health care debate via the congressional town hall meetings.

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Hillary Clinton demands accountability for war crimes

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Aug. 05 (Opinion) - As we send murderous, crusading civilian units around the world to accompany our invading armies -- while ushering a regime of torture wherever we go -- and then announce we will only Look to the Future, Not the Past, when their crimes are exposed (despite our best efforts to keep them concealed), do we actually expect anyone to take these sermons seriously?

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More facts behind the GE/Fox deal and a new Olbermann statement

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Aug. 04 (Opinion) - From Glenn Greenwald - The MSNBC anchor confirms that my two columns on this matter were factually accurate.

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The scope -- and dangers -- of GE's control of NBC and MSNBC

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - this is one of the most blatant examples yet of pernicious corporate control over America's journalism. The most striking aspect of this episode is that GE isn't even bothering any longer to deny the fact that they exert control over MSNBC's journalism. They've brazenly dispensed with the long-held fiction of the sanctity of journalistic independence from interference by the corporate parents that own America's largest news organizations.

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Stephen Colbert on Chuck Todd and torture investigations

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - As I wrote last week, numerous reports indicate that Holder wants to replicate the Abu Ghraib travesty by investigating only low-level interrogators who exceeded the torture limits approved by John Yoo and George Bush, and not investigate the high-level policy makers who instituted the criminal torture regime or the DOJ lawyers who authorized it.

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First steps taken to implement preventive detention, military commissions

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Jul. 21 (Opinion) - From this interim report, it's more apparent than ever that the central excuse made by Obama defenders to justify preventive detention and military commissions -- there are dangerous Terrorists who cannot be released but also cannot be tried because Bush obtained the evidence against them via torture -- is an absolute myth. That's clear for multiple reasons:

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Harper's Ken Silverstein

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Jul. 20 (Opinion) - Politico's Mike Allen exposed The Washington Post's plans to charge lobbyists and corporations large amounts of money to meet -- at the home of The Post's publisher -- with various Post reporters and senior Obama officials. Shortly thereafter, however, Harper's Washington Editor, Ken Silverstein, uncovered several events organized by Politico that raise similar (albeit less blatant) questions as the ones raised by The Post's events. Silverstein often reports on the sleazy, corrupting intersection of money, influence and media in Washington, and he's my guest today on Salon Radio to discuss the implications of these sorts of media events generally and Politico's involvement in them specifically.

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