NewsTrust - For Review

Dick Gephardt's Fall: How a Progressive Stalwart Turned into a Spectacular Political Sellout

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Sebastian Jones - Oct. 15 (Opinion) - In a town where everyone seemingly has a price, Gephardt has distinguished himself, selling his reputation as a pro-labor, pro-universal healthcare, pro-environment expert and advocate to his new corporate masters, giving their efforts to kill and maim reforms a familiar, friendly face in the Democratic establishment. As a result, Gephardt has become a highly sought-after and very effective lobbyist. He has also betrayed nearly every principle he once claimed to hold.

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Whiner-in-Chief

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

The Nation - By John Nichols - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - Griping about Republicans on Fox and off-message bloggers in pajamas hurts Obama much more than the targets of the administration's wrath.

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The Coalfield Uprising

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Jeff Biggers - Oct. 01 (Special Report) - ...while officials are framing the issue as a manageable environmental problem, mountaintop removal has also caused....one of th largest displacements of US citizens since the nineteenth century... .

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Where is the Defund Blackwater Act?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Jeremy Scahill - Sep. 25 (Opinion) - Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working-class people. Their campaign has gained bipartisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009, which has now passed the House and Senate. Yet the bill was written so broadly that, as Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post has pointed out, it could "plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex."

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ACORN and Accountability

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

The Nation - By Christopher Hayes - Sep. 23 (News Analysis) - With the notable exception of handing over $700 billion to Wall Street last year, the United States Congress is not known for quick, decisive action. But recently, in a resounding bipartisan vote, members of both houses voted to deny federal dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Over the past fifteen years, ACORN and its affiliates have received on average about $3.5 million a year from the government, or approximately one-millionth of this year's budget. The votes came just a few days after the release of a series of (now infamous) videos in which young right-wing activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles pose as a pimp and a prostitute. They take a hidden camera to a number of ACORN tax preparation offices around the country seeking tax and business advice. (Why a pimp and prostitute? Who the hell knows. Neither answered my request for an interview.) The undercover duo provoked responses from ACORN staff that ranged from the unconscionable (an employee in Baltimore reacting to O'Keefe's plan to bring in thirteen Salvadoran girls as prostitutes with the suggestion he claim some as dependents) to the obviously sketchy (a Brooklyn tax adviser suggesting the couple put their cash profits in a can and bury it in the backyard) to the praiseworthy (the ACORN offices in Philadelphia called the cops and filed a police report)--O'Keefe and Giles haven't seen fit to post that tape. Mostly, though, the tapes are a testament to what might be called the Borat Effect: human beings' intense socialization to be helpful and not rock the boat, even when confronted with someone doing something objectionable, outrageous or preposterous.

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Meet the Hazzards

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

The Nation - By Nomi Prins, Christopher Hayes - Sep. 23 (Special Report) - As we mark the end of the first year of the financial bailout, the public seems to regard the government's actions with a toxic combination of rage and confusion. People are pissed off but too bewildered to know what to do with that anger. The confusion isn't an accident. The government hasn't exactly been forthcoming about how it's made buckets of money available to the banking sector. When it does disclose some information--such as in July's SIGTARP report from the Treasury or the Federal Reserve's weekly balance sheet--it's in the form of intimidating descriptions, accounting mumbo jumbo and technical reports that do little to illuminate just what the hell is going on. What's worse, banks and the establishment press have portrayed TARP as the sum of the banking industry's federal subsidies. An August 30 New York Times article, "As Banks Repay Bailout Money, U.S. Sees a Profit," gives the impression that taxpayers should be happy to have made $4 billion on the deal, as if our checks were in the mail. But when the government became Wall Street's bank, it wasn't just $700 billion of TARP money that flew north to Wall Street. TARP was but a small fraction (roughly 4 percent) of the full $17.5 trillion bailout and subsidization of the financial sector. [See image.] The details of this total bailout are complicated, but the basic mechanisms aren't beyond the average citizen's grasp. We're going to walk you through it.

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Will McChrystal Quit?

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

The Nation - By Robert Dreyfuss - Sep. 22 (News Analysis) - Under all three, Kimmitt said, McChrystal believes that he can do the job. On the other hand, if he doesn't get the low option, probably something like an additional 15,000 troops, the general might consider quitting.

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Karzai, Election Fraud and the Wages of Empire

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

The Nation - By John Nichols - Sep. 10 (Opinion) - So we get the "news" -- not from the satirical Onion but from the nation's newspaper of record -- that U.S. officials are trying to prevent Karzai from declaring "victory" in the exercise in fraud that naive commentators still insist on referring to as an election.

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Another Mysterious Electrocution Death in Iraq

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Jeremy Scahill - Sep. 09 (News) - Hermanson was not killed by enemy fire or an improvised explosive device or even by "friendly fire." In fact, he died in what is considered to be the safest place in Iraq for Americans--the heavily fortified Green Zone. His body, according to his family, was discovered on the floor of a shower near his quarters at Camp Olympia. It appears that Hermanson was electrocuted.

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Van Jones Exit Isn't Right-Wing Win, It's an Obama Surrender

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

pdamerica.org - By John Nichols - Sep. 07 (Opinion) - It was an unnecessary and unwise surrender by an Obama administration there is neither ready nor willing to fight "those who spin lies for profit"--as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People president Ben Jealous described those who smeared Jones.

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Working Without Laws

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Annette Bernhardt, Ruth Milkman & Nik Theodore - Sep. 05 (Review) - Take the restaurant workers who line up for paychecks after twelve hours of work only to be told there's no money, or the nursing home aide who routinely works well into the night without extra pay, or the temp worker who packs food in an ice-cold

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Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare

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

The Nation - By Patricia J. Williams - Aug. 26 (Comment) - If you are watching the healthcare town-hall ruckuses with only common dictionary meanings in your head, you will be struck by the protesters' general incoherence and outright nonsense, bearing no rational connection to the actual draft of the healthcare bill.

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Novak Without Tears

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

The Nation - By Eric Alterman - Aug. 26 (Special Report) - Journalist and television personality Robert Novak died August 18. I think it's time to do him the honor of taking his life's work seriously. I got to know Novak a bit in the late 1980s while writing a magazine profile of him, and another of his then-colleague John McLaughlin while researching a book on the history of punditry. I found myself immune to Novak's charms--as he was to mine--but I don't begrudge the fact that many people in Washington did not. Novak was an extremely popular figure within the capital; and while I extend his close friends and family my sincere sympathy, as a historian of journalism I worry that his myriad personal connections may have the effect of obscuring the historical record with regard to his actions. With that in mind, here are a few aspects of Mr. Novak's career that have received short shrift during the past week:

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Flushing Blackwater

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

The Nation - By Jeremy Scahill - Aug. 26 (Investigative Report) - Blackwater, the private mercenary company owned by Erik Prince, has been thrust back into the spotlight by a series of stunning revelations about its role in covert US programs. Since at least 2002, Blackwater has worked for the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan on "black" contracts. On August 19, the New York Times revealed that the company was, in fact, a central part of a secret CIA assassination program that Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. The paper then reported that Blackwater remains a key player in the widening air war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it arms drone aircraft. These disclosures follow allegations--made under oath by former Blackwater employees--that Prince murdered or facilitated the murder of potential government informants and that he "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe."

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Paranoia Strikes Deep

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

The Nation - By Michael Kazin - Aug. 26 (Comment) - "If something is not done shortly, this country is going the way of...Italy, Germany...or Russia, and it is high time we did something," exclaimed Irénée du Pont, one of the more prominent conservatives of the 1930s. Many of his fellow Americans agreed there was good cause to be alarmed: a new Democratic president was proposing an unprecedented expansion of federal power that would increase taxes on the well-off and dole out benefits to the jobless and other unfortunates. Several spokesmen on the right made more ominous vows: "So help me God, I will be instrumental in taking a Communist from the chair once occupied by Washington," declared Father Charles Coughlin, who commanded one of the largest radio audiences in the nation.

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Lou Dobbs Tours Single-Payer Systems Abroad and Realizes, Holy Crap They're Good

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Leslie Savan - Aug. 15 (News Analysis) - Lou Dobbs is a strange man. One day he's railing against "Obamacare," stoking the birther and deather paranoia that an illegitimate president's health care plan will mandate euthanasia. Next day he's practically singing the praises of single-payer healthcare systems 'round the world. It's kind of French of him, but last week, CNN's government-out-of-my-face bloviator began a monthlong, nation-a-night series to "learn from other countries' health care plans."

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The Case for Busting the Filibuster

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

The Nation - By Thomas Geoghegan - Aug. 12 (Opinion) - This past spring, Senator Claire McCaskill wrote to me asking for $50 to help elect more Democrats, so we could have a filibuster-proof Senate. Now that Al Franken has finally been declared the sixtieth Democratic senator, her plea may seem moot. But even with Franken in office, we don't have a filibuster-proof Senate. To get to sixty on the Democratic side, we'll still have to cut deals with Democrats like Max Baucus, Ben Nelson and others who cat around as Blue Dogs from vote to vote. Whether or not Senator Arlen Specter is a Democrat, the real Democrats will still have to cut the same deals to get sixty votes. Maybe we loyal Dems should start sending postcards like the following: "Dear Senator: Why do you keep asking for my money? You've already got the fifty-one votes you need to get rid of the filibuster rule." It's true--McCaskill and her colleagues

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Ain't Nothing Centrist About Them

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Katrina Van den Heuvel - Jul. 24 (Opinion) - At this moment -- when 72 percent of the nation supports a public plan option and 14,000 people lose their healthcare every day -- the House Blue Dogs and conservative Democratic Senators are doing just about everything they can to cripple real health care reform.

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Blackwater Seeks Gag Order

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

TruthOut - By Jeremy Scahill - Jul. 22 (News) - It became common practice during the Iraq occupation for the US State Department to work with private security companies like Blackwater to help facilitate giving what amounted to hush money to the families of Iraqis shot dead by private security contractors. In fact, Blackwater's owner, Erik Prince, discussed this practice when he testified in front of Congress in October 2007 and admitted to paying $20,000 to a Blackwater victim's family and $5,000 to another.

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t r u t h o u t | A Real Win for Single-Payer Advocates

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

TruthOut - By John Nichols - Jul. 17 (Opinion) - Canada did not establish its national health care program with a bold, immediate political move by the federal government. The initial progress came at the provincial level, .............

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Israel's Man of Conscience

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Ezra Nawi - Jun. 29 (Comment) - After all, was I the one who poisoned and destroyed Palestinian water wells? Was I the one who beat young Palestinian children? Did I hit the elderly? Did I poison the Palestinian residents' sheep? Did I demolish homes and destroy tractors? Did I block roads and restrict movement? Was I the one who prevented people from connecting their homes to running water and electricity? Did I forbid Palestinians from building homes?

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Time to End False Bipartisanship

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Katrina vanden Heuvel - Jun. 28 (Opinion) - In a meeting with journalists last week, Emanuel proposed that healthcare legislation could be bipartisan without Republican votes. "There will be ideas from both parties, and individuals from both parties, in the final product," he said. "Whether the Republicans decide to vote for things they promoted will be up to them." ( David Axelrod seconded the emotion in his appearance on ABC's "This Week.")

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Neocons Are Clueless About Iran

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Leslie Savan - Jun. 22 (Opinion) - See how it works? Obama is weak because he won't scream denunciations at Ahmadinejad; if only he would, then Ahmadinejad would have a more secure hold on power -- which (to complete the circle) is what the neocons not-so-secretly wanted in the first place.

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Why Vote "Yes" for the War and the IMF?

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By John Nichols - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - The Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are aggressively whipping House Democrats to support the 2009 war supplemental bill that seeks to steer another $10o billion in US tax dollars into the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan while at the same time squandering at least $5 billion on the failed economic schemes of the International Monetary Fund.

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Sheila Bair Is on Your Side

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Robert Scheer - Jun. 10 (News Report) - Bair is the Republican whom President Obama reappointed to head the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, but she is protecting the interest of taxpayers as no Democrat has in this administration, and she needs your support. Huge financial decisions are being made by this government, involving trillions in future obligations of US taxpayers, and Bair has been a rare effective voice for the interests of ordinary folk.

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