April 2011

Four Million Refugees From a Liberation

Of all the 95% of humans who live outside the United States, or any of those within it for that matter, who do you think is most invisible? Whose existence, did we come to hear about it, would be the most incomprehensible and therefore inaudible?

I have a nominee: the 4.8 million Iraqis made homeless by the liberation, the people liberated from their homes, millions of them liberated into exile from their country, afraid to return and with little to return to.

These people are not the most exotic read more

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How Democratic Party Blogs Filter Information

Here’s a blog that readers of Dailykos despised:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/28/970914/-Obama-Denies-Vermont-He…

Here’s one a day later (currently on their most-popular list) that they loved:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/28/971283/-Alan-Simpson-Just-Asked…

FireDogLake loved both. Democratic Underground got into a bitter split over the first one and loved the second one.

read more

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Why a Dog Is More Qualified for Congress Than Robert Hurt

The Charlottesville Daily Progress, to its credit, did something that I don’t think it or most small-town newspapers have done before, and certainly have not done often: it wrote about the local congress member’s position on military spending. Sure it’s where half of our income taxes go, but it’s hardly ever mentioned.

Hurt told the paper that he wants to cut spending, but not in the military: “I think everybody would agree that national defense is a top priority read more

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In L.A. This Weekend: Swanson, Hedges, Chappell, Garrett

Upcoming public events:

Saturday, April 30, 2011
3:15 – 5:15 pm Book signing at Los Angeles Times Festival of Books ( http://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks ), at the Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace ( http://www.icujp.org ) booth, Booth 921.
University of Southern California

7:30 – 9:30 pm “The Costs of War” with David Swanson, Chris Hedges, Paul Chappell, and Lewis Logan, moderated by Ameena Mirza Qazi.
United University Church at the read more

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They Question Where He Was Born But Are Trying to Give Him Absolute Power

Beneath the noisy blather about where the president was born and the whole superficial pretense of disagreement and fundamental opposition between elected Republicans and Democrats, top Republicans in the House and Senate are attempting to give President Obama and his successors from whichever party absolute power to make war and absolute power to imprison.

Tom Andrews has blogged on this here.

There is legislation in both houses that would update the Authorization to Use Military Force passed a read more

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Obama Denies Vermont Healthcare

Here’s the news as I received it in an Email from Thom Hartmann’s radio show on Wednesday:

“Vermont is one step-closer to becoming the first state to set up a truly universal, single-payer health care system. The Vermont Senate passed the new healthcare bill yesterday – following in the footsteps of the state House that passed the bill last month. Now – it just needs to be signed into law by Governor Peter Shumlin who’s already expressed his support for the read more

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Alan Simpson Just Asked Me to Leave Rich People Alone

I’m feeling pretty guilty. I hadn’t known I was causing billionaires so much suffering. The former co-chair of President Obama’s deficit (a.k.a. catfood) commission just asked me during a public event to stop going after rich people. Then he came up to me after the event to make sure I’d gotten the point. He seemed truly worried about it.

This was a panel discussion at the University of Virginia. The panelists were Simpson, David Walker (former U.S. comptroller, former read more

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Is Israel's Rightwing in Eric Cantor's District?

In May 2009, Congressmen Eric Cantor (R., Va.) and Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) wrote to President Barack Obama about U.S. policy toward Israel. Their staff sent the letter as a PDF but forgot to change the name of the file to something other than “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf.”

AIPAC stands for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a group widely recognized as one of the most effective at lobbying Congress, and a group that consistently promotes the positions of the rightwing read more

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How Americans Can Get Up and Stand Up

In December 2009, psychologist Bruce Levine published an article at Alternet called “Are Americans a Broken People?” His timing couldn’t have been better. Americans of good will and bad analysis were suffering a severe fit of Obamanation withdrawal. The article was reposted everywhere, commented on endlessly, and responded to voluminously. (This was my response.) Levine has now developed his article into an important book called “Get Up, Stand Up.”

Setting aside read more

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Mitt Romney and Netroots Nation Agree: It's Peacetime

Mitt Romney recently criticized “peacetime spending” in an era in which we have numerous wars going and are devoting about half of discretionary spending to wars and the military.

Netroots Nation has just announced 70 panels of progressive commentators. Of those panels, 69 do not discuss the wars or the military, their moral costs, their economic costs, their environmental costs, or their destruction of civil liberties and representative government.

One panel is called “Means read more

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