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How unseemly for New York Times executive editor Bill Keller to look down so disdainfully at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with a nasty ad hominem portrayal in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Dealing With Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets.”
When you’re listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable "aw shucks" manner.
Egypt is an alarm that signals the urgent need for change in U.S. foreign policy. It provides President Obama an opportunity to transform a foreign policy that has often had the opposite effect than was sought and is undermining U.S. economic and national security.
Read on.Almost seven years have passed since I spent some time in the Middle East. The closest I get to the opinions of "the Arab street" these days is the fellow who runs the delicatessen a block away from me.
Read on.The political crisis sweeping the Middle East is another part of Ronald Reagan’s dark legacy that is shattering into chaos even as the United States prepares to lavishly celebrate his 100th birthday.
Read on.On Friday evening, Jan. 21, after reading a short story by James Thurber, titled The Scotty Who Knew Too Much, Keith Olbermann abruptly closed his program by informing his viewers it would be his last. This out-of-the-blue exit will go down in broadcast history as one of the most bizarre.
Read on.I watched Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk about the ongoing events in Egypt. In essence, he said that if the demonstrations against the 30-year-old dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak succeeded the world could get an Iranian-style regime in Egypt and that would be the end of democracy.
Read on.Groundhog Day brings to mind various associations, including the fervent hope of this snow-buried Bostonian that Punxsutawney Phil will not see his shadow this year and spring will come early. This may be the one good thing about global warming.
Read on.With the rise of a Hezbollah-backed government in Lebanon, hand-wringing seems to be the order of the day in the American and Israeli governments.
Read on.What’s left out of a movie about history often interests only a few experts in the field. However, the 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.
The death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over again in recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion of power.
The reason people in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the world have been influenced to some extent by the work of WikiLeaks is that they have read or heard about the material that WikiLeaks has helped to make public.
If the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt tell us anything, it is that predicting the beginning of mass unrest is very difficult. Indeed, it is probably easier to predict the stock market.
Read on.This is an upstairs/downstairs story that takes us from the peak of a Western mountaintop for the wealthy to spreading mass despair in the valleys of the Third World poor.
Read on.In the last year of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. questioned U.S. military interventions against progressive movements in the Third World by invoking a JFK quote: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
As the United States celebrates Ronald Reagan’s centennial birthday, the defining proof of his greatness as president will be represented by two sequential film clips – Reagan in Berlin ordering Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” followed by scenes of the Berlin Wall coming down.
“Live and let live” would appear to be a simple, sensible guide to social life, but obviously many Americans reject this creed with a vengeance.
Read on.The Detroit Tigers are retiring the great baseball manager Sparky Anderson's number 11 this season. "It's a wonderful gesture," Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg wrote. "I just wish Sparky could see it."
Read on.U.S.-Russian relations are on the upswing – with the new treaty reducing deployed long-range strategic missiles (New START), an agreement on nuclear cooperation, and an arrangement to transport supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan through Russia. But there is much more to be done.
Tea Partiers, Republicans, and protectors of public morality are right about corruption in government.
When Yasir Arafat took over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969, he changed it from a tool of the Egyptian government to a dynamic united front seeking national liberation for the Palestinian people.
Read on.Whistleblowing takes many forms but almost always involves the disillusionment of an insider with the nature of what he or she is inside.
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On Sunday, I attended an informal talk given in a parish hall by the Justice Department’s Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. His topic: “The way his work for justice is defined by his faith.”
All over Europe and in much of the rest of the world, a new fictional hero has engaged the fascination of millions of readers. His name is Mikael Blomkvist, and he’s the protagonist of the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.
Read on.Ted Koppel, whose broadcasting career got a big boost from the Iranian-hostage crisis in 1980, doesn’t seem aware that the long-running cover-up of how Republicans sabotaged President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations has collapsed – or Koppel may simply prefer to stick with the safer version of the story.
In Ukraine, where media diversity is often defined by which powerful oligarch controls which TV station, one network, TVi -- known for its independent investigative style -- is under intense legal pressure, with its owner not part of Ukraine's power circles.
Keith Olbermann’s abrupt departure from MSNBC should be another wake-up call to American progressives about the fragile foothold that liberal-oriented fare now has for only a few hours on one corporate cable network.
Most people do not realize the meaning of being a Baptist. Theologically, we cover the full spectrum from right to left. We are scattered politically throughout Republicans, Democrats, Tea Partiers and None of the Above. Our hallmark is freedom.
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According to Laura Rozen, a journalist specializing in foreign policy matters and writing in Politico, the Obama administration is seeking "new ideas from outside experts on how to advance the [Israeli-Palestinian] peace process."
Barry Zorthian, who died last month at the age of 90, was one of the last surviving U.S government officials who shaped America’s role in the Vietnam War, a man who also stood at the shadowy intersection between press management and psychological warfare.
The continuing WikiLeaks controversy has focused needed attention on a number of important issues: whether, for example, Julian Assange was justified in releasing classified information in order to make government more accountable, whether the release of the information put U.S. intelligence sources and methods at risk, and whether the legitimate need for secrecy in certain government activities occasionally provides cover for government activities that public officials would have trouble justifying if they took place in the open.
On the eve of the Chinese President’s visit to the United States, and the intense speculation about his intentions — and ours — I found myself in a dark room at the Anthology Film Archive in the East Village watching a spectacular documentary by Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang called “Petition.”
The American media continues to tout the reduced violence in Iraq without foreseeing the long-term potential for a resumption of severe ethno-sectarian violence and the absence of mechanisms — Ã la Sudan — to defuse it.
Read on.Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Jan. 17, 1961, speech on the “military-industrial complex,” the threat he identified has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower could have imagined. It has become a “Permanent War State,” with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future.
On Jan. 13, the Pentagon commemorated the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with an address by Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, who insisted that today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.
Read on.A United Nations-backed tribunal, which has conducted a long and troubled investigation into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, issued a sealed indictment on Monday amid expectations that members of Hezbollah will be blamed.
Zeev Sternhell is an Israeli historian and a recognized expert on Fascism. He is also an occasional contributor to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Read on.On Jan. 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his prophetic warning about the military-industrial complex, anticipating the increased political, economic, military and even cultural influence of the Pentagon and its allies.
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“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
It seems that I have upset some folks on the Left again, this time by mentioning – deep inside a story about Sarah Palin’s proclaimed victimhood over the Tucson massacre fallout – that groups like the 9/11 “truthers” also have contributed to America’s crazed political environment.
Recent figures indicate that 2010 tied 2005 as the hottest year on record. Indeed, nine of the ten warmest years occurred since 2001 as climate chaos creates havoc around the world.
Read on.What happened in Tucson is not new to American life. It happens every day across the country. Indeed, murders using guns are so common that little note is taken until a high-profile person is the target or the numbers of dead are shockingly high.
Read on.Fascism is one of those words that sounds like it belongs in the past, conjuring up, as it does, marching jack boots in the streets, charismatic demagogues like Italy’s Mussolini or Spain’s Franco and armed crackdowns on dissent and freedom of expression.
Read on.Jared Loughner acted as a domestic suicide terrorist in the political “battleground” of American politics. His YouTube postings and “good-bye” phone messages are ominously reminiscent of the traditional farewell videos of Islamist martyrs.
Read on.There are two groups responsible for last Saturday’s tragedy in Tucson Arizona.
Read on.It didn’t take long after the Tucson massacre for the American Right to retreat to its favorite default position: victimhood.
If actions speak louder than words, the U.S. military has seemed to confirm the pessimistic findings of the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) on the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which the military had recently pooh-poohed.
The Society of Professional Journalists [SPJ] is preparing to jump on the "kick Helen Thomas when she is down" campaign by retiring a lifetime achievement award that honors this great American journalist.
As Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano recently admitted, the notion of "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" is so totally passé.
Read on.“It is our right and our duty to criticize the people who have put the fate of our country in peril,” Rush Limbaugh said this week on his syndicated radio show.
Read on.The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov had a rule: if you show a gun in the first act, by the time the curtain falls, it has to go off.
Read on.As far as we know, the often tearful, new House Speaker John Boehner hasn’t shed a tear over the near-fatal wounding of his Arizona colleague Gabrielle Giffords, but the folksy Sarah Palin sounded a solemn note as she went to her Facebook page to mourn the close-range shooting of the just-reelected Democratic congresswoman.
Read on.The full story of the bloody Tucson, Arizona, rampage that killed six and grievously wounded a U.S. congresswoman has yet to be pieced together, but the tragedy reminds us of the risk to democracy from both violent political rhetoric and reckless exaggerations about “victimhood.”
Five years ago, we became aware that something significant was happening among Christian churches. Young people were leaving churches in huge numbers, most with no intention to ever return.
As the House of Representatives was engaged in its reading of an abridged version of the U.S. Constitution – leaving out parts like the sections on slavery that would make the Founders look bad – I was reminded again of the power of false narrative, especially at a time when the American Right dominates the U.S. media landscape.
Feb. 6 will mark the centenary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. The conservatives have wasted no time in starting the show.
Here is an interesting piece of news from the Washington Post: "A group of prominent U.S. Republicans" went to Paris last month to attend a rally of the French Committee for a Democratic Iran. This organization just happens to be intimately connected with the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK).
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia unintentionally revealed the hypocrisy of the Right’s rhetoric about “originalist” interpretations of the U.S. Constitution with his comments about how the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection under the law” doesn’t mean equal rights for women.
Finally, Congress appears ready to hold some high-profile hearings – except they won’t be about the most important scandals of the past decade, like how the United States was misled into the Iraq invasion, how the Afghan War was bungled, how torture became a U.S. practice, or how bank deregulation and Wall Street greed nearly destroyed the economy.
Perhaps President Barack Obama should give himself a waiver on the ban prohibiting U.S. government employees from downloading classified cables released by WikiLeaks, so he can better understand the futility of his Afghan War strategy.
When we think of the great struggles of our day we almost always think in terms of movements and groups. There are Communists and Fascists, Capitalists and Socialists, Jews and Muslims, Zionists and Christian Fundamentalists, Democrats and Republicans, Western Civilization and its rivals, ad nauseum.
In an age, when nature is besieged and the political landscape blighted, and one stands, stoop shouldered and wincing into the howling wasteland of epic-scale idiocy extant in the era, a solitary person can feel lost ... marooned inside an increasingly isolated sense of self.
Read on.Hardly a day goes by without news about the penetration of the Pakistani state by Islamic fanaticism and the connection between that country’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate and radical groups in Afghanistan, including the Taliban.
Read on.Despite a few victories in the lame-duck session of Congress, Democrats and progressives should be under no illusion about the new flood of know-nothingism that is about to inundate the United States in the guise of a return to “first principles” and a deep respect for the U.S. Constitution.
Read on.In 1960, I co-founded a student magazine at Cornell University called Dialogue. I was a wannabe journalist, fixated on emulating the courageous media personalities of the times from Edward R. Murrow to a distinctive figure I came to admire at Presidential press conferences, a wire service reporter named Helen Thomas.
Read on.“What is your favorite book," a journalist asked Gen. Rafael Videla, after he ascended to power in Argentina in 1976.
Read on.At a closed-door White House meeting this month, President Barack Obama justified his repeated concessions to the Right as necessitated by its success over three decades in selling Ronald Reagan’s anti-government message to broad sectors of the American public.
Read on.Although the recently released WikiLeaks secrets document the well-known animosity of Iran’s neighbors to the radical Islamist regime — with their hopes for a U.S. attack on the nation over its nuclear enrichment program — talks to end the Iranian effort will continue.
Read on.In George Orwell’s 1984, Britain is depicted as a totalitarian police state that is ruled by the Party, or Big Brother – an enigmatic, ubiquitous elite that controls society through heavy surveillance, nationalist propaganda and historical revisionism.
Benjamin Disraeli once labeled Britain’s government "an organized hypocrisy." That was in circa 1845. Things have not changed much and by now hypocrisy might well be seen as a common sin of democratic government.
The Advent season is a fun time. For many Christians, it is the happiest season of the year. The joy comes from the anticipation: “Joy to the world, the Lord has come. Let earth receive her king.”
In the snows of yesteryear, far away from Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or START treaties or the War on Christmas, I see the movie house of my youth, the Playhouse Theater on Chapin Street, the only one in my small hometown -- except for a nearby drive-in that closed during the winter.
Despite some recent victories like repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” many on the American Left are feeling a cumulative disgust toward President Barack Obama, not just for his generally timid policy choices but – even more so – for his failure to articulate and fight for progressive values.
America's “They Decade” is ending, and it is time to heed Edmund Burke. Evil happens when good men do nothing.
In the days of Stalin’s Russia, not only would dissidents “disappear” but images of officials at the May Day reviewing stands would be erased from photographs when their political stars fell.
Before Christmas emerged as a commercial success, it led a checkered social life. In the 13 American colonies and the early days of the United States, it was known as a festival of heavy drinking and brawling.
The Obama administration's claim of "progress" in its Afghan war strategy is based on the military seizure of three rural districts outside Kandahar City in October. But those tactical gains have come at the price of further exacerbating the basic U.S. strategic weakness in Afghanistan – the antagonism toward the foreign presence shared throughout the Pashtun south.
When President Obama ran for the presidency, his rhetoric was distinctly progressive. He is a very good orator and a superior debater and so we can be forgiven for taking the rhetoric seriously.
Read on.The U.S. government protected Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie in the years after World War II and later unleashed the infamous Butcher of Lyon on South America by aiding his escape from French war-crimes prosecutors, according to a new report issued by the National Archives.
Read on.Whatever the unusual aspects of the case, the Obama administration’s reported plan to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiring with Army Pvt. Bradley Manning to obtain U.S. secrets strikes at the heart of investigative journalism on national security scandals.
In World War I, as happens to be true in most wars, the Christian church leadership joined in the patriotic fervor with very un-Christ-like, nationalistic and racial/religious superiority stances.
On Dec. 7, some 50 Israeli rabbis issued a "decree" forbidding their Jewish fellow citizens from "renting or selling homes or land to Arabs and other non-Jews." The "decree" was soon endorsed by an additional 250 Israeli rabbis.
President Barack Obama hailed Richard Holbrooke, who died Monday, as “one of the giants of American foreign policy.” The President’s kudos reflected the Establishment gravitas that Holbrooke, the special envoy overseeing U.S. policies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, had acquired in his long career — fact and reason to the contrary.
It's curious that Sweden, the most sexually liberal nation in the world enlisted Interpol to hunt down Julian Assange on sexual charges stemming from a broken or unused condom.
Ten years ago, the United States stood at a crossroads though the dimness of the future made it hard for many to see which path led toward a brighter day and which headed toward disaster. But then, a partisan Republican majority of the U.S. Supreme Court made the choice for the nation.
