Civility for the Few, Brutality for the Rest. Preparing for a radio interview on Barack Obama’s upcoming State of the Union Address (SOUA) last Tuesday morning, I nearly became overwhelmed by some of the multiple and interrelated Orwellian absurdities at the heart of United States’ reigning media-politics culture....Take the Kabuki drama of peace and harmony planned [...]
In his speech commemorating the victims of the mass murderer Jared Loughner in Tucson, Arizona, Barack Obama turned to the Bible. At a memorial service titled “Together We Thrive: Tucson and America,” the president told mourners how “Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that [...]
Alex Doherty: In the wake of the killings in Tuscon the tea party and their fellow travelers have been attacked for their lack of civility and for constant use of military metaphors regarding their opponents in the Democratic Party. Is civility really the key issue here? Paul Street: No, it isn’t. Citizens have no special [...]
The deficit-fueling tax cuts for the rich that Barack Obama recently agreed to inherit and pass on from George W. Bush have been sold to the American public as necessary for the creation of jobs and the expansion of the “recovery.” Profits for the wealthy few, the argument goes, mean more employment and income for the [...]
Just what did Barack Obama and his spinners do to the critical faculties of so many leading American progressives? Some of my regular readers might be surprised to know that I often bring a significant measure of disinclination to my recurrent radical criticism of President Barack Obama and his "progressive" defenders. Read further...
So a key part of U.S. President Barack Obama's not-so "liberal" health insurance "reform" bill was declared "unconstitutional" last week by the right-wing federal district court judge Henry E. Hudson in Virginia. In a 42-page opinion, the justice wrote: "Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers [...]
Chutzpah Oh boy – so now he’s really gone and done it. President Barack Obama has (as widely predicted) “caved-in” to Republican demands for the preservation of George W. Bush’s arch-plutocratic, deficit-driving tax cuts for the wealthy few (at a cost of $900 billion to the federal treasury) in a tax “deal” that accommodates Republicans (and their [...]
*The essay below is extracted from the May 2010 postscript to my book The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010) – the perfect Christmas gift for that not-so liberal know-it-all fake-progressive partisan Democrat cousin or uncle or sister-in-law who can't stop making excuses for the center-right [...]
Two days ago the warmongering U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman voiced broad elite American opinion when he called for Internet companies to refuse to provide hosting for the WikiLeaks Web Site. “No responsible company – whether American or foreign – should assist WikiLeaks in its effort to disseminate their stolen materials,” said Lieberman. Amazon.com has already complied (belatedly [...]
Listen here - excellent, thought-provoking questions and related commentary from Doug Henwood of LBO.