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Selling White Rage
American Enterprise Institute fellow Tim Mak, who writes for conservative columnist David Frum’s NewMarjority.com, explains the increasing rage in rightwing radio this way: Follow the money. In a post earlier this month, Mak argued the shrinking ad market for talk radio is driving conservative yappers like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh into ever-deepening vitriol. He…
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How to Tell a Lie Well: Scream
Polls are coming at us fast and furious these days. But two stood out to me this week as proving, once again, all you have to do to make a lie into the truth is repeat it loud enough and often enough. First, the Pew Research Center for People & the Press’ weekly survey of…
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The Limits of 'Pragmatic' Politics
Few things are as grating as the polite jargon used to describe politicians caving in to corporate interests. “The politics of the possible,” for instance, has suddenly replaced “yes, we can” as Barack Obama has walked back a central plank of his presidential campaign—that he’d create a public insurance plan. If only the problems we…
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What Our Modern Era of Greed Looks Like
Between the beach and the birthers-turned-death panelists, you probably missed this one last week: Income inequality in America became more pronounced at the end of the Bush era than it had been since, well, ever. The closest comparison to the gap between the super rich and everybody else are the years just before the Great…
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Death Squads Target Gay Iraqis
A chilling Human Rights Watch report adds to a building mound of evidence that death squads are targeting gay men in Baghdad and Sadr City, Iraq—a reality that undermines claims of a democratic and cultural opening in the country since the 2003 U.S. invasion. At minimum, dozens of men who are either openly gay or…
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The Birthers and Jim Crow 2.0
If ever there was a “teachable moment” about race in modern America, now is it. With the birthers and the reparations conspiracy theories and the Nazi imagery at health care meetings, someone’s gotta explain why all these white folks are wilding out. We need an articulate, impassioned race man to clarify things. But not Al…
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Obama: ‘The Status Quo is Not Working for You’
All you needed to hear was “New Hampshire” to know the White House’s game plan. If you want to stage a big political moment, to tie yourself and your message to democracy and revolution and good government—you go to New Hampshire. And so it was that President Obama mounted his retort to the GOP’s town…
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Remind Them of the Devil They Know—Private Insurance
In the thick of August, President Obama has a very specific challenge: to yank the health care reform conversation up out of the weeds and back into the broad, easily understandable consensus he tapped during the campaign—that the current system is a disastrous failure that grows more expensive and less effective every year we continue…
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Health Care Reform: The Beach-Reader Edition
By now you surely know this much: It’s August, there’s still no health reform bill in either chamber, and that’s a political setback for Barack Obama. This scorecard is not trivial. In a democracy, the politics matter. That said, we’re talking about society-defining public policy here. How we get and pay for health care affects…
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Letting Science Lead, Again
This week offers a potentially historic turning point in America’s response to HIV/AIDS, as the Senate weighs whether to show the courage of President Obama’s convictions and end one of the most counterproductive public health laws Congress has ever written: the ban on federal funding for needle-exchange programs. The Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
