Uncategorized
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American Mandela
It’s become something of a parlor game for the chattering class to compare President-elect Barack Obama to the pantheon of presidents. Is Obama the second coming of Abraham Lincoln? A recent Newsweek magazine cover cast Honest Abe’s long shadow behind the incoming president’s silhouette. Inside, writers Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe found the parallels between the…
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Trouble on the Left
This week Barack Obama will choose his environmental team, the group of people responsible for dealing with everything from climate change to energy policy, and concern is building in some Democratic circles about whether this is the point at which he will finally appoint a prominent liberal to his Cabinet. After a swift set of…
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Bill Ayers Must Be Behind This
Fran Drescher may want to make discretion the key word in her bid for Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested Tuesday morning on corruption charges stemming from his selection of Barack Obama’s Senate successor. A federal investigation alleges that Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, sought campaign…
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Big Ups to God
We may want Big Brother to leave God alone, but that doesn’t stop a few hundred million of us from hittin the big guy up for favors on a regular basis. A recent study shows that 90 percent of Americans pray every day. About three quarters pray for themselves and loved ones, and the other…
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Dancing With the Stars
Up until I was about 10 or so, dance for me was tap and tutus, toe shoes and the Rockettes, and the New York City Ballet twirling through George Balanchine’s version of The Nutcracker. It was the pretty white teacher in my Staten Island, N.Y. dance studio teaching me how to pirouette and the chorus…
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More Mumia?
A new Sundance channel documentary, In Prison My Whole Life, unrevealingly retreads the case against Philadelphia-based Black Panther-cum-revolutionary radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal was arrested (and later convicted and sentenced to death) on Dec. 9, 1981 for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. That date coincides with British-born filmmaker William Francome’s birthday. The…
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Where's South Africa's Obama?
One by one, South Africa’s Moses Generation is dying out—there was another funeral last Saturday—and its demise is raising uncomfortable questions about the yet-to-emerge Joshua Generation to lead South African into its Promised Land. These biblical references arise out of a speech Barack Obama delivered in Selma, Alabama last year, when the then 46-year-old Obama acknowledged…
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Can We Trust the Brain Trust?
People are beginning to notice that President-elect Obama and his still-forming circle of advisers are a very different kind of people in power—different from those we have known in recent political history. Whereas, the Bush administration—and Reagan before him—seemed to bask in a beer-drinking, next-door neighbor image, Obama has assembled a team of highly educated…
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A New Type of Pain Killer in South Africa
What do you do when life becomes so distressing and coping mechanisms begin to fail? Teenagers in South Africa are experimenting with anti-retroviral drugs as a way to escape their realities. These drugs are designed to treat HIV/AIDS by boosting patients’ immune systems and suppress the virus. Across the country, teenagers—even those who do not…
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Meet Obama
It has become a near mantra for the president-elect: “We have only one president at a time.” But as the last days of the Bush administration dwindle away, it looks more and more like that one president is Barack Obama. Over the weekend, while Bush was flipping a coin at the Army/Navy game, Obama was…