Free Republic

Progressives are on the move once more. Wisconsin lit the spark, as workers, students, teachers and farmers occupied the state’s capitol in February and launched recall elections that sobered conservative Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his legislative allies. Occupy Wall Street turned that spark into a conflagration that swept the nation. Last week, in Ohio and Maine and even Mississippi, voters overwhelmingly rejected efforts to trample worker rights, constrict the right to vote and roll back women’s rights. These electoral victories have led pundits to wonder whether Occupy Wall Street will imitate the Tea Party and stand candidates for office....

Two American hikers who were detained in Iran have been sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of "illegal entry" and "espionage," the state TV website says.

My dust-up with Nation Magazine contributing writer Ari Berman occurred at the onset of what I had hoped would be a constructive conversation on my radio program “The Fairness Doctrine - left, right and uncensored. My co-host, liberal commentator Patrick O’Heffernan had invited Berman on the air to discuss President Obama’s State of the Union address. I began by asking if it was ok if I diverged from the topic briefly to clear up a matter regarding a piece of history related to his magazine. Then came the fireworks. I brought up that fact that the editor of Nation Magazine,...

Governing elites in Washington and Wall Street have devised a fiendishly clever "grand bargain" they want President Obama to embrace in the name of "fiscal responsibility." The government, they argue, having spent billions on bailing out the banks, can recover its costs by looting the Social Security system. They are also targeting Medicare and Medicaid. The pitch sounds preposterous to millions of ordinary working people anxious about their economic security and worried about their retirement years. ... ...To understand the mechanics of this attempted swindle, you have to roll back twenty-five years, to the time the game of bait and...

It's known that Julian Assange, the Wikileaks chief, has Guantanamo files, however this sounds fairly explosive. Reuters (via The Nation): WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, jailed in Britain this week, has told media contacts he has a large cache of U.S. government reports about inmates at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, known as GITMO, the last of four major tranches of U.S. government documents which WikiLeaks had acquired and at some point would make public. "He's got the personal files of every prisoner in GITMO," said one person who was in contact with Assange earlier this year.

We’ve got mail! Actually, we get a lot of mail, but anyway… Kevin from Manchester, Conn. sent us a aloof e-mail suggestion we would not discuss this story since it was posted on a liberal website. The Nation – a left-wing liberal online magazine – has charged Lou Dobbs is an “American hypocrite” since he has “relied for years on undocumented labor for the upkeep of his” various properties. But … there is always a but. I’m not sure why Kevin thinks we would not talk about this. It’s not like we have not written about the Nicky Diaz story...

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public –...

1. Attack World Hunger and Poverty as if Our Life Depends on It: It Does. Anchor our foreign policy in the compassion for the poor that unites all the world's religions. Reduce the debts of impoverished countries. Shift foreign aid from buying weapons to feeding people. 2. Champion the Rights of Every Child, Woman and Man. Make America stand for justice, not expediency. Stop turning a blind eye to governments that abuse their own people. Ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. If punishing a foreign tyrant means,...

She'd never admit it, but if there's one person hoping for a big Republican victory in 2010 and, yes, a President Palin in 2013, it could be . . . Katrina vanden Heuvel. That's right, the editor of The Nation might well be looking at GOP success as her best shot at salvaging the sinking fortunes of her far-left magazine. A recent article in Vanity Fair—which no one would accuse shilling for the right—is entitled: Hate Sells: Why Liberal Magazines Are Suffering Under Obama. It details how circulation at The Nation has been dropping significantly since Pres. Obama took office....

The "war hero" candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. This is an expanded version, with primary documents attached, of a story that appears in the October 6, 2008 issue of The Nation. (Watch Schanberg's appearance on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.) BY SYDNEY H. SCHANBERG John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout...

How disappointed are the Obama warriors of 2008? "May your love for me not fade as quickly as your love for Obama," read one pale pink e-card making the rounds on Valentine's Day. Obama himself addressed the topic of a one-term presidency in a recent interview with Diane Sawyer, albeit in a noble, idealistic, theoretical way ("I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president"). Well, OK, who wouldn't rather be really good for four years than mediocre for eight; but how many really good one-term presidents have there been? (Only one--James K. Polk--according to a...

"Iran has clearly stated the enriched fuel is needed for a research reactor to produce radio isotopes to treat cancer."

EXCERPT Democrats should also give Republicans plenty of room to do themselves in. By openly declaring themselves for sale to Wall Street, Republicans are displaying the kind of crony capitalism that drives Americans to form Tea Parties. Ironically, this doesn't seem to bother Sarah Palin. Faced with a choice between subsidizing the banks and poor kids, she went with the banks, warning the Tea Party activists that the Obama administration is "taking over" everything, including "health care, student loans." With views like that, she won't have any trouble getting speaking gigs at $100,000 a shot. (The writer is editor of...

Requiem Malcolm A. Kline, January 28, 2010 Quiz question Who said this? “I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president—which means, in our time, a dangerous president—unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.” The answer: ...

The first casualty of the president's political debacle will likely be Timothy Geithner, the severely over-confident treasury secretary well known as a lapdog of Wall Street. Geithner was effectively repudiated by the president last week when Barack Obama abruptly announced a new, more aggressive approach to financial reform. But the immediate threat to Geithner is the scandal of collusion and possibly illegal behavior gathering around the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for its megabillion-dollar takeover of insurance giant AIG.

Barack Obama went to Boston to rally voters and got a pie in the face. He lost his innocence as the valiant young president and also lost his sixty-vote majority in the Senate. Now we will find out what the man is made of--either a true political leader or just another show horse. Dozens of explanations are being offered for why the Dems were humiliated in Massachusetts. Democrats incline to grab easy answers. The president, if he is tough enough, will instead face the hard message of this political fiasco. The special election displayed monumental miscalculations by which Obama has...

Present Obama has succeeded in doing something we didn't think could be done: He has united the country. Yes, both the Right and the Left now agree: We think the Bystander-in-Chief is doing a TERRIBLE job! Afghanistan is the latest example. Mr. Dithers says he's going to send 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, to do some community organizing, and then he's going to pull them out within a year-and-a-half, i.e., by July 2011. The Right says, "How stupid is that? The general in charge says he needs 40-60,000 men to do the job. And, Rule #1 in fighting a war:...

Richard Viguerie, the legendary hard-right activist who spent much of the past decade arguing that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were too liberal, now declares that: "Tea Party Activists Are the New GOP." There is little reason to argue with the man whose direct-mail campaigning funded the rise of the Republican right in the late 1970s and who grumbled loudly when Newt Gingrich, Bush, Cheney and Republican leaders tried to soften the party's roughest edges. Viguerie isn't grumbling now. He's celebrating. And rightly so. With the decision of moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava, the party's nominee in New York state...

When Sarah Palin's big-bucks memoir "Going Rogue: An American Life by Sarah Palin" comes out Nov. 17, there'll be another book about her hitting the stores the same day: "Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, an American Nightmare." The "Rouge" book, with a similar name and cover, will be put out by a new company, OR Books, says Publisher's Marketplace, which says it will be composed of "essays assembled by Nation editors Richard Kim and Betsy Reed." Marketplace adds that "it promises 'progressive perspectives on Sarah Palin's political career' by writers including Naomi Klein, Jane Mayer, Katha Pollitt, Jim Hightower, Christopher Hayes,...

(CNSNews.com) - Emily Douglas, Web editor for The Nation magazine, said Wednesday that making the “recession worse” and making goods “more expensive” for Americans are means to reduce consumerism and preserve the environment. Douglas was one of three journalists participating in a panel discussion, “Covering Climate: What’s Population Got to Do With It,” which was held at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. The other two panelists were Dennis Dimick, executive editor of National Geographic, and Andrew Revkin, environmental reporter for The New York Times (who participated via Web camera). An audience member who identified herself as an employee...

If you want some indication of the disarray that the "progressives" find themselves in, consider that disgraced broadcaster Dan Rather will be keynoting a September 23 event sponsored by The Nation magazine on "What Will Become of the News?" The Nation calls Rather "legendary," ignoring how he was put out to pasture by CBS News after he used fake documents in 2004 to smear then-President Bush. Tickets to hear and see Rather are $200 each. Rather is a legend in his own mind-and apparently the minds of those left-wingers who appreciate his effort to defeat Bush's re-election bid and throw...

Several weeks ago an important report commissioned by the Vermont Health Care Commission was quietly posted on the Legislative Council Web site. No fanfare, no press conferences, no attention given. Media ignored it. The committee that ordered it ignored it. The Legislature ignored it. The administration ignored it. The report's findings tumbled into the political abyss... What it says ought to be engraved in the thinking of every legislator and every administration member... The Kavet-Rockler report ordered by the Legislature, and apparently dust-binned by it, carries a very disturbing "inconvenient truth." That is that ...

From last week’s issue of The Nation, the flagship publication of the Left: The White House call for progressives to ignore these Democratic obstructionists is not much different from Lyndon Johnson telling Martin Luther King Jr. to halt civil rights demonstrations in a South ruled by segregationist Democrats. Change never comes from following such advice. This comparison isn’t an accident. “Progressives” continually try and cast the push for socialized medicine as the new Civil Rights cause, as though the inability to get taxpayers to pay for one’s medical care was in any way comparable to Jim Crow and segregation. Just...

he Nation is claiming to have information from informants that Blackwater founder Erik Prince is some sort of delusional latter-day Templar Knight, ordering murders to cover up his plot to wage war against the Islamic world. If it sounds a bit far-fetched … well, it should. Without going into the specific allegations being made in the consolidated civil cases, logic and factual errors in claims made in the article are troubling. See this claim from a man who claims to be a former member of the Blackwater management team, identified as John Doe #2: "Using his various companies, [Prince] procured...

I heard one news report on the radio when all of this happened a couple days back that talked about the 3 Americans captured in Iran, but haven't heard anything about it since, nor do any of the reports on the internet say anything about it. One was described as a teacher and a "campus activist", and another one was a "community activist". Anyone else here this?

Washington has said it is checking reports that three US tourists were detained by Iranians while hiking along the northern Iraqi border. The three are reported to have gone missing in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region which borders Iran.

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq (AP) - The U.S. State Department says it's investigating reports that three Americans have been detained by Iranians after wandering near the border in the self-ruled Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Two Kurdish officials say the three Americans apparently were arrested after entering Iranian territory without permission. One security official says the missing Americans were tourists on an outing. The official says the three contacted a colleague Friday and said "they had mistakenly entered Iranian territory and troops surrounded them." The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information. State Department spokesman...

The long hunt for the new leader of the Republican Party has at last come to an end, and the winner isn't Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, or even Sarah Palin, but this woman in a red T-shirt: (VIDEO AT LINK) If you're going to lead a low-tech lynch mob, you've got to be able to get that Gilbert Gottfried screech into your voice like the Lady in Red does when she says, "I want my country back!" That's leadership for you, ever so much more forceful than poor Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, a GOP moderate (one of eight who voted...

WASHINGTON – Walter Cronkite is dead at 92 – but most Americans, many of whom considered him "the most trusted man" in the country during his reign as CBS News anchor – still don't know what motivated him and how he secured such an influential and lofty position. He was like a grandfatherly institution in the early days of TV. People believed him. Uncle Walter wouldn't lie, America believed. Thus, when he gave his opinions, they had impact. One example was his report on the Tet offensive in Vietnam, which is credited with swinging the tide of opinion against the...

Kung Fu and Kill Bill star David Carradine was found hung in a hotel room in Bangkok on Wednesday, Thai police said. "Kung Fu" and "Kill Bill" star David Carradine was found hung himself in a closet in a hotel room in Bangkok on Wednesday, Thai police said.

Ask those on the left what values they champion, and they will say equality, tolerance, women's rights, gay rights, workers rights and human rights. Militant Islamists oppose all that, not infrequently through the application of lethal force. So how does one explain the burgeoning left-Islamist alliance? I know: There are principled individuals on the left who do not condone terrorism or minimize the Islamist threat. Author Paul Berman, a man of the left, has been more incisive on these issues than just about anyone else. Left-of-center publications, such as The New Republic, have not been apologists for jihadism. But it...

All is not well in Obamafanland. It's not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury's latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama's silence during Israel's Gaza attack.

John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney were the founders, with Josh Silver, of Free Press, which has launched a campaign to save the news. Their book, Saving Journalism: The Soul of Democracy, will be published by New Press in the fall. Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it...

The most expensive presidential campaign in history and the cataclysmic financial meltdown of the past few months combined to produce a "perfect storm," Romero told me recently. The storm blew a $19 million hole in the ACLU's budget, resulting in a hiring freeze and the cancellation of various projects, followed by the announcement, in January, that 10 percent of the national staff was being let go. Employees with decades of experience were told to clear out their offices; no department was left unscathed.

Cut the Military Budget--IIBy Barney Frank This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation. February 11, 2009 I am a great believer in freedom of expression and am proud of those times when I have been one of a few members of Congress to oppose censorship. I still hold close to an absolutist position, but I have been tempted recently to make an exception, not by banning speech but by requiring it. I would be very happy if there was some way to make it a misdemeanor for people to talk about reducing the budget deficit...

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men,...

CAN YOU HEAR the grumbling over in what Howard Dean used to call "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?" The tolerance-and-diversity crowd is upset with Barack Obama; it seems the president-elect has been bringing people into his circle who don't agree with them on every single issue. The consternation on the left began with the naming of Obama's national security team - Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Robert Gates to continue as secretary of defense, and retired four-star General James Jones as national security adviser. "Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks," they were promptly dubbed in the Guardian by...

Now it has officially gone too far: Democrats, in their zeal to appear friendly to evangelical voters, have chosen celebrity preacher and best-selling author Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration. There was no doubt that Obama, like every president before him, would pick a Christian minister to perform this sacred duty. But Obama had thousands of clergy to choose from, and the choice of Warren is not only a slap in the face to progressive ministers toiling on the front lines of advocacy and service but a bow to the continuing influence of the religious right...

It couldn't have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama's best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday's New York Times op-ed page, he announced that "it's finally time to tell my true story." Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , "The Real Bill Ayers" is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left. "I never killed or injured anyone, "Ayers writes. "In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an...

It couldn't have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama's best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday's New York Times op-ed page, he announced that "it's finally time to tell my true story." Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , "The Real Bill Ayers" is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left. "I never killed or injured anyone, "Ayers writes. "In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an...

The names floated for Barack Obama's national security team "are drawn exclusively from conservative, centrist and pro-military circles without even a single -- yes, not one! -- chosen to represent the antiwar wing of the Democratic party." In his plaintive post this week on the Nation magazine's Web site, Robert Dreyfuss indulges in the political left's wonderful talent for overstatement. But who are we to interfere with his despair? If reports are correct, on Monday the President-elect will ask Robert Gates to stay on as Secretary of Defense and name retired Marine General James Jones as National Security Adviser. These...

There are some heated conversations under way in the progressive blogosphere, including some at thenation.com, in which our own writers as well as people like Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, David Sirota and Digby are debating why Barack Obama has so far appointed few progressives to his cabinet. It's worth checking them out. I think that we progressives need to be as clear-eyed, tough and pragmatic about Obama as he is about us. President-elect Obama is a centrist at a time when centrism means energy independence and green jobs and universal healthcare and massive economic stimulus programs and government intervention in...

Here is the ugly, unofficial truth that neither Wall Street nor the government will acknowledge: the pinnacle of the US financial system is broke--with perhaps $2 trillion in rotten financial assets on the books. Nobody knows, exactly. The bankers won't say, and regulators won't ask .... [which]feeds the conviction that banking's problems are far worse than we've been told. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College puts it plainly: "It is probable that many and perhaps most financial institutions are insolvent today--with a black hole of negative net worth that would swallow Paulson's entire $700 billion in one gulp." The...

Hillary's Mystery Money MenRuss Baker & Adam Federman Thu Oct 18, 2:04 PM ET The Nation -- In the Clintons' pursuit of power, there is no such thing as a strange bedfellow. One recently exposed inamorata was Norman Hsu, the mysterious businessman from Hong Kong who brought in $850,000 to Hillary Clinton's campaign before being unmasked as a fugitive. Her campaign dismissed Hsu as someone who'd slipped through the cracks of an otherwise unimpeachable system for vetting donors, and perhaps he was. The same cannot be said for the notorious financier Alan Quasha, whose involvement with Clinton is at least...

Southerners, Farmers Rejoice at Obama Victory. Follow link http://www.notthenation.com/pages/news/getnews.php?id=636

John McCain is right about one thing: he's no George W. Bush. Bush, for all his flaws, would never run a campaign as badly as McCain's. The Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004 were disciplined, on message and well-organized. The McCain campaign is exactly the opposite. McCain bragged in the first debate that he understands the difference between strategy and tactics. But apparently his campaign doesn't. Ari Berman says that "Most Americans don't care about ACORN or Bill Ayers or Joe the Plumber" Complaining about ACORN's bad voter registrations? That's a tactic, too, and not a very effective one.

The upcoming presidential election will shape the Supreme Court for decades to come. John Paul Stevens is 88, David Souter dislikes Washington and the 75-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been treated for cancer. One or more of these liberal Justices will probably leave the bench in the next four years. The replacement of one or two of them by a conservative would mean a rollback of key rulings of recent years. Roe v. Wade has drawn the most attention, but many other liberal rulings of the past twenty years that were decided by 5-to-4 or 6-to-3 votes could be reversed....

Washington can act with breathtaking urgency when the right people want something done. In this case, the people are Wall Street's titans, who are scared witless at the prospect of their historic implosion. Congress quickly agreed to enact a gargantuan bailout, with more to come, to calm the anxieties and halt the deflation of Wall Street giants. Put aside partisan bickering, no time for hearings, no need to think through the deeper implications. We haven't seen "bipartisan cooperation" like this since Washington decided to invade Iraq. In their haste to do anything the financial guys seem to want, Congress and...

If, God forbid, foreign policy had to be the deciding factor in choosing between Barack Obama and John McCain, then last night's terrible showing by Obama would make me a Ralph Nader voter in a heartbeat. Obama's performance was nothing short of pathetic, and only a Democratic-leaning analysts and voters with blinders on could suggest that Obama won the debate. More important, he utterly blew a chance to draw a stark contrast with John McCain on America's approach to the world. He checked all the boxes. Barack ("Senator McCain is right") Obama couldn't find anything to disagree with the militarist...

John McCain chose the supremely under-qualified Sarah Palin as his running mate partly because she is a woman. If you have a problem with that, you're a sexist. She talks incessantly about being a mother of five and uses her newborn, Trig, who has Down syndrome, as a campaign prop. If you wonder how she'll handle all those kids and the Veep job too, you're a super-sexist. "When do they ever ask a man that question?" charges that fiery feminist Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, Palin, who went back to work when Trig was three days old, gets nothing but praise from...