First, we have an Israeli government wanting to forbid Arabs students from learning their history. Now, religious fundamentalists of a different kind: The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state’s education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would…
Showing all posts tagged United States
Who is the junkie in this deal?
Michael Oren, the new Israeli Ambassador to the US, tells Jeffrey Goldberg about the complex relationship between America and Israel: Israel needs the political and economic support of American Jewry, and American Jewry increasingly needs the spiritual infusion of the Jewish state. … In recent years, we have found that a 10-day visit to the…
Featuring Hitler a little too close to Israel
A report on 80 + 1 by Californian technlogy writer (and friend) Cyrus Farivar: Jews and Palestinians in Israel have been at each others’ throats basically since the British showed up and screwed everything up. It’s been an intractable struggle that’s been going on for the better part of a century. The latest episode incarnation…
Buying access in Washington
Glenn Greenwald interviews Harper’s Ken Silverstein: A couple of weeks ago, Politico’s Mike Allen exposed The Washington Post’s plans to charge lobbyists and corporations large amounts of money to meet — at the home of… The Post’s publisher — with various… Post reporters and… senior Obama officials.… Shortly thereafter, however,Harper’s Washington… Editor, Ken Silverstein, uncovered several events organized by… Politico…
How to become a communist with Obama
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News tells me that Barack Obama is “destroying capitalism” over his proposed health care plan. That sounds like good news to me, but tell me more, Rupert:
Oil, blood and some tears
Foreign Policy in Focus posits the question most don’t want to ask: In the past month, two seemingly unrelated events have turned Central Asia into a potential flashpoint: an aggressively expanding North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a nascent strategic alliance between Russia and China. At stake is nothing less than who holds the future…
Old, scared boys are what we want
Just how screwed is the current Republican Party? Old, white men only need apply.
Beating people into believing the Afghan dream
Rory Stewart writes in the London Review of Books about the illusion of bringing “democracy” to Afghanistan: When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ”˜There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the…
More than two sides in the global arena
Tony Karon writes in The National about the dangerous tendency of many in the political and media establishment to frame everything in terms of simple terms and good versus bad: Last summer it was so much easier for Americans: “Today we are all Georgians,” John McCain declared at the height of the Russian offensive provoked…
When times are tough, exploit the poor
File this under the weirdest story of the week. CNN reports on lobbyists recruiting homeless people to stand in line for them on Washington’s Capitol Hill.