Exclusive: President Obama sent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu home with a warning that Israel cannot count on U.S. support if it unilaterally bombs Iran. Top neocons are fuming and Netanyahu must weigh the risk of defying Obama on Iran…
Obama’s Drone Policy Still Vague
The Obama administration has offered more information about its targeting of al-Qaeda-related figures, including U.S. citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki, for drone strikes and other lethal attacks. But the assurances of “due process” still lack the detailed explanation that the gravity of…
Lost History, Obama Administration, October Surprise, Politics, Right Wing, Secrecy, The Bush-43 Administration
How the Right’s Smear Machine Started
Exclusive: The Right’s attack machine, which these days questions President Obama’s birthplace and smears Georgetown student Sandra Fluke over contraceptives, arose in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate with young conservatives thinking they were the real victims, thus justifying…
Financial Magic Thinking Dies Hard
Since the early supply-side days of Ronald Reagan, the Right has pretended that slashing taxes on the rich will generate extra revenue, thus more than paying for itself. The reality has turned out differently, but Michael Winship says that hasn’t…
Spring Fund Goal: $25,000
From Editor Robert Parry: As the presidential election campaign heats up and the war drums over Iran grow louder, we continue to fill a major hole in American journalism by reporting on difficult realities, both the serious political stakes in…
An Israeli October Surprise on Obama?
President Obama is walking a political tightrope between constraining Iran’s nuclear program and restraining Israel’s war threats, while political critics are shaking the supports. But ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar says Obama’s predicament may be even trickier, with Israeli hardliners possibly…
Obama Cedes Ground on Iran War
Amid the pounding of war drums on Capitol Hill, on newspaper op-ed pages and on the Republican campaign trail President Obama has insisted on giving peace one more chance regarding Iran’s nuclear program, but he has conceded key ground on…
Mother of the Sit-Down Strike
Seventy years ago, the remarkable life story of Lucy Gonzales Parsons came to an end in a fire that destroyed her Chicago home. Though little remembered today, Parsons pioneered strategies to protest poverty and injustice, including the sit-down strike, William Loren…
Romney’s Made-up History on Iran
Exclusive: In facing down Iran as U.S. president, Mitt Romney says he would be guided by the experience of Ronald Reagan threatening Iran with a military strike if it didn’t free 52 Americans held hostage during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. But…
Maligning Pvt. Manning
Classified documents allegedly leaked by Pvt. Bradley Manning have revealed the grim sometimes criminal truth about the U.S. government’s actions, and Manning has said that was his intent. But his own lawyers have portrayed him as a misfit, not a…
Sloppy Comments on Iran’s ‘Nukes’
Exclusive: The New York Times and other U.S. news outlets failed miserably to tell the truth before the Iraq War and they aren’t doing much better as new war clouds build over Iran. Journalists lazily repeat false assumptions like Iran’s…
Can Rush Keep It Up?
Gerrymandering Threatens Kucinich
Ohio’s Republican-controlled government gerrymandered a new congressional district across a northern strip of the state to pit two progressive Democrats Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur against each other in Tuesday’s primary. Steve Cobble laments this and recalls some of Kucinich’s brave stands.
Profiting Off Nixon’s Vietnam ‘Treason’
Exclusive: The notion of Wall Street bankers meeting in private to discuss profiting off a plot to extend the Vietnam War and risk the lives of thousands of American soldiers may sound like a conspiracy movie script, but it is…
Obama as ‘Peace President’
Many of President Obama’s critics on the Left slam him for not doing more to reverse President George W. Bush’s war policies, but ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar says the criticism misses the significance of Obama’s resistance to Bush’s moniker,…
LBJ’s ‘X’ File on Nixon’s ‘Treason’
Special Report: In the dusty files of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library in Austin, Texas, once secret documents and audiotapes tell a dark and tragic story of how Richard Nixon’s team secured the White House in 1968 by sabotaging peace talks…
Who’s Behind Anti-Israel Bomb Plots?
Last month, when three bomb plots surfaced in India, Thailand and Georgia — all with apparent Israeli targets — the immediate assumption was that Iran was seeking revenge for Israeli-connected assassinations of Iranian scientists. But new evidence suggests another possibility,…
The Chasm of Political Ugliness
The retirement of Sen. Olympia Snowe and the death of right-wing smear-master Andrew Breitbart are removing two figures who stood on opposite sides of the chasm dividing the old world of collegial collaboration between politicians and the new one of…
On American ‘Exceptionalism’
American politicians forever talk about the nation’s “exceptionalism,” a special greatness that sets the U.S.A. apart from all others. But this jingoism requires whitewashing much of U.S. history and ignoring much of the present, too, says Lawrence Davidson.
Confusion Over the First Amendment
Exclusive: The Blunt Amendment went down to a narrow defeat in the Senate on Thursday, but its contention that employers must be allowed to impose their religious beliefs on the medical insurance choices of their employees will remain a hot…