Markos from Daily Kos has a new gig writing opinion pieces for Newsweek, and he’s been in rare form with his first couple of efforts. From this week’s column: “In his first Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan remarked that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ While the quip has provided […]

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In order to keep these roundups fresh as a spring daisy, I usually discard any links I’ve been keeping around that are more than a week old. But since this is OcPot’s first roundup in more than six weeks, I’m extending the freshness window slightly to include a few things that were just too good […]

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Here’s a little video roundup to keep you entertained while I try to scrape together the time to post something more substantial.
First off, Mr. Colbert points out the enormous black-and-orange elephant in the living room … the War on Halloween! That’s not going to be very popular in the candy corn belt.

 
He really enjoyed […]

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Daily Kos has a review up of Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Harper’s ran an excerpt from The Shock Doctrine in the October issue which was, as the DKos review says, riveting, and immediately put the book on my must-read list. I’m planning to pick up a copy […]

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Eric Alterman has an outstanding column in The Nation on how the media’s mean girls (of all genders) develop the narratives they use to bring down the presidential candidates they take a dislike to. With examples of what they did to Gore in 2000, and what they’re doing to Obama and Edwards right now.
Two of […]

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General Petraeus says that “victory” in Iraq will require 9-10 more years. I’m trying to imagine how ten more years of bloody occupation can possibly work out to a victory. More on that subject here.

A bill has been introduced in Venezuela to restrict baby names to a list of 100 approved choices. “The bill’s ambition, […]

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Bush has suddenly decided that the Iraq occupation is kinda like Vietnam after all, but of course he’s careful to draw the wrong conclusions from the comparison. The article quotes American University historian Allan Lichtman as saying that Bush’s spin on the situation “is not revisionist history. It is fantasy history.”
On a related note, […]

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“Iraq hasn’t even begun”: Writing in the LA Times, Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University, examines the long-term consequences of the debacle in Iraq, and concludes, “Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.”
Digby on the […]

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Nicole at Crooks and Liars puts it well: It’s ironic to be celebrating Independence Day during a time when we have a virtual King who defies the law with impunity, and is not held accountable to the people he governs. Revolution? What revolution?

Also at C&L, what a TV newscast looked like on July 4, 1972. […]

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POLITICS: The Senate Judiciary committee has voted 13-3 to authorize subpoenas for documents related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program. That includes three Republicans on the committee voting in favor of the subpeonas: Sens. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

Poland “stuns” other members of the European Union by demanding that the […]

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POLITICS: In “Hillary’s Labor Problem,” Joe Conason points out that Hillary Clinton’s top political strategist, Mark Penn, is the CEO of a union-busting law firm. “Having started in a tiny, two-man polling operation in a New York City mayoral campaign, he is now the CEO of Burson-Marsteller Inc., one of the planet’s largest P.R. shops, […]

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The populations of 20 common US birds — including a range of familiar “backyard birds” such as sparrows, chickadees, whippoorwills, and larks — are in decline, according to a new report from The National Audobon Society. The 20 species in question have less than half the populations they did in 1967. A variety of factors […]

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Profile of Newtok, Alaska: One of the first victims of climate change, a town gradually sinking into the mud. As the hardest hit of the 180 Alaskan villages suffering from erosion, “studies say Newtok could be washed away within a decade.”
Iceberg of Yuck: The Consumerist says, “Poison toothpaste, killer cough-syrup, and tainted pet food are […]

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