Archive for February, 2012

Now is the Time to Leave Afghanistan

February 27, 2012
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Cultural insensitivity of the kind illustrated by the recent Koran burnings at Bagram Air Base might be an understandable lapse in the first months of a military occupation, but after ten years? It wasn’t long ago when General David Petraeus asked a good Reverend in Florida intent on holding a “Koran Burning Day” to...

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The Republicans Used a Base Strategy in 2004 and 2010, Can it Work in 2012?

February 22, 2012
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The same corporate media pundits who assured us back in 2000 that George W. Bush, given the contested presidential election, would have to “move to the center” are today telling us that the Republican candidates’ stoking of the culture war is “toxic” to independent voters and will kill them in the general election. Some...

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David Brooks’s Anti-Poverty Program: “Bourgeois Paternalism”

February 15, 2012
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In his latest column David Brooks argues against what he calls “economic determinism” in analyzing the underlying causes of poverty in America. After telling his readers he isn’t going to blame the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior he plows right ahead and blames the poor for being poor because of...

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