Photo: AP Images

Healthcare Debate

“I guess what surprised me is the ferocity, it’s much stronger than I expected; It’s people who are ideologically opposed to Mr. Obama, and this is the opportunity to weaken the president.”

-John Rother, the executive vice president of AARP, which is supportive of the health care proposals and has repeatedly declared the “death panel” rumors false.

*Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer, by Howard Dean, with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir

Education

“If there’s anything Americans should be mature enough about to have a decent conversation, it’s the education of their children.”

-Rev. Al Sharpton, liberal Democrat and community activist, who is working alongside unlikely ally and Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to promote Obama’s school reforms.

*Related Title: Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, by Linda Perlstein

Afghanistan

“I think some administration officials realized that by being so openly critical of Karzai, they faced the risk that they could get a Karzai who was not only reelected but was hostile to the U.S. because of how he had been treated.”

- Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, commenting on Afghan President Hamil Karzai, who is favored to win the August 20th presidential election. The Obama administration says it is “actively impartial” in the vote.

*Related Title: The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David E. Sanger

New Era of Progressive Politics

“We have entered a new era of progressive politics which, if we do it right, can last 30 or 40 years. America has rapidly moved to another place on a lot of these issues. The president needs your help. And the cause needs your help.”

-Former President Bill Clinton speaking at the Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburg, PA.

*Related Title: The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, by Michael Lux

The Financial Crisis

“We don’t know whether these numbers are going to hold out in the long run, but they do seem to indicate that we’re reaching a bottom a lot sooner than we thought. It looks like the worst might be over.”

-Raj Badiani, senior economist for IHS Global Insight in London, on fresh signs of modest economic recovery as Germany and France become the first industrial nations to officially pull out of the global recession.

*Related Title: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, by Paul Krugman
Photo Caption: Former President Bill Clinton addresses the Netroots Nation Convention at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., Thursday Aug. 13, 2009. (AP Photo/John Beale)

What are the greatest political films of all time? Stuart Klawans, film critic for The Nation, runs down his top 25 in The Nation Guide to the Nation, the essential guide to small businesses, cultural institutions, activist organizations, and gathering places, and more for the millions of progressives from coast to coast. Klawans, whose criticism and reviews won the 2007 National Magazine Award, offers his list as “Notes Toward A Filmography Of the Left.” Herewith, ten of his picks, chosen at random. For the full list, see The Nation Guide, available at Progressive Book Club.

Hoop Dreams (1994)

A Grin Without a Cat (1997)

Hearts and Minds (1974)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

The Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Modern Times (1936)

Citizen Kane (1941)

The Bicycle Thief (1948)

High School (1968)

Life is to Whistle (1998)

Which films would make your “greatest” list?

I.F. Stone

American Radical
Before there were Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, or Talking Points Memo, there was I. F. Stone.

* Related Title: The Best of I.F. Stone

Wal-Mart And The ‘Brave New World Of Business’
A historian discusses the impact of Wal-Mart on both the American and the global economy in his new book.

* Related Title: Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, by Ellen Ruppel Shell

A Q&A with Richard Russo
The famed author talks about his new book, That Old Cape Magic.

Prisons in Crisis
The United States has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. Now, in deep recession, some states are letting prisoners go because they can’t afford to keep them locked up.

Speaking out for the Uighurs
Rebiya Kadeer’s memoir criticises China’s actions in her land.

Photo: AP Images

In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him. He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming.

- A participant in one of the informal conversations with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues that former Vice President Dick Cheney is holding to discuss his forthcoming memoir.

* Related Title: The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008, by Bob Woodward

We have heard from both chambers that the House sees a public plan as essential for the final product, and the Senate believes it cannot pass it as constructed and a co-op is what they can do. We are cognizant of that fact.

- White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel commenting on the Senate Finance Committee’s outsized prominence in the health reform debate.

* Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care For Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer, with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir

It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him he now runs the regiment. It popped people’s eyes.

- A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s executive director from 2001 to 2004. He’s referring to Kyle D. Foggo, who in 2003 oversaw construction of several secret CIA detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees. In 2004, partly in reward for his work on the prisons, he was named the C.I.A.’s executive director, the third-ranking position at the agency. (Before he had been merely the chief of the agency’s main European supply base.) Foggo is currently serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison for fraud relating to CIA contracts.

* Related Title: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, by Jane Mayer

I did check into private schools, but there was no way in the world I could afford the $700 a month. Charter was the only other option.

- Wendy Lewis, a 46-year-old single mother on Chicago’s South side. The U.S. Education Department is engaged in a high-pressure campaign to get states to lift limits on charter schools through a $4 billion education fund. Proponents say charter schools offer healthy competition in public-education systems. The data on whether charters are working are mixed, at best.

* Related Title: Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, by Linda Perlstein

..New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks called these protesters “insane.” Wrong. That diminishes their importance (and lets “mainstream” conservatives off the hook for not denouncing them in the strongest possible terms). … I do not consider this insanity but a calculated statement of values.

- Author Susan Jacoby, referring to protesters at many town hall health reform meetings who have called President Obama a Nazi and even carried posters featuring him with a Hitler mustache.

* Related Title: The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby

Marian Wright Edelman: The Cradle to Prison Pipeline
The Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund talks with Harvard University’s Charles Ogletree about her work.

Related Title: The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation, by Marian Wright Edelman

Daniel Levy & Brian Katulis: The Narrowing Window
Can Hamas and Fatah reconcile?… Daniel: Without a state, the Palestinian Authority is useless… The double-edged sword of Palestinian security forces… Chicken Little-ism on the US-Israel relationship… How Obama can sell a settlement freeze to Israelis…

Related Title: The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David E. Sanger

Politics of Language: George Lakoff
George Lakoff makes plain how the words used by politicians translate to the public’s support for various political issues. Language matters - especially when it comes to politics.

Related Title: The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain, by George Lakoff

Big Think Interview with Richard Thaler
A conversation with the author and behavioral finance theorist.

Health Reform: Is 2009 like 1993?
A Conversation with Former Congressional Leaders on the Prospects for Health Reform and Comparisons to Clinton’s Reform Efforts

Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, by Howard Dean, MD with Igor Volsky, Faiz Shakir

[Posted by Corinne Lestch]

Cheap, by Atlantic writer Ellen Ruppel Shell, is a sharp and entertaining examination of the cost — psychic, economic, environmental, social — of American society’s mania for low price, which Shell calls the most devastating market force of our time. We once distrusted “cheap”; now we’re fixated on it, and the effects of that cultural shift are everywhere visible: from environmental harms to soaring debt loads to stagnant incomes to hollowed-out communities. The book is full of vivid first hand reporting, shrewd insight, surprising history, and plenty of eye-popping numbers (though not too many!). Here are some that jumped out.

• Before retiring in February 2009, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott Jr. took home in his biweekly paycheck what his average employee earned in a lifetime (his total annual compensation was $1,456,000).
• Chain stores rose to prominence with startling speed after World War I, growing in number from an estimated 50,000 in 1920 to 141,492 in 1929.
• Factory outlets are America’s #1 tourist destination, the fastest-growing segment of not only the retail industry but also the travel industry.
• From 1995 to 2006, Riceland (the largest rice miller and marketer in the world) received $554,343,039 in government handouts (i.e., taxpayer money). Thanks to this, Riceland can set the bar for low price: in 2005, the world market price for rice was 20 to 34 percent less than what it cost the average U.S. farmer to grow.
• The New York Times reported: “During a year when the stock market lost a third of its value – its worst performance since the Great Depression – shares of McDonald’s gained nearly 6 percent, making the company one of the only two in the Dow Jones Industrial Average whose share price rose in 2008. (The other was Wal-Mart).”
• The popular Denny’s Restaurant chain touted its Extreme Grand Slam Breakfast, consisting of three strips of bacon, three sausage links, two eggs, hash browns and three pancakes. The meal contains 1,270 calories and 77 grams of fat.
• Any savings from low-priced consumer goods was more than wiped out by the rising costs of nondurable goods and services in 2003: a 76 percent increase in mortgage payments; a 74 percent increase in health insurance costs; a 25 percent increase in tax costs; and a monumental increase in child care costs.
• Thanks to innovations in modern-day malls, the typical visit to a mall extended from 20 minutes in 1960 to almost three hours in 1979.
• The number of outlet malls in the United States more than tripled from 113 in 1988 to a peak of 325 in 1997. Since then the field has thinned out a bit as the size of each individual outlet ballooned to as large as 600,000 square feet.
• In 1993 the top five retail organizations held 48 percent of the apparel market, and by 2000, 10 retail chains sold 72 percent of American clothing.
• Department store markdowns grew to 6.1 percent of all dollar sales in 1965, to 18 percent in 1984, and to 33 percent in 2001.

Jonathan Cohn hits the Colbert show to talk about healthcare reform and his book Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price.

Jeff Sharlet on “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power”
A secretive group known as The Fellowship, or “The Family”, is one of the most powerful Christian fundamentalist movements in the United States. The Family’s devoted membership includes congressmen, corporate leaders, generals and foreign heads of state.

Related Title: Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right, by E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Stalin in Charge: New Research Shows How the Soviet Politburo and the Secret Police Served a Single Man
The torrent of documentary material released in the 1990s on the workings of Stalin’s totalitarian rule is still more than a trickle – despite Putin’s repression of the Russian media and NGOs, despite the overt rehabilitation of Stalin as the great personnel manager and author of military victory, and despite the restrictions on historical archives and foreign researchers.

Related Title: Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies, by Michael Signer

A Classic List Of Must-Read Children’s Books
As summer vacations draw to a close and school-age children begin the mad scramble to fulfill their summer reading obligations, author Lesley Blume recommends a few timeless books that may not be on the required book lists.

Related Title: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

Unscientific America: Chris Mooney
Why is it that for every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science?

Related Title: Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum

The Library Books Nobody Wants to Borrow
A website revealing the worst books on library shelves has become a surprise hit.

The Bush Attorney General Firings

“He was the dominant voice. The White House involvement began earlier than we had thought, and their input went well beyond what they had stated publicly.”

-Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a former prosecutor who led the judiciary committee’s questioning of Karl Rove about the firings of US attorneys general. Newly released documents show Bush’s top political aide focused on GOP calls to oust New Mexico’s top U.S. prosecutor.

Related Title: Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, by Charlie Savage

Scare Tactics and Healthcare Debate

“I am not in favor of them. I just want to clear the air. Let’s disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations.”

-President Obama, speaking at a town hall meeting on health reform in Portsmouth, N.H., on conservative claims that he supports assembling a “death panel” of experts that would decide whether patients live or die.

Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform, by Howard Dean, with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir

The Financial Crisis

“We’ve averted the worst, and there are clear signs the stimulus is working.”

-Kenneth Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board in New York. A Bloomberg News survey shows that the Obama administration’s economic stimulus efforts appear to be paying off.

Related Title: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, by Paul Krugman

Healthcare Townhalls

“I think it is very hard because [Democrats] don’t have the message machine the Republicans do. The Democrats still believe in Enlightenment reason: If you just tell people the truth, they will come to the right conclusion.”

-George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has advised some Democrats on how to sharpen their message, commenting on the wild fallacies being spread by conservative critics of the Obama administration’s health reform efforts.

Related Title: The Political Mind, by George Lakoff

The CIA’s Interrogation Program

“I remember him saying they were preparing people for intense interrogations.”

-Robert J. Madigan, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska who had worked closely with Dr. Jim Mitchell, one of two military retirees and psychologists who found business opportunities working with the Central Intelligence Agency as the architects of the most its interrogation program.

Related Title: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, by Jane Mayer

Lou Dobbs scarcely rates more than a few pages in The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right – journalist David Neiwert’s brilliant exposé of the right-wing addiction to violent hate rhetoric – but the CNN anchor may need more space in the book’s next edition. Lately he has made himself and his network look foolish by speculating about the President’s birth certificate, lending support to the conspiracy theorists who insist that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii.

And on Monday afternoon, Dobbs again seemed to lose his grip during his daily radio broadcast during an ugly rant against Governor Howard Dean — who is leading the progressive fight for health care reform and now serves as chairman of the Progressive Book Club.

One of those liberals who helped advance the idea of liberal fascism is none other, of course, than Dr. Howard Dean. I thought we had gotten rid of this left-wing pest for awhile but he’s resurgent…He’s a bloodsucking leftist – I mean, you gotta put a stake through his heart to stop this guy.

Click below to listen:

Uttered in the midst of a debate over health care that is growing increasingly nasty and heated, with riotous behavior and even death threats from mobs of angry wingers at Congressional town halls across the country, what Dobbs said was at the very least irresponsible, and at worst an incitement to criminal attack.

But then irresponsible rhetoric is nothing new from the host of The Lou Dobbs Show, whose habit of enabling haters on both his television and radio broadcasts began long before the “birthers” showed up on his show.

As Neiwert documents in The Eliminationists, Dobbs has persistently promoted misinformation intended to stigmatize immigrant workers, especially those from south of the border, blaming them wrongly for increased crime, “stealing” American jobs, spreading diseases such as leprosy, and even plotting to take over the Southwestern states.

By depending so heavily on false and exaggerated claims gleaned from white supremacist websites, Dobbs has diminished his network’s value as a reliable news source as well as his own journalistic reputation. He pretends to be a political independent, yet these days he sounds just like a little Republican noise machine, or a taped message from the insurance industry.

What his verbal assault on Governor Dean proved – aside from Neiwert’s point about far-right hate speech going mainstream – is that Dobbs prefers name-calling to real debate, just like the mobs who shout down discussion of health reform.

Now, publicly shamed by our friends at Media Matters – and perhaps concerned that he may indeed have stepped out of bounds at CNN – Dobbs has offered a grudging, sarcastic non-apology for his fusillade against Governor Dean. Other friends of PBC, notably at Democracy for America, have called on CNN to fire Dobbs, which seems unlikely. He should apologize – and then he should invite Governor Dean on his show to have a real debate on the issues, rather than yet another round of sandbox rhetoric from behind the microphone.