Today's Stories

October 15, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
Our Cheap Politicians

October 14, 2009

Michael Neumann
Fearsome Words? a Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict

M. Reza Pirbhai
Fighting the Taliban: What, Exactly, is Being Fought in Afghanistan?

Gareth Porter
Hawks Play Up the Taliban's Ties to Al Qaeda

Paul Craig Roberts
War Criminals Are Becoming Arbiters of the Law

John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon

Ralph Nader
The CBO's Flawed Report on Medical Malpractice

Dean Baker
Won't You Please Come to Chicago to Greet the Bankers?

Charles Modiano
White Silence: Where Does Brett Favre Stand on Rush Limbaugh?

Nadia Hijab
Abandoning "Women and Children"

Walter Brasch
An Extension of Her Motherhood: Sherry Carpenter, Journalist and Animal Care Provider

Website of the Day
Nader: Obama Has a "Concessionary Personality"

October 13, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Putting the Spine Back in the Commonwealth

Shamus Cooke
What Obama Isn't Telling American Workers

John Ross
War on Mexican Women

Brendan Cooney
Ask Awal Khan About Obama's Prize

Frida Berrigan
Operation Enduring Detentions: Losing the Moral High Ground

Yves Engler
Is Canada More Pro-Israel Than the US?

David Macaray
Why the Government Fears Unions

Dave Lindorff
Democrats: Selling Out, But Still Getting Screwed

Mark Weisbrot
Occupying Afghanistan is Making Things Worse

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
History Repeats Itself

Binoy Kampmark
That Dirty Colonial War

Website of the Day
The Health Insurance Industry's Latest Doublecross

October 12, 2009

Pam Martens
Secret Deal Between Wall Street and Washington Shines a Harsh Light on Federal Housing Agency

Mike Whitney
A Dollar Rout or More Bernanke Trickery?

Martha Rosenberg
Yale Lab Tech Causes Two Problems for Animal Researchers

Jessica Arents
The Price of Peace: Our Arrest at the White House

Eamonn McCann
Massacre in Ireland, Massacre in Iraq

Bill Hatch
Dairy Industry Goes Down the Tubes

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time for a Timetable in Afghanistan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Siren Song of World Praise

Gideon Levy
Obama's Betrayed Mission in the Middle East

Iyad Burnat
Why Does Obama Get a Prize and Bush Got Shoes?

Alan Cabal
Why Obama Deserves the Nobel

Dan Bacher
The Astroturf Method

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help

October 9-11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
War and Peace

James Bovard
Eight Years of Big Lies on Afghanistan

Kathleen and Bill Christison
New Crisis Developing in Palestine

Andy Worthington
Congressional Depravity on Gitmo

Marc Levy
Talking Dirty to the Kids

Tariq Ali
Ahmed Rashid's War

Mike Whitney
The Securitization Boondoggle

Paul Craig Roberts
Warmonger Wins Peace Prize

Alan Nasser
Cockeyed Economics

Jack Z. Bratich
The Twitterest Pill: Policing Dissent in the Information Age

Steve Breyman
Time for a War Tax

David Michael Green
A Hapless Presidency

Dave Lindorff
The WTF Prize

Paul Buchheit
Fear of the Rich

Jim Goodman
Feedlots and E. Coli

Missy Beattie
Theater of the Absurd

Michael Leonardi
Ships of Poison

Nadia Hijab
The Plight of the Right of Return

Mel Packer
The Crackdown on Pittsburgh

David Macaray
The Raiding Game

James T. Phillips
Getting Burned

Charles R. Larson
One Man's Walk Through Hell

Michael Donnelly
Behind the Capitalist Curtain

David Yearsley
The Biggest Blot on Mel Gibson's Rap Sheet

Lorenzo Wolff
Rap That Threatens ... and Endures

Poets' Basement
Heyen, Ames and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Jobs Conference

October 8, 2009

Saul Landau
A Late September Morning With Fidel

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Dark Omens for the US in Afghanistan

Linn Washington, Jr.
Pot and Perversion: Judicial Antics Expose Drug War Insanity

Marshall Auerback
Neo-Classical Economics Misses What Matters

Dave Lindorff
A Nation of Snoops

David Rosen
Bankrupt Morality: the Staying Power of Republican Sinners

Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee
The Bear Essentials: New Thinking Needed to Save BC's Salmon and Grizzlies

John V. Walsh
Remembering Hinton's Fanshen

Stewart Lawrence
The Edwards / Hunter Affair Reconsidered

Charles R. Larson
Conservatives in the Sandbox

Website of the Day
Et Tu, Code Pink?

October 7, 2009

Brendan Cooney
Are Republicans Breaking US Law in Honduras?

Paul Craig Roberts
Dead Labor: Marx and Lenin Reconsidered

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Recovery: Unemployment Up, Wages Down (But the Banks Have Been Saved ... Sort Of)

Jonathan Cook
A Third Intifada?

John Stanton
HTS: Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harms Way

Joanne Mariner
Tortured Language

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cherry Blossoms

Stephen Lendman
The Gaza War's Effect on Women

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time to Draw Down in Afghanistan

Mary Lynn Cramer
Doublespeak on Health Care

Website of the Day
How to Bag a Wolf by Aerial Assault

October 6, 2009

Mike Whitney
Dollar Hysteria: Is the Sky Really Falling?

Gareth Porter
The Iranian Rift in the IAEA: Leaked Paper Based on Disputed Intel

Jonathan Cook
How Israel Buried the UN's War Crime Probe

Boris Kagarlitsky
My Hour as Talking Head in Moscow

Iain Boal
The New Crisis at Pacifica

Ron Jacobs
Why Are We in Afghanistan?

John Ross
Wave of Anarchist Bombings Strikes Mexico

Michael Dickinson
Panic in Istanbul: Smoke, Mayhem and the World Bank

Stephen Fleischman
Beware the Predator

Ira Glunts
The Audacity of Nope

Missy Beattie
Outside Looking In

Website of the Day
Round Up the Usual Suspects

October 5, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families While Partnering with a Federal Agency

Mike Whitney
Dead Man Walking: Welcome to the US Economy

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Feds Imprison the Innocent

Harry Browne
Ireland Says, "Yes, Please"

Sara Mann
My Little Town: Nothin' But the Dead and Dyin'

Omar Barghouti
Dissolve the Palestinian Authority

Shamus Cooke
A Jobless Recovery?

Brenda Norrell
A Dirty New Low for Peabody Coal

Fred Gardner
Situation NORML: Reconciling Medical Pot Use and Legalization

Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap

Website of the Day
In Goldman Sachs We Trust?

October 2-4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Geezer Renditions

Saul Landau
News From Raul Castro

Diana Johnstone
After the German Elections: Is Socialism Really Dead in Europe?

Greg Moses
Cramming for the Downside

William Blum
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Another Cold War Myth

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Nuclear Program: Where's the Proof?

Russell Mokhiber
Welcome Back, Michael Moore

John Ross
Chomsky in Mexico

Ellen Brown
IMF Catapults From Shunned Agency to Global Central Bank

David Ker Thomson
Cop Shocks

David Macaray
The Audacity of Toyota

Gary Engler
Unions in a Rut

Robert Fantina
Meet the New Boss (Same as the Old Boss)

Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer
Pittsburgh: Still a (Coal) Company Town

Anthony Papa
Here is Your Chance to Help End the Failed War on Drugs

Joe Allen
The Good Wife: Bad View of a Corrupt System

Harry Browne
Tarantino Scalps His Audience

Ron Jacobs
Collective Fiction

Charles R. Larson
Cultural Warriors: Austrialian Aboriginal Art Triennial

David Yearsley
Hanns Eisler's Great National Anthem for East Germany is Available: Make It America's

Poets' Basement
Taylor, Gardner and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Wrongful Convictions of Youth

October 15, 2009

A Review of Going Rogue

Sarah Palin Bears It All

By CHARLES R. LARSON

The most amazing aspect of Sarah Palin’s autobiography, Going Rogue: An American Life, is that in just a few short months, Governor Palin has mastered the art of  standard English.  Flawless, lucid, flowing language pours from each page in the Governor’s  stunning rags-to-riches account of her remarkable life. As a prose stylist, clearly she has few peers.  William Safire immediately comes to mind but also Carlyle and Addison and Steele.  More startling—and even her detractors will agree with this—is the speed with which Governor Palin wrote her autobiography, which can only be the product of the well-organized mind of a genuinely talented writer.  The book has appeared months before its original planned date, all because of the Governor’s remarkable gifts of self-reflection.

And what a story she presents, original in every way: born in Idaho, raised in the outbacks of Alaska (where her family had moved) in one of America’s wildest environments, a supportive family as a child and—after her marriage to Todd—even more encouragement from her husband and children.  But to skip back a distance before her marriage, it is worth noting the most formative years of her life: the time she was a university student.  Much has been speculated about Governor Palin’s undergraduate education extending, as it did, over four different schools.  Fortunately, those speculations will now end, since Palin details her university experience and corrects the record.

The movement from one school to the next (Hawaii Pacific University, where incidentally she was a student with Barack Obama; North Idaho College; Matanuska-Susitna College; and the University of Idaho), was all a planned peregrination.  “At each university, I sought out the finest minds, the most demanding professors in order to probe their intellects for decoding the major philosophical questions that mankind has been concerned with since time immemorial.”  Once she had taken courses from the most  distinguished professors at an institution, then she moved on to another university where the process would begin all over again. “All American students,” she concludes, “would be better educated if they followed a similar plan.  Always tap the greatest intellects no matter where you find yourself.”

Of Alaska, Governor Palin is nothing if not rapturous, ethereal, even spiritual.  Clearly there is something about the state that is embedded deeply within her soul.  The open spaces are perfect for self-reflection and contemplation.  Her account of one early experience as a child—when she thought she was lost in the woods and would never find her way home—was comparable, she argues, to the Vision Quest for many Native Americans.  She exudes excitement, especially, about hunting, which she sees, after all, as nothing more than providing for one’s family.  “How can one not be thrilled by scoping with one’s rifle bear, caribou, crocodiles?” she asks. “God gave us these creatures so we could feed our families,” she remarks, and although she admits that contemporary attitudes toward hunting have changed, in Alaska guns are still a necessity for self-preservation.  (The time she was lost in the woods as a child, her greatest fear was that she would encounter a grizzly bear.)

Governor Palin is fully cognizant of Americans’ desire that she be the next President of the United States.  Her frontal approach to the question that all of us have asked ourselves is refreshingly honest.  She admits that Going Rogue: An American Life will serve as her official campaign biography and that she wrote it at this juncture in her life so that once she receives the nomination of her party, “Someone else won’t have to write a quickie job.”  In her directness, Governor Palin writes that her decision not to serve her full term as the governor of Alaska was prompted by her realization that she had already accomplished all that was needed for the state.  There was nothing left for her to do. 

More startlingly, she states that if elected President of the United States, she will probably not serve the full eight years.  “If I can do for my country as a whole what I did for Alaska in less than a full term, why would I want to stay in the position for such a lengthy time?  To stay longer would be a waste of my talents. I’ll move on to something more challenging—the United Nations, for example, or even the Supreme Court—places where I have long realized I can contribute even more.”   

Going Rogue is an archetypal American autobiography—deep in its reflective understanding of Governor Palin’s place in American history, profound in her vision for America’s future under her guidance.  What a pleasure to read a writer who can quote Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, and Reinhold Niebuhr with such ease and apply their wisdom to her own life.  I suspect that this book will soon be taught in American schools alongside the works of Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, other classic accounts of what it means to be an American.

Going Rogue: An American Life
HarperCollins, 422 pp., $28.99.

Charles R. Larson is Professor of Literature at American University, in Washington, D.C.

Disclaimer: The review was written before he read the book.

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