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Calling All CounterPunchers!
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Calling All CounterPunchers!
Annual Fundraising AppealWe interrupt your regular reading habits to bring you the following important announcement: CounterPunch needs your financial support!
We're not in the habit of making idle threats and this isn't one. Either we meet our fundraising goal of $75,000 over the next three weeks or we'll be forced to drastically curtail the operation of our website. It's near the end of our year and the wolves are gathering at the door.CounterPunch's website is supported almost entirely by subscribers to the print edition of our newsletter. We don't clutter the site by selling annoying popup ads. We tried getting money out of Google, but they gave us the boot. We aren't on the receiving end of six-figure grants from big foundations. George Soros doesn't have us on retainer. And we don't sell tickets on cruiseliners.
The continued existence of CounterPunch depends solely on the support and dedication of our readers. And we know there are a lot of you. We get thousands of emails from you every day. Our website receives millions of hits and nearly 100,000 readers each day-and those numbers grow by the month. Of course, all these readers chew up a lot of bandwidth and that costs money.
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CounterPunch
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Today's Stories October 30, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Vijay Prashad October 29, 2008 Arno J. Mayer Eric Toussaint Matt Gonzalez Steven Conn Jonathan Cook Patrick Bond Ramzi Kysia Douglas Valentine Stephen Martin Margaret Dooley-Sammuli Amee Chew Website of the Day
October 28, 2008 James G. Abourezk Andy Worthington Gary Leupp Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whitney Gregory V. Button Ralph Nader P. Sainath Martha Rosenberg Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 27, 2008 Michael Hudson Barbara Rose Johnston John Dinges Mike Whitney Mary Lynn Cramer Greenspan's Higher Power Alan Farago David Michael Green Andy Worthington George Wuerthner Niranjan Ramakrishnan Website of the Day October 24 / 26, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Ishmael Reed Mike Whitney Don Santina Scott Boehm Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Binoy Kampmark Linn Washington Jr. Nicole Colson Bernard Chazelle Brian Jones Christopher Brauchli Benjamin Dangl Val Strange Steve Early David Macaray Allison Kilkenny Richard Rhames Jim Bell Kris De Welde Barry Clemson Adam Engel Mark Scaramella Tuli Kupferberg Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 23, 2008 Allan J. Lichtman Todd Chretien John Ross Peter Morici Mats Svensson Marlene Martin Robert Jensen / Margaret Kimberley Deepak Tripathi David Morris Website of the Day October 22, 2008 Brian Cloughley Heather Gray Jeff Birkenstein Ralph Nader DC Larson David Swanson Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth Larry Everest Robert Fantina Martha Rosenberg Stephen Martin Website of the Day October 21, 2008 Vijay Prashad Paul Craig Roberts Corey D. B. Walker Steve Breyman Eric Toussaint Wajahat Ali Robert Weitzel Brendan Cooney Dave Lindorff Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing Patrick B. Barr Omar Barghouti Website of the Day October 20, 2008 Michael Hudson Anthony DiMaggio Tariq Ali Uri Avnery Bill Quigley Ben Rosenfeld David Michael Green William S. Lind Chris Genovali Stephen Martin Howard Lisnoff David Yearsley Website of the Day October 17 / 19, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Pam Martens Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whtney Michael D. Yates Suzanne Smith Carl Boggs Ralph Nader Fidel Castro Dave Marsh Saul Landau Jo Guldi Kevin Zeese Larry Everest Steve Early David Macaray Ben Terrall Missy Beattie Don Monkerud Helen Redmond Dan Bacher Wajahat Ali Farzana Versey Vladimir Frolov Kim Nicolini Poets Basement Website of the Day October 16, 2008 Mike Whitney Jonathan Cook Ayesha Ijaz Khan Alan Maass Chuck O'Connell Mary Lynn Cramer P. Sainath Andy Worthington Peter Gelderloos Stephen Martin Douglas Valentine Website of the Day
October 15, 2008 Steve Conn William P. O'Connor Robert Weissman Jonathan M. Feldman Ron Jacobs Conn Hallinan Justin Podur Karl Grossman Dave Lindorff Eric Walberg Martha Rosenberg Uri Avnery Monica Benderman Website of the Day
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October 30, 2008 When Populist Cynicism Meets Professional ExpediencyThe Year of Unreliable WitnessesBy JAMES McENTEER Joe The Plumber, aka Samuel Wurzelbacher, has become a kind of bellwether for the 2008 presidential campaign, though it is clear that he has his own (semi-hidden) agenda, his own (semi-hidden) secrets and his own (semi-hidden) reserves of ignorance. This “average guy” from Ohio is now stumping for John McCain, claiming that an Obama presidency would turn this country socialist and mean “death to Israel.” Such transparently poisonous nonsense would seem ludicrous on its face to all but the most deluded partisan right-wing warriors. But McCain – who surely knows better – is courting and grooming “Joe” as an attack dog, to say things the candidate himself prefers not to utter. Joe is but the latest and least vetted of many incredible opinionators who commandeer media platforms in this campaign from which to bestow their “wisdom.” Media outlets pay big bucks to individuals who have disgraced themselves or disgraced the system or simply failed upwards from unsuccessful political careers to paid punditry. We have a minor tradition of convicted felons turning to media for a living. Oliver North and Gordon Liddy are examples of political abusers, crooks and liars who now offer their opinions as talk-show hosts. As long as they have an audience their employers will keep paying them. But who in the world listens to those clowns? Karl Rove has probably done more to demean and subvert the democratic processes in the United States than anyone in recent memory. He has slandered opponents, politicized government and promoted war as a campaign tactic. He has flaunted Congressional subpoenas with apparent impunity. Some hail his political “genius” for getting George W. Bush into office twice. But Rove has no moral credibility. We don’t need to ask Rove the question Joseph Welch put to Senator Joseph McCarthy: “Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” We already know he does not. But instead of answering for his many crimes in Congress or in courts of law, Rove pontificates about Obama’s fitness for office or McCain’s campaign strategies for megabucks on the Fox network and in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Why would anyone trust anything this scumbag has to say? Unlike Karl Rove, Robert Shrum has not undermined the democratic system with illegal or mean-spirited tactics. But neither has he won any of the various Democratic presidential campaigns he has advised over the years. Yet here he still is, after publishing his memoir entitled No Excuses, offering advice to candidates and voters alike through The Huffington Post and various op-ed pages. Why should anyone listen? Kristol has wrought more than enough destruction as a cheerleader for the misbegotten Bush-Cheney junta wars in the Middle East. He apparently pushed for Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice presidential candidate. Do we really need to hear more from this discredited bozo in the pages of The New York Times? Enough already. Assessing the veracity and gravitas of most radio and television commentators, we are confronted by an appalling paucity of perceptive political observation. Fox offers nothing but white noise, in the racial and the aural sense. Talk radio whips ditto heads into emotional frenzies that the “hosts” themselves don’t really share. Their humongous salaries put them in another, higher economic class than the listeners they stir up. Theirs is an exercise in populist cynicism and professional expediency. We tend to gravitate toward mainstream media and internet sites whose opinions we already share. But the myth of the uncommitted, undecided voter provides a rationale for shrill, outrageous stories and charges that bid to change our minds and our votes. Along with the unreliable mainstream media commentators, the marginal mumbles of Joe the Plumber only add to the uncivil, uninformed babble drowning out any meaningful discussion of urgent issues we can no longer afford to ignore.
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 Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont               CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed                   |
