Posted on July 18, 2008
Members of the Mehdi Army stand guard next to a poster of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, at a checkpoint in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq.
By Robert S. Eshelman
“Firebrand.” It was the ubiquitous moniker used to describe Iraq’s fiercely anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr when, in March 2004, his leering portrait became commonplace among American media reports of Iraq.
American Viceroy L. Paul Bremer III had just shut down al-Sadr’s Baghdad newspaper, al-Hawza, and hinted at arresting him, ushering in the first of several confrontations with al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army.
More recently, this label has given way to that of… more
Globally, 1 billion overweight people coexist with 800 million starving people.
That's one of many perverse facts in Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Melville House, April 2008, U.S.… more
Combining irreverent humor and acerbic critique, a handful of new media outlets -- including The Onion -- are transforming American politics and culture, writes Theodoe Hamm, in his new book The New Blue Media. After 9/11, The Onion stopped its presses for one week. The hiatus allowed the paper to show its respect for the gravity of what had happened in lower Manhattan. But it also enabled its… more
Pick almost any metric -- fraction of workers in unions, lag of pay behind productivity increases, growing hours of work, rising economic insecurity -- and it's obvious that American workers and their unions are… more

(Via Doster), In light of this:
Unnecessary deaths and amputation, grossly inadequate medical care, systematic prisoner beatings.
These are just some of the findings from a... more
Oh Bruce Bartlett, your logic makes so much sense! Many 23-year old Chicagoans like myself think highly of public education. I think that means we should... more
Read his 6,000 word opus on MoveOn. He gets at some of the tensions I highlighted in my piece from last year on the intersection between... more
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Viewpoint
By David Sirota
In the asylum that is American politics, beware a candidate like Barack Obama when he is lauded for moving to “the center” — because usually… more
By Terry J. Allen · July 17
By Salim Muwakkil · July 15
By Ken Brociner · July 13
Recent Articles
By Paul Abowd
The National Labor Committee (NLC), a New York-based human rights group, has been investigating working conditions at Toyota Motor Corp., and the labor… more
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I heard this story a long time ago, growing up in Choctaw County in Oklahoma before my family moved to Texas. A tribal… more
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Directly west of Chicago’s iconic Buckingham Fountain sits the Congress Hotel. Itself an icon during its heyday of the early 20th century, the… more
By David Sirota
Ha-Joon Chang is an award-winning Cambridge economist whose new book, Bad Samaritans, explodes what its subtitle calls “the myth of free trade.” At… more
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Cartoons

By Andrew Wahl
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