Alexander Cockburn's Blog, page 4

Auctioning off the Presidency From the Pentagon Battlements for 05/31/2012

Let me whisk you to 1980 on one of Obama's miracle drones.

In the right-center we had incumbent President Jimmy Carter, derided as a man of peace, el wimpo.

True, his top foreign policy man was an unreconstructed Polish Cold War warrior burning to bring the Soviet Union to its knees. True, the two had launched the largest covert operation in the CIA's history — $3.5 billio ...

Updated: Thu May 31, 2012

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Brave New World, Brave New Majority for 05/25/2012

    The news is in. White births are no longer a majority in the United States. The Bureau of the Census confirms that non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 of all births in the year ending July 2011, while minorities -- including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race -- reached 50.4 percent.



    I felt lonely and went out on the porch and ho ...

Updated: Fri May 25, 2012

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Brave New World, Brave New Majority for 05/24/2012

    The news is in. White births are no longer a majority in the United States. The Bureau of the Census confirms that non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 of all births in the year ending July 2011, while minorities -- including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race -- reached 50.4 percent.

    I felt lonely and went out on the porch and ho ...

Updated: Thu May 24, 2012

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Gay Marriage and the Shackles of Matrimony for 05/18/2012

I think gay marriage is an incredibly boring subject; though, I do like to hear right-wingers say that it will bring the whole edifice of Western civilization crashing down. It's hard, these days, to find such messages of good cheer. I don't yearn for such a union, so I have no personal stake in the issue. Occasionally, my gay friends tell me they've got married. They never seem especially exub ...

Updated: Fri May 18, 2012

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Gay Marriage and the Shackles of Matrimony for 05/17/2012

I think gay marriage is an incredibly boring subject; though, I do like to hear right-wingers say that it will bring the whole edifice of Western civilization crashing down. It's hard, these days, to find such messages of good cheer. I don't yearn for such a union, so I have no personal stake in the issue. Occasionally, my gay friends tell me they've got married. They never seem especially exub ...

Updated: Thu May 17, 2012

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Police Brutality for 05/11/2012

Let's suppose that the blind Chinese dissident, Chen Guangcheng, remains spunky once he's settled in at New York University and gets some time during the summer to join an Occupy demonstration, along with his wife.

Here's what they might reasonably expect by way of treatment from the NYPD, if we are to believe — which I do — a report on new police strategies against protestor ...

Updated: Fri May 11, 2012

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It's Clear: Europeans Have Had Enough! for 05/04/2012

    Watch Europe tip left and right as voters rise in fury against the austerity menu that's been bringing them to utter ruin. In Holland, the right-wing Freedom Party leader, Geert Wilders, brought down the governing coalition on Monday bellowing his defiance for the "diktats from Brussels," and asserting, "We must be master of our own house." Labor and Christia ...

Updated: Fri May 04, 2012

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When Half a Million Americans Died and Nobody Noticed for 04/27/2012

Are American lives cheaper than those of the Chinese? It's a question raised by Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, who has just published a compelling comparison between the way the Chinese dealt with one of their drug scandals — melamine in baby formula — and how the U.S. handled the Vioxx disaster.

In September 2004, Merck, one of America's largest pharmaceut ...

Updated: Fri Apr 27, 2012

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Romney Could Turn a Tie Into a Lead for 04/20/2012

A medium-sized thunderbolt has crashed down amid the somewhat torpid early stages of the presidential campaign. A New York Times/CBS poll of registered voters, released Wednesday, shows President Obama and the assured Republican nominee Mitt Romney running neck and neck, at 46 percent each.

Only last month the same poll was showing Obama with a modest lead, as Romney slugged his way thro ...

Updated: Fri Apr 20, 2012

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Farewell Gastro-Porn: Is the Foodie Frenzy Finally Fizzling Out? for 04/13/2012

As two high-profile U.S. restaurants close and food critics take a step back, is this the end an era?

This has been a bad year for grand restaurants in the three- to four-star range, and the clang of their closing doors raises the question — is the whole gastro frenzy that stirred into life in the mid-1970s finally lurching towards closure? Goodbye Iron Chefs, sayonara, an ...

Updated: Fri Apr 13, 2012

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