Category : Alexander Cockburn

America changed as the new year stumbled across the threshold, but the big shift didn’t get much press, which is easy to understand. Can there be a deader news day than a New Year’s Eve that falls on a weekend? Besides, alive or dead, habeas corpus has never been a topic to set news editors [...]

Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama had signed into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from the [...]

Newt Gingrich, who recently admitted that his own childhood was comfortable, seems to have a problem with youth — poor youth, that is. Back in 1994, the Gingrich master plan to shrink the welfare rolls was to ship the children of the poor off to orphanages. He told a Harvard audience not so long ago [...]

When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It’s article one in every Democratic president’s playbook. Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909. He was manly; he ranched in North Dakota and explored the Amazon. He was a rabid imperialist, charging up San Juan Hill and sending the Great White Fleet round the world. And he [...]

From Manhattan, to Nashville, to St. Louis, to Portland, Ore., to Oakland, Calif., the police this week moved in to clear out the Occupy Wall Street protesters from the various downtown plazas or squares where they’d established their peaceable camps. Mayor of Oakland, Jean Quan, had earlier acknowledged a conference call between 18 mayors across [...]

As he prepares to follow Gov. Rick Perry into the oubliette of history, Herman Cain can at least console himself that as an alleged harasser of women, his was certainly a classier act than that of a man who not only got elected president in 1992, but was triumphantly re-elected in 1996 by 47.5 million [...]

Just over a year from now, Americans will be deciding whether to re-elect President Barack Obama or … probably Mitt Romney. In the latter case, this is to assume that Mitt, a Mormon and a family man, doesn’t, like one of his rivals for the Republican nomination — Herman Cain — get caught up in [...]

Remember Tilikum? Back in 2010, I likened this proud mammal — 6 tons and 22 feet long and the largest orca whale in captivity — to Spartacus. Tilikum was kidnapped by whale-slavers off Iceland at the age of two in 1983. Deliberately starved as part of his “training” in a Sealand tank in Victoria, Canada, [...]

I’ve never believed in “peak oil.” (The notion held with religious conviction by many on the left here, that world production is topping out — and will soon slide, plunging the world into economic chaos.) There’s plenty of oil, with the constraints, as always, being the cost of recovery. Witness the vast new North Dakota [...]