Despite Bart Stupak’s July letter announcing his intent to submit an amendment to health care reform further restricting American women’s reproductive rights, Village insider Ellen Malcolm waited until TODAY to sound the alarm, while list-building and fundraising on a purported petition to Harry Reid to “Stop Stupak.”

Can we defeat the Taliban in a meaningful way? If so, how?

I think Bob Bauer’s op-ed about Scooter Libby’s sentence had a few strong points, except that he was way too naive about how the Plame outing worked.

“Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s quest to change Harlem and America” is an important book. I think so not because his favorable portrait of the Harlem’s Children Zone provides the answers, but because it inspires so many questions: about the nature of urban poverty, the capacity and means by which public institutions can break cycles of systemic inequality, and how a community can transform. Tough doesn’t answer all of these questions—and some he leaves uninvestigated, such as the tension between learning and performing well on exams—but his moving account of Geoffrey Canada’s project to
change the lives of the children of Harlem should be read by anyone who wants to think critically about how poverty, culture and education intersect.

The current administration has failed to tackle the worst unemployment situation in the US since the Great Depression, with Obama often sounding like Herbert Hoover on economics.

Mother Jones magazine’s Kevin Drum doesn’t seem to understand the reason progressives are fighting hard for the public option; the fight for the public option is inseparable from the fight for better subsidies and affordability.

The 9/11 Commission’s Senior Counsel reveals that FAA and NORAD changed their records to accord with Dick Cheney’s and Paul Wolfowitz’s narrative of heroism and leadership on 9/11.

Kit Bond seems to have forgotten his Missouri roots. Instead of letting the courts ask that most Missourian of questions — Show Me — of the government and of KSM, Bond would rather try something else. Sorry, Senator, but that’s not how we do things around here.

As I type this, the schedules for tomorrow’s TV talk shows are being firmed up and finalized. You know that they’re going to be just jam-packed with neocons and Bush dead-enders lining up to tell Obama he’s a punk and a pussywillow for even considering pulling out of Afghanistan. With that in mind, let’s make [...]

Sarah Palin (former governor of Alaska, English as a second language, snowbilly grifter…that Sarah Palin) is going out on book tour next week hitting all of the big media centers like Noblesville, IN. and Roanoke, VA. and other towns with more than four stoplights. One of her stops will be in Norman OK. after her people were warned off of Lenexa Kansas because the people in Lenexa believe that women who read books are witches, so Oklahoma it is! Exciting!