Our southern border is just checkers, man; the northern border is chess,” a Border Patrol agent tells Sylvia Longmire, author of Border Insecurity: Why Big Money, Fences, and Drones Aren’t Making Us Safer. A border-state Republican congressman calls it a “Whac-A-Mole game.” But it’s no game for the poor of Mexico and Central America, […]

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  We like to think of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib as nasty aberrations from American justice, but what if they’re more or less par for the course? When I was at Gitmo a few years ago covering the trial of a 15-year-old captured on the Afghan battlefield, it came out that the kid’s interrogator had […]

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  Last Sunday, Showtime unveiled its new investigative series Years of Living Dangerously, and the public conversation on climate change in America shifted into a higher gear. The Years program is notably the most ambitious and authoritative examination of the impact of climate change ever to appear in the mainstream media. The big news about the […]

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  There’s some good news about the news business for a change. The big head wound traditional media venues like newspapers and TV suffered with the advent of Internet ads is starting to heal. The bleeding has either stopped or slowed to a less-painful trickle for most divisions of the Fourth Estate, according to the […]

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  As Barack Obama was being inaugurated, he stood on a red and green carpet. That bright accompaniment, welcoming those come to see a progressive sworn in—ostensibly to further a liberal agenda—was manufactured by a Koch brothers subsidiary, INVISTA, which had won the contract to provide carpeting for the quasi-monarchical presidential ceremony. It would be […]

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