Those who want to see a people’s democracy, let them come here and see this,” Fidel Castro told the UN General Assembly in 1960, after his Marxist insurgency overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s government in Cuba. The United States had long made forcefully clear that it preferred dictatorial banana republics (Nicaragua), coffee republics (Guatemala), or, in […]

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photo: Haaretz “There is the question of how to respond practically to Putin’s aggression and there is the question of how to respond intellectually,” writes Leon Wieseltier, of The New Republic, in his most recent column. “The latter is no less important than the former, because the Ukrainian crisis is not a transient event but […]

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The football game part of the Super Bowl was a non-event, but there was serious controversy over one of the commercials: Actress Scarlett Johansson was appearing in an ad for SodaStream, a maker of carbonated beverage dispensers whose main factory is in the West Bank, Palestinian territory that has been occupied by Israel since 1967. […]

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  It didn’t take much. Just the power of the presidency, the State of the Union, and the whole country watching. Plus the president’s will. And AIPAC’s entire campaign to destroy America’s chance to reach an agreement with Iran crumbled. Within hours, three senators announced they were no longer co-sponsoring AIPAC’s bill to kill the […]

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There can be little doubt that Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 nomination for president because she voted to authorize the Iraq War. If she had opposed it, there would have been no rationale for the Obama candidacy. It is likely that she, not President Obama, would now be in the White House. It seems crazy. […]

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