Reviewed: The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics by Thomas Byrne Edsall (Anchor Books, 272 pp., $15.95). The New Year’s Day bill that Congress finally passed to avert the “fiscal cliff” prevented a rise in income taxes for most American families, and put off drastic cuts in the federal budget for two months. […]

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Immediately after Barack Hussein Obama won a second national election, there were murmurs on the right about adapting to new political realities. The blustery coalition of conservative Christians, emissaries from the Old South, and the Chamber of Commerce that has blocked progressive change since the end of the last century now confronts its endgame. Yet […]

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1. Amnesty International Amnesty International is engaged in a campaign to pressure President Obama to close the U.S. prison at Guantánamo. 2. National Religious Campaign Against Torture NRCAT is lobbying the White House and Congress to create an independent commission of inquiry on torture. 3. Open Society Justice Initiative The Justice Initiative has sued Romania […]

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In late February, the United States Supreme Court will review Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The decision by these nine justices could uphold generations of voting rights protections, or, adversely, this Court—by modifying or rejecting Section 5—could allow many of the racially discriminatory voting practices blocked in 2012 to re-emerge. While we were […]

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Almost a decade after he was kidnapped and forcibly disappeared by Macedonian officials acting at the behest of the CIA, Khaled El-Masri has finally secured a measure of redress. After years of denial in Skopje (capital of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), stonewalling in Berlin and silence in Washington, the European Court of Human […]

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