By the time Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the Project for a New American Century’s brand was a liability. The neocon organization had promoted the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006, with both wars up and running, PNAC founder William Kristol left it to his deputy director Ellen Bork to turn off the […]

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Investigative reporter Wayne Barrett has documented so many Mitt Romney–Monsanto connections that he concludes, “If Romney is elected, this bête noire of environmentalists will have a very old friend in a very high place.” Barrett, a Nation Institute Fellow, reports in the September 13 issue of The Nation that Bain Capital helped transform Monsanto from a […]

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One month before the election, most polls have the president leading by a narrow popular-vote margin, which the Romney campaign seems incapable of closing. And Obama’s lead in high-population states provides an advantage over a challenger whose support lies in the South, Midwest, and inland West, where lower population is equated with lower electoral votes. […]

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Fifty years ago, a Johns Hopkins–educated zoologist did something that few at the time thought was possible. With the publication of one book, she started a national debate about the universally accepted use of synthetic pesticides, the irresponsibility of science, and the limits of technological promise. She also challenged the metastatic growth of the synthetic […]

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Reviewed: Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars Is More Important Than Winning Them by David Keen (Yale University Press, 312 pp., $38). Heraclitus said that war is the father of all things, and though the great Greek’s utterances are  wisdom for the ages, this one-liner is way past its sell-by date. Sure, war is undeniably the big daddy of bigger military […]

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