Three-fourths of the way into Ralph Nader’s new book, The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future, Nader addresses the runaway militarism that is becoming an existential threat to American democracy. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and […]

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University of Texas president William Powers stood before a dozen TV cameras outside the Supreme Court Building, discussing the affirmative-action case that had just been argued before the justices, when a slight man approached from the right and said: “The plaintiff is here. Please, let the plaintiff speak.” The plaintiff was Abigail Fisher, a 22-year-old […]

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As CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee in 1999, Mitt Romney promised a cheaper, “zinc plated” Olympics. Yet the 2002 Winter Games received twice the federal funding as the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, according to a GAO audit requested by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ): “[A]bout $75 million was […]

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Event concession holders and colleagues who cashed in on the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics are repaying former Olympics CEO Mitt Romney. Fraser Bullock—the Bain Capital colleague Romney hired as the Salt Lake Organizing Committee’s (SLOC) chief operating officer—and his family have provided Romney $210,275 in political contributions. Bullock also “bundled” an additional $568,897 from […]

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Reviewed: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War by Edmund Wilson (Norton, 848 pp., $37.95). Fifty years after its publication, it’s still easy to understand why Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore got people all hot and bothered. Wilson devoted about 800 pages to “the literature of the American Civil War,” and at first blush, it […]

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