Ptristam’s NewsCloud Journal

The Obama Smear

ptristam — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:59:29 +0000

To Obama’s detractors, whose ranks grow in proportion with his popularity, Barack’s middle name, “Hussein,” is a gift, the bait that keeps snagging on just the right smears that, Obama’s race being off limits, can always attach to his Arab-sounding past. It’s guilt by ethnicity, a vague, unspoken coloring that just hangs there, like an unmovable obsidian cloud over an otherwise sunny stretch of Norman Rockwell canvass.

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End the Bush-Cheney Junta

ptristam — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 06:55:33 +0000

While he was publicly renouncing torture, Bush was secretly ordering the CIA interrogators to brutalize prisoners all they wished. Congress wants to see those secret memos justifying the policy. The question is: Why isn’t Congress asking for Bush’s head?

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Primetime Lies: How ABC News Cheers Police Brutality / Pierre Tristam [Candide’s Notebooks]

ptristam — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 07:55:03 +0000

Why is ABC News so eager to justify cop brutality and belittle public reactions to videos of police brutalizing and murdering people?

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Dave Riegel: The Problem with Merit Pay

ptristam — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 07:52:45 +0000

I could go on and on about practical and logistical difficulties associated with merit pay. But the strongest arguments against it are philosophical.

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The Audacity of Fraud: How Barack Obama Is Losing My Vote

ptristam — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:05:18 +0000

Barack Obama’s 5,000-word manifesto on “Renewing American leadership” in the current issue of Foreign Affairs comes off as Republican hawkishness in Kennedy clothing. Call it neo-conservatism with a human face.

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Maureen Dowd Unintentionally Writes Self-Parody

ptristam — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:03:03 +0000

Dowd has come to resemble a substance abuser who refuses to admit she has a problem, in her case an addiction to the intoxicating schadenfreude she seems to derive by depicting top Democratic pols as fey girly men.

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This Time, It’s War - 7/9/2007 - Broadcasting & Cable

ptristam — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:01:01 +0000

Networks should provide even more graphic coverage of what’s actually going on in Iraq and never shy away from the gruesome toll the war is taking.

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Neighborhood Bully: America’s dismal Global Image

ptristam — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:36:07 +0000

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has just released its most extensive survey of world opinion since 2002 — 45,000 people in 47 nations. The results are a dismal vote against Bush’s America. Not to mention a disturbing, contrasting confidence vote in Vladimir Putin. At least the world still loves Bruce Willis and dumb American reality shows.

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Matrimony of Rights: Gay Marriage and

ptristam — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:55:26 +0000

There’s hope for the United States yet. A bid by the bigoted right and Catholic wrongs to defeat gay marriage in Massachusetts failed. Perfect timing: the similarities between opponents of gay marriage and opponents of amnesty for undocumented immigrants are not only uncanny. They’re almost indistinguishable.

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Immigrants as America’s Undocumented Saving Grace

ptristam — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 06:28:17 +0000

There are no such things as illegal immigrants or illegal aliens. There are immigrants. Some are documented. Some are not. Both contribute. Both make this country work better than it would without them, as they always have. The difference is details. The country’s debt to immigrants, legal, undocumented or involuntary, is larger than America could ever repay.

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