Category archives for: The Big Picture

Marriage’s Fiercest Defenders

by Alexander Cockburn

It took a gay Republican judge with libertarian leanings to issue from the bench, in a US District courthouse in San Francisco, one of the warmest testimonials to the married state since Erasmus. Last Wednesday Vaughan R. Walker, struck down California’s ban on gay marriage, prompting ecstatic rejoicing among a mostly gay crowd outside the [...]

A Deadly 9/11 Cover-Up

by Alexander Cockburn

A Deadly 9/11 Cover-Up

In our latest newsletter, hot off the press — What do the W.R. Grace Company, the Trade Towers, Libby Montana and asbestos have in common?

This Will be Obama’s Legacy

by Alexander Cockburn

This Will be Obama’s Legacy

Jeffrey St. Clair contributed to this story. With the impending departure from the U.S. Supreme Court of Justice John Paul Stevens at the age of 89, we lose one of the nation’s last substantive ties to Great Depression and to the effect of that disaster on the political outlook of a couple of generations. Stevens’ [...]

The Oldest Game In Washington

by Alexander Cockburn

The Oldest Game In Washington

You can see how seriously Obama is taking the hot populist temper of the American people and their eagerness to strangle every banker in the entrails of every insurance executive. In an altogether welcome departure from past presidential form in State of the Union addresses at least since 1973 (the first time I listened to [...]

A Richly Deserved Humiliation

by Alexander Cockburn

A Richly Deserved Humiliation

Republican Scott Brown takes over a seat held by the Kennedy family for over half a century and the dark cloud already hovering over Obama’s White House thickens. By any measure the energetic Brown’s emphatic defeat of Martha Coakley, believed only a month ago to be a sure thing as Ted Kennedy’s replacement, is a [...]

Bum Rap for Harry, Not for Bubba Bill

by Alexander Cockburn

Even though he’s had to perform all the usual acts of contrition, tumid with “deep regrets” and “sincere apologies” Harry Reid of Nevada is surely getting a bum rap.

Acting Responsible

by Alexander Cockburn

Acting Responsible

Look on the bright side. They finally found a WMD. Not in the desert wastes of Iraq, nor in the cellar of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Not in an Iranian nuclear facility. In Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear.

Disappointments In Samarra

by Alexander Cockburn

Disappointments In Samarra

Hazlitt got gloomily drunk for a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, accurately anticipating that decades of reaction lay ahead, now that Boney had been definitely put away, with the Holy Alliance in the saddle and the French contagion safely bottled up. Smart fellow, that Hazlitt. He should have stayed drunk for a month. Sometimes, [...]

Turning Tricks; Cashing In On Fear

by Alexander Cockburn

Turning Tricks; Cashing In On Fear

In the early 1970s the UN spearheaded the progressive notion of a new world economic order, one that would try to level the playing field between the First World and the Third. The neoliberal onslaughts gathering strength from the mid-1970s on destroyed that project. Eventually the UN, desperate to reassert some semblance of moral leadership, [...]

Not Even a Peanut

by Alexander Cockburn

Not Even a Peanut

 A friend down the coast here in California called Wednesday to say that her mother, 95, had fallen, cracked her ribs, got a cough and told her daughters, “That’s it. I’m checking out.” She’s given up eating. I remembered all the arguments I’d had down the years with the old lady — a perennial optimist [...]

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