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This article focuses on a case of a criminal Lori Berenson. During the nearly five years of her incarceration, much has been written in the United States about Lori Berenson, on how the daughter of liberal, academic parents turned a youthful concern for social justice into a committed passion. Although there have been some reports focusing on Berenson's work with leftist organizations in Central America, little is known about the circumstances of her arrest in Peru. But mention the name Lori Berenson to Peruvians, and the face most of them see in their minds is the one that appeared on their television sets on January 8, 1996, when she was presented to the press by the police, making her first public statement since her arrest.

The article looks at a tax provision which will require the United States government to pay up to $8 billion to the nation's ten largest paper companies. The author points out the this money will come from a transportation bill intended to reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Ironically, paper mills have decided to add unnecessary diesel fuel to their paper in order to qualify for the tax credit.

The article offers commentary on the small mill town of Berlin, New Hampshire that suffered an economic setback when its sole manufacturer, the local paper mill, was decimated. A similar mill in a nearby town, the Wausau paper mill, was shut down, and U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards came there to aid the laid-off mill workers. This act of concern proves that Edward's populist politics set the domestic economic agenda for the 2008 U.S. presidential race.

The article reports on a loophole in a U.S. law that allows the paper industry to receive a tax credit meant to encourage environmentally sound behavior, even as it continues to burn polluting fossil fuels. The defect in the legislation was revealed in this magazine in April 2009. Efforts to correct the matter are discussed, as is opposition to ending the credit mounted by senators Olympia Snowe and Blanche Lincoln, who represent states where the paper industry prominent.

The article discusses the crisis relate to U.S. newspapers in 2016. Topics covered include the slow death of newspapers in the country due to the launch of online resources such as social networking sites. Also mentioned is the impact of the launch of advertising sites such as Craigslist on the demise of U.S. newspapers.

In this article the author comments on the decline in the financial fortunes of U.S. newspapers. He does not agree with pundits who declare that newspapers are essential to the conduct of political life in the United States and that such publications should be considered moral arbiters and forces for good. He asserts that newspaper publishers are more interested in profit than in covering local news or in investigative reporting.

This article discusses how the Internet is usurping the dominance of government controlled media and propaganda in the U.S. and other first world nations. For example, the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) is concerned about misinformed bloggers. However, the article focuses on how mainstream media still seems to be controlled by government, focusing primarily on questions surrounding politician John Edwards' potential adultery and the media's reluctance to pursue the topic.

Any day now the powers at newspapers The New York Times and Washington Post will have to decide whether they will print the full 35,000, word text of the document sent to them in late June by the terrorist, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is calling the Unabomber. In the letter that accompanied the text, he gave each paper three months to publish his screed, upon which he promises to desist from terrorism, but he warned that if they refused he would start building his next bomb. Naturally the decision has been somewhat complicated for the two papers, since they don't want to seem to give in to terrorist demands and don't particularly like giving such publicity to the Unabomber's decidedly anti-establishmentarian opinions.

On November 17, 1994, the Council on Economic Priorities announced the "winners" of its annual search for the most toxic corporations in the United States. Through its Campaign for Cleaner Corporations, known as C3, C.EPP. has set up a dialogue with the country's largest polluters. The goal of C3 is, through unfavorable publicity generated by the list, to compel the filthiest companies in the filthiest industries to improve their environmental and worker safety records. The companies named on the 1994 list of environmental scofflaws are Exxon, International Paper, MAXXAM, Southern Company, Texaco, Union Carbide, Westinghouse and Westvacy. Exxon, International Paper and Texaco. INSET: Toxic corporations.

The article points out that U.S. presidential candidate John McCain has during his U.S. Senate career withheld information about prisoners-of-war (POWs) left in Vietnam. By sponsoring legislation that makes information about POWs classified information, McCain has helped bury the stories of Vietnam war prisoners who never returned. Deposition papers from North Vietnamese General Tran Van Quang stated that Hanoi, Vietnam held 1,205 U.S. prisoners as leverage to insure war reparations.

The author describes how "The New York Review of Books" has become increasingly politicized since the election of President George W. Bush. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the "Review" became a formidable--and, in some sense, unique--journalistic institution. Many of its readers reside in academia, but the paper has a devoted following in the upper reaches of media, politics and philanthropy, which gives it an influence vastly out of proportion to its circulation of 130,000. The publication has always been erudite and authoritative--and because of its analytical rigor and seriousness, frequently essential--but it hasn't always been lively, pungent and readable. But the election of George W. Bush, combined with the furies of 9/11, jolted the editors. Since 2001, the "Review's" temperature has risen and its political outlook has sharpened. In stark contrast to "The New Yorker" or "The New York Times Magazine," the "Review" opposed the Iraq war in a voice that was remarkably consistent and unified. What blew the dust off "The New York Review?" As war drew closer, and the press grew more accommodating and deferential, the "Review's" disgust increased, and the editors fired their heavy weaponry. The fall of Baghdad only deepened the fury of the "Review's" contributors. Judt is not the "Review's" only critical voice on Israel. What accounts for the "Review's" post-9/11 revival? One word that continually tumbles from the lips of seasoned "Review"-watchers is "Vietnam." In the case of Iraq, as with Vietnam, the "Review" saw what many other commentators missed or ignored.

In the dusty border town of Rio Bravo, just across the Rio Grande from Pharr, Texas, the Duro Bag factory chums out the chichi paper bags sold for a buck at suburban shopping malls throughout the United States. The sección-part of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, a pillar of support for the country's ruling bureaucracy since the 1930s--has a contract with the company, a protection agreement in which government-affiliated union leaders are paid to guarantee labor peace. Solidarity has captured the imagination of labor's activist core. It is still very difficult for border workers and their allies to muster sufficient economic pressure in the United States to force major corporations to respect workers' rights, much less change U.S. and Mexican government policies, which deepen poverty and lend the companies political cover.

This article focuses on the article "Modern Morality," published in June 18, 1997 issue of the journal "The New York Times." June 18 was the day that the world's most important publication, took an advertisement in The New York Times, the paper that prints only the news that will fit its not-dissimilar mindset. The advertisement reprinted a the world's most important publication editorial titled "Modem Morality;' a subject should have thought alien to the core passions of either paper. But then for Americans morality has nothing at all to do with ethics or right action or who is stealing what money-and liberties-from whom.

In 1943, with the war against Japan intensifying in the Pacific, Dr. L.F. Fisser of the National Defense Research Committee designed a tiny incendiary bomb for the use of the U.S. Army Air Force. The two-ounce bomb was to be dropped on Japan affixed to free-tailed bats, of which there happened to be an ample supply in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. The bat bombs were to be chilled to hibernating temperature in ice-cube trays, packed 180 to a box and sprung free at a thousand feet above the ground, where they would thaw and, in great hunger, swoop down on the wood and paper homes of Tokyo. Something may be insane, but it is only crackpot when it doesn't work. Another plan to bring the total warfare concept to the Japanese capital was conceived by General Curtis LeMay.

A concerted campaign afoot came at the Socialist Scholars Conference a year ago, where the author appeared on a panel with Murray Bookchin, the author and co-founder of the Institute for Social Ecology, to discuss "The Politics of Ecology." Bookchin gave one of his elegant, impassioned, learned presentations, but it had a harsh edge to it of sourness and rancors directed against those who might hold to any of the tenets of deep ecology, particularly the ideas embraced in the term "biocentrism." Deep ecology, it seemed, was a part of the broad ecological movement in the U.S. that was wrongheaded and dangerous, diverting attention from the serious tasks of eliminating capitalism and restructuring class society, and was in some way a threat to the reasonable, right-minded form of social ecology. Next came a broadside presented by Bookchin to the national Green gathering in Amherst, Massachusetts, last July, a paper starkly and forthrightly called "Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology."

The article focuses on the book "Hammer," by Armand Hammer and Neil Lyndon. Hammer has been writing and rewriting his life for at least a half-century; this is his second autobiography and the fourth official account of his life. A more telling alteration of the historical record concerns Hammer's first and only meeting with Lenin, in October 1921. Hammer has always suggested, whether indirectly or by omission, that he met Lenin alone, but Lenin's papers show that he was accompanied by Boris Reinstein, an influential Russian friend of his father's who knew Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and who was, in 1921, a Comintern official in charge of relations with the United States.

In the storm of recriminations in Egypt that followed the politician Achille Lauro fiasco, the provocative leftist weekly "Al Ahaly," asked a pertinent question: "Will the crime of hijacking the Egyptian plane be the calamity that puts us back on the right track, which we have forsaken for the last 15 years?" By that the paper meant, will Egypt at last acknowledge the folly of maintaining close ties with the United States and take a more independent approach to resolving the Arab-Israeli dispute and reviving the economy? A break with the United States by the most powerful Arab state, the only tone to have signed a peace treaty with Israel would have almost as profound an impact on the region as the Iranian revolution had. Officially the Egyptians say no change is in the offing. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is trying to undo whatever damage his hot words about "piracy" might have caused him in Washington following the U.S. interception of the Egyptian airliner carrying the Achille Lauro hijackers.

The article lauds the June 2012 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Arizona v. United States, which found most of the provisions of Arizona's 2010 immigration enforcement law to be unconstitutional. It says that the decision was predictable, given that both liberal and conservative justices have expressed the view that immigration law is a federal matter, not a state matter. It discusses the part of the law which the Court did not find to be unconstitutional, the so-called "show me your papers" provision, and says the decision leaves open the possibility that this provision may be struck down in future litigation.

The article focuses on Surrealism of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Surrealism was essentially a literary movement, whose primary products were books, magazines, poems, letters and manifestoes. The legendary Surrealist exhibitions of the late 1930s and early 1940s were Surrealist in spirit and secondarily Surrealist in content. In 1942, for example, an exhibition called "The First Papers of Surrealism" was installed at the Whitelaw Reid mansion on Madison Avenue in New York, and those that attended it were far more likely to remember the show itself than any of the works on display.

The late politician Murray Kempton once noted that although the newspaper "New York Times," likes to pose as being above the battle, this position has never stopped the newspaper, once the battle's fought, from sneaking onto the field and shooting the wounded. The article tells how little interest the people seem to have in the unconstitutional usurpation of a presidential election by a rogue Supreme Court majority. It is also striking how little moved they are by the rights Americans are so rapidly losing in the never-to-be-won war against never-to-be-defined "terrorism." The current confusions of the newspaper are not so much that paper's usual problems with honest reporting but what looks to be a perfect indifference to the welfare of this Republic, as opposed to corporate cheerleading for the new homeland that November 2000, not September 2001, made possible. Meanwhile, U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney, in his "undisclosed" bunker, is no doubt wondering whether or not to postpone the certain-to-be-divisive presidential election of 2004.

This article presents information regarding the execution of Timothy McVeigh in Terre Haute, Indiana, who doused a building at 220 N. 21st Street with gasoline and set it aflame in a dispute with residents of a first-floor apartment. For years, social scientists have tried to measure the effects of executions on states and cities that perform them, usually looking for a corresponding decline in homicides, but for years it has been impossible to prove any deterrent effect. In 1975, criminologist William Bowers presented the first of a series of papers that diverged radically from the claims of deterrence.

He's not the quickest calf in the pasture, so it took U.S. President George W. Bush, and his White House handlers, a few months to grasp a basic rule of modem American electoral politics: Don't look bad on the environment. After thirty-one years of Earth Days, the environment has become a mom-and-apple-pie issue; 68 percent of Americans say they support the goals of the green movement. Thus it was no surprise to see Bush's poll numbers sliding, even among Republicans, as his Administration abandoned lower limits on arsenic in drinking water, the Kyoto Protocols on climate change and a host of other urgent measures. Bush has a problem. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to release a major study of dioxin's health effects that, if uncensored, will surely increase pressure for dioxin's rapid phase-out. Meanwhile, the chemical, paper and other dioxin-related industries are pressing the U.S. Government to block the study's release. If Bush heeds their call, he shields industry from costly new regulations but reinforces his anti-green reputation.

In this article, the author focuses on the Center for Constitutional Rights (C.C.R.) The C.C.R.'s suits are stirring gestures of legal aikido, using U.S. law as a weapon against U.S. foreign policy. But wielding U.S. legal power over officials of other nations is at best an ambiguous and imperial solution to crimes that at once embody and transcend national interests. Torturers and death squads carry out their crimes under a triple shield of immunity. They are protected against the paper laws of their own countries; they enjoy the patronage of large corporations and powers, principally but not exclusively the U.S. government.

The article presents sociopolitical conditions of the U.S., as of May 17, 1993. If the U.S. were in the business of handing out good-citizen awards, they would announce some winners. The people whom the U.S. government would commend are not the usual do-gooders. They are called Exemplary Disobedient Citizens. The first set of honorees would be two New York City federal judges, Jack Weinstein and Whitman Knapp, both eminent and venerable jurists of untarnished probity. Changes in the political micro-climate usually are not worth the graph paper they are plotted on, but the recent rise of the Congressional Republicans has stirred suspicions that the U.S. government during the period of President Bill Clinton is already dead in the water.

In New York, armies of furious journalists clash by night with treacherous and greedy publishers. Editors and columnists scurry between sinking scows, and readers are barraged by scandal and smut. Headlines called parking lot king turned publisher Abe Hirschfeld this nut and taunt co-owner and editor Wilbert Tatum as ready for slime time. New York is a radically diverse city, but the new non-European, unhomogenized majority is excluded from the media mainstream. The Hirschfeld Tatum idea of a multicultural paper is pretty good-minus Hirschfeld and Tatum, of course, who indeed may be gone by the time this is read.

This article presents information on various socio-political issues in the U.S. This week the journal questions that delegates to the Democratic National Convention will likely not hear raised amid the din of Madison Square Garden. If their conclave follows the standard TV script, it will offer more promises than substance. So the journal have put together some articles on the political situation. This week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Pennsylvania abortion case, managed to uphold Roe v. Wade on paper while eviscerating it in practice. True, the Court struck down the galling husband-notification requirement. But it upheld four other provisions, a twenty-four-hour waiting period, a mandatory antiabortion lecture from a doctor, parental consent for minors and detailed record-keeping requirements.

The article discusses the unfulfillment of peace accords made by the government of California. Thousands of people-workers and political activists of California demanded for government compliance with the January 1992 peace accords. The very signing of peace accords reflected one basic reality that the civil war that broke out in 1979-80 had become un-winnable by either side. Even while mounting a strong military challenge during 1980s, the National Liberation Party (Al Salvador) began a difficult, often wrenching process of adapting to new circumstances. In months since the signing of accords, wide gaps have opened between the vision on paper and the enforcement in practice. Clearly, full implementation will require intensive domestic and international pressure.

The $21 million Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, which opened on 20 July, takes visitors on a trip down memory lane. The effort made here to reshape popular memory is sweeping, relentless, and sophisticated. Calling this a "library" is misleading; the place has no books or documents. Officials promise to open a basement archive in 1991 that will contain primarily pre- and postpresidential papers. If the library is weak on archives, it is strong on video, visitors get to see former U.S. President Richard Nixon's 1952 "Checkers" speech, in which the vice-presidential candidate labored to exonerate himself of charges of corruption with maudlin references to his dog Checkers.

As editor and publisher of the world's most famous newsletter, I.F. Stone's "Weekly," as a reporter and columnist for PM and its successor papers, as Washington editor of "The Nation," as a frequent contributor to "The New York Review of Books," Izzy was a quadruple threat. He combined the meat and potatoes moxie of a police reporter, the instinct for precision of a scholar, the question phrasing skill of a Socrates never better manifested than in his 1988 best seller, "The Trial of Socrates," and the political philosophy of an anarchist if he was to be believed when he wrote that "every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." Actually, he confided to an international gathering of investigative journalists in Amsterdam a couple of years ago.

The article presents information on the Canadian labor unions. Compared with its American counterpart, the Canadian labor movement has been remarkably successful. In 1965, both movements represented 30 percent of the nonagricultural work force in their respective countries. Canadian unions now represent 38 percent of the nonagricultural work force, while only 17 percent of Americans who are not farm workers belong to unions. During the 1970s and 1980s Canadian telecommunications, energy, chemical, paper and forestry workers all split from their American parents to create their own organizations.

The article discusses the impact that labor union membership has on wealth distribution in the U.S. from 1940 through 1980, referencing the paper "Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence From Survey Data,” by Henry Farber, Dan Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu. The relationship between higher numbers of union membership and the reduction of economic inequality is discussed.

The article presents information on various developments relating to the U.S. politics and government. The State Department has sent White Papers to the newspaper The New York Times announcing plans to exterminate peasants in Latin America and elsewhere. Untroubled by the thought that it may be encouraging murderers, The Times has routinely published these White Papers, and the U.S. government has promptly pressed forward with the promised exterminations. Soon logging trucks will be rumbling through the ancient forests and the worn hillsides of public lands will see more overgrazing. These defeats came in the budget rescission bill, which U.S. President Bill Clinton has pledged to sign.

The article presents information on a Supreme Court case between "The Detroit News" and the "Detroit Free Press." The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on a proposed joint-operating agreement between The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. At stake, along with billions of dollars in monopoly profits for the nation's two largest newspaper chains, is the fate of the dwindling daily newspaper competition in U.S. cities. The Court will be taking its first look at the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 and quite possibly its last. The act lets two papers in the same city merge their business sides into a joint-operating agreement, with news functions remaining theoretically separate, if one paper is "failing."

The author looks at the case of former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contract employee Edward Snowden, who leaked information about the agency's mass electronic surveillance program, as of 2014. The author calls for amnesty for Snowden. Topics include other whistleblowers in U.S. history such as Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers concerning the Vietnam War, and the record of U.S. President Barack Obama in issuing pardons.

The article discusses the "Washington Post" newspaper, focusing on the fact that a majority of the paper's revenue comes from its Kaplan Higher Education subsidiary. This is portrayed as a questionable arrangement in terms of business ethics, as Kaplan's business model depends on the U.S. federal student loan program, and the paper publishes editorials regarding that program.

The article reports that in January 2009, U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney will attempt to leave office with the personal records from his tenure, unless a lawsuit filed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on September 8, 2008 prevents him. According to a 1978 law, U.S. presidents and vice-presidents must deposit their papers with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The author raises questions about why some the "New York Times" fired a stringer named Jay Blotcher because he'd been a member of the anti-AIDS advocacy group ACT UP nearly fourteen years ago. The "Times" is making its case not on Blotcher's membership in ACT UP, which really would be McCarthyism, but on his role as a "public spokesperson for an advocacy organization." But Blotcher and his supporters point out that many "Times" staffers have relationships that could "confuse" readers. Dr. Lawrence K. Altman has many such professional associations with various medical establishments, public and private. Bernard Weinraub covers Hollywood for the paper, while his wife is a head honcho at Sony Pictures. These cases do not involve the "appearance" of conflict-of-interest but its essence. [T]he belief of some that Blotcher was singled out not for being gay but for being in ACT UP and Queer Nation continues to divide the paper internally. Even if one accepts the paper's argument that its only crime is a kind of post-Blair hyper-fastidiousness about appearances at the expense of fairness to one of its stringers, the story cannot be allowed to die there.

The article uses facetious language and political satire to discuss the scandal surrounding New York Representative Anthony Weiner, wherein he used the social microblogging website Twitter to post a picture of his penis concealed by briefs. The author discusses the penis as an iconic element in U.S. popular culture and particularly critiques the behavior of political commentator Andrew Breitbart. Sex scandals are compared to politics, and the paper examines what criteria dictate whether a sexual act is seen as one of perversion. Prior sex scandals of U.S. politicians are discussed, including those of Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

The article discusses a paper produced by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions which suggests that having a greater number of women legislators in the U.S. Congress results in a higher amount of women's rights and female-friendly legislation being proposed as of 2016.

The article discusses the paper "When Should Public Debt Be Reduced?" by Jonathan Ostry, Atish Ghosh, and Raphael Espinoza of the multinational organization International Monetary Fund (IMF) in relation to U.S. public debt. Topics include the impact of the Great Recession on U.S. public debt, Kenynesian aspects of government spending and taxation, and the relation of economic growth to paying down public debt.

Offers a look at U.S. President George W. Bush's judicial nominee for the Supreme Court, John Roberts, and his views on civil rights, civil liberties and social justice. Difficulty of predicting the performance of a Supreme Court nominee; Claim that Roberts was involved in an ethics scandal because he was interviewed for the nomination while hearing a Bush administration appeal; Question of how Roberts would handle cases that conflict with his private religious views; Report that Roberts has promoted the doctrine that Congress could strip federal courts of their enforcement power in civil rights and abortion cases; Demands of Democrats for release of Roberts's Solicitor General papers.

The article focuses on the political activism of the Green Party in the United States. Many of us in the Green Party made a tremendous compromise by campaigning in swing states for such a miserable standard-bearer for the progressive movement as presidential candidate John Kerry. I plan to work with the Greens to get more Green candidates elected to local office. Regardless of our party preferences, Democrats and Greens must build strategic alliances on two key issues of our day: electoral reform and ending the occupation of Iraq. Let us jointly promote a Voters' Bill of Rights that includes standardized voting machines with paper trails, nonpartisan administration of elections, instant-runoff voting, a national election day holiday, an end to felon disenfranchisement and others changes outlined in our ten-point Voters' Bill of Rights. Strengthening the framework of our internal democracy (count every vote, every vote counts) and fighting against empire (money for jobs, not for war) are strategies that will resonate with the vast majority of Americans and set the stage for future electoral victories.

The author comments on the U.S. news media's attacks on Judith Steinberg, the wife of presidential candidate Howard Dean. I used to think we should get rid of First Ladies. The ongoing public in-quest into Dr. Judith Steinberg makes me see, however, that we need First Ladies: Without them, American women might actually believe that they are liberated, that modern marriage is an equal partnership, that the work they are trained for and paid to do is important whether or not they are married, and that it is socially acceptable for adult women in the year 2004 to possess distinct personalities---even quirks! The attack on Dr. Judy began on the front page of the "New York Times" (you know, the ultraliberal paper) with a January 13 feature by Jodi Wilgoren, full of catty remarks about her "sensible slipper fiats and no makeup or earrings" and fatuous observations from such academic eminences as Myra Gutin, "who has taught a course on first ladies at Rider University in New Jersey for 20 years." If Judy Steinberg were a cosmetic surgeon or a diet doctor or held Botox parties after office hours, if her patients were famous, or the friends of the famous, if she could dish on the phone about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Martha Stewart, would the media cat pack think Judy Steinberg was cool? No one asks Hadassah Lieberman or Elizabeth Edwards or Gertie Clark how come they have so much free time on their hands that they can saddle up with their husbands' campaign for months, or why, if they care so much about politics, they aren't running for office themselves.

The article discusses what has gone wrong in John Kerry's campaign for the U.S. presidency. If a presidential candidate is truly the Real Deal, does he have to repeatedly pronounce himself the Real Deal? That's the dilemma confronting Senator John Forbes Kerry, who at the start of the pre-primary season was tagged the front-runner among the Democratic contenders. On paper, he looked real. He's a Vietnam War hero who protested that war. He's mostly in sync with Democratic primary voters. But Howard Dean, a nobody governor from Vermont, zoomed past him in the pre-voting indicators: money, poll results, volunteers and buzz. In the aftermath of a late-in-the-game staff shake-up, Kerry began pitching himself as the "Real Deal" candidate who could undo Bush's "raw deal," which favors "powerful interests." So when the Senate passed the Medicare bill, Kerry complained, "By caving in to the special interests, the Senate has given our seniors a raw deal." In New Hampshire, he unveiled a "Real Deal" agenda he would move to enact in the first 100 days of a Kerry presidency. The problem: Kerry is trying too hard to be "real." It's an obvious reaction to the criticism that Kerry, not known for exciting the voters, has yet to present an inspiring message or persona to fire up grassroots Democrats. In some respects, Kerry has been running a campaign more suitable for re-electing an incumbent senator: Look at my résumé, look at my record, look at my advisers.

The author explains why he appreciates the subversive wit of the "Boondocks" comic strip. I can't remember what those kids were doing in the first Boondocks comic I saw, but I do remember exactly what passed through my mind when I read it: "How the hell did this get into a daily newspaper?" I stopped reading the comics page a long time ago. It seems that whoever is in charge of what to put on that page is given an edict that states: "For God's sake, try to be as bland as possible and by no means offend anyone!" It's odd considering all the black ink that goes into making up the comics section (and color on Sundays) that you rarely see any black faces on that page. Of course, the real funnies are on the front pages of most papers these days. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper. You see, in America these days, we aren't supposed to talk about race. We have been told to pretend that things have gotten better, that the old days of segregation and cross-burnings are long gone, and that no one needs to talk about race again because, hey, we fixed that problem. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Except for the occasional op-ed, where is the discussion of any of this in our daily newspapers? Fortunately, and hilariously, it is on the comics page in the form of Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks. The strip has crossed over into the vast American mainstream, proving once again that the best art finds its way to all people regardless of their background.

This article presents information regarding the presents of Mike Miller of Mike Miller Toyota, a major advertiser in the "Los Angeles Times", and Bob Zacky of the Zacky Farms chicken dynasty. Zacky of the Zacky Farms chicken dynasty. Many interpreted their presence in the Times's box as a form of corporate apology for the paper's aggressive reporting, which had allegedly upset both men recently. But even today, the Times remains a house of many mansions. Steve Wasserman runs a remarkably literate weekly book review section, for example, whose uncompromising ethos would seem to contradict everything that is said about the paper. It is a paper, in other words, with a lot of decline left in it, even though the Willes/Downing forces appear almost certain to prevail in the end.

The new school year brings new censorship threats for student journalists heading back to campus. In an August ruling that's likely to affect the entire system of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, a federal appeals court ruled in Southworth v. Grebe, that officials at the Madison campus could not use any student's mandatory activities fees to fund campus groups whose political activities the student opposes. Related challenges have been made involving public universities in California and Oregon. The Madison ruling can be traced back to a case at the University of Minnesota almost twenty years ago. Just over one-third of the papers in the Associated Collegiate Press network rely on student fees to operate. The Student Press Law Center has identified censorship through funding as one of the top ten obstacles facing college journalists. The Madison ruling also plays into the fastest-growing form of censorship in recent years-newspaper theft. Students across the country have stolen papers to protest a political viewpoint, and recently an administrator used the same tactic.

Mark Willes, the former cereal executive and new chief of the Times Mirror Company, rode into town with a death warrant for New York's unique paper, New York Newsday, we almost yearned for the days of another Californian, Citizen Kane. Wiles killed his paper because even though it was headed past the break-even point it would never earn "an appropriate rate of return."

U.S. President George Bush has embarrassed the pardoning power; and thereby he may have done very well for himself. Bush's pardon of six officials involved in the Iran/contra scandal refreshed images of Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon after Watergate in 1974. Bush shamelessly invoked the authority of other precedents. For that enterprise, Casper Weinberger's papers provide crucial evidence. Although the pardon is irrevocable, Bill Clinton could help prevent further mischief by former Presidents by nullifying Reagan's Executive Order 12667, which grants former Presidents the right to impose executive privilege over their papers.

The article criticizes Francis Fukuyama's paper "The End of History?" The paper has not even a word on the economy of war for one thing, or on the national security state. It may be true that millions of people across the globe now yearn for the standard of living enjoyed by the American middle class, but the very existence of this standard, which is flaunted with the same lack of consideration as Fukuyama brings to the study of history, is creating a historic crisis of expectations. Making much of a "victory" in the cold war, which is to say that any fool can declare an end to a conflict the scope of which he vastly exaggerated in the first place, Fukuyama addresses a feverish ode to the joys of the free market.