Here's some blowback anyone could have seen coming from 10,000 miles away–or however far Iraq and Georgia are from the USA: those crazy LRAD sound-beam weapons which were used to devastating effect by Georgia's authoritarian leader to crush massive pro-democracy demonstrati …

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Former president Jimmy Carter caused a stir when he suggested that opposition to health care reform reflected negative racial attitudes.

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We think that what happened in Venezuela since 1999 has been an unhappy mix of big-mouthed leadership and state capitalism, based on the plentiful oil income.

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CARACAS, Venezuela -- Tens of thousands marched through Venezuela's capital on Saturday to protest what they call growing authoritarianism by President Hugo Chávez. Anti-Chávez protesters, many of them wearing white, filled the streets of Caracas, denouncing recent arrests of  …

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The war on Iraq has so monopolized public attention as to obscure the regime change taking place in the Homeland.

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This situation actually has far broader implications about all citizens' relationship to the police and the way we are expected to respond to authority, regardless of race.

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Although the goals of Socialism are noble, in practice it cannot achieve those goals.

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Yale social psychologist Stanley Milgram defined obedience as the "the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purposes," and called it "the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority." A decade before Milgram produced his findings, whic …

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Got up this morning and shoveled 4 inches of Global Warming off my driveway.

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With 1,500 people crammed into London's Institute of Education, and many more packing venues from Birmingham to Glasgow, if nothing else the Convention showed that there are a lot of people who are very angry about the New Labour government's rose-tinted authoritarianism.

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On his first day in office, President Obama kept his most important campaign promise and began the process of closing Guantanamo. But this eliminates only the most visible part of the U.S. torture bureaucracy.

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For two centuries since, civics books, Hollywood biopics and party convention speeches have constructed a mythology insisting that this democratic commitment to checks and balances makes our country a beacon of freedom -- the "shining city on a hill" overlooking a despotic world  …

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How do we fight the "dumbing down" of U.S. culture?

This article arose in a reply on an article thread by Rachel Maddow, Talk me down! How can the U.S. spread democracy when we're compromising our own principles?.

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During mid-December a large number of people working under temporary contracts in governmental offices lost their jobs due to orders "from above" that mandated a drastic reduction in the inflated state payroll due to the economic crisis.

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H/T: RealClearPolitics

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Council staff on the lookout for paedophiles have been ordered to stop and quiz any adults found walking in Telford Town Park without a child, it was revealed today.

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Joe Biden, speaking yesterday at a rally in Ohio (h/t Jonathan Schwarz):

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Republicans rule, rather than govern, when they are in power by imposing their authoritarian conservative philosophy on everyone.

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This month marks five years since Mikhail Khodorkovsky — once one of Russia's richest men — was seized in his private plane at the Novosibirsk airport. He was subsequently convicted of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp.

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Chucking cobblestones is nowhere near as clever as writing Me and Bobby McGee. Busted flat in Baton Rouge, heading for the trains - riding the rail cars across the immensity of America has always represented freedom.

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President Arroyo's administration might use emergency powers to clear the way for charter change and extend her term beyond 2010, a political analyst and members of the Liberal Party said Tuesday.

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A War On Terror board game designed in Cambridge has been seized by police who claim the balaclava in the set could be used in a criminal act.

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A quick war is the best propaganda: The conflict in the Caucasus has further strengthened the Putin-Medvedev leadership duo, according to new polls.

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The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

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Democrats Wrong on Energy--We Must Increase Supply and Fast

The Democrats don't want nuclear. They don't want more drilling in this country, on shore or off shore. Why?

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