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Missouri’s Troy Davis

Missouri’s Troy Davis

People who had never heard of Davis or had never thought much about the death penalty suddenly confronted Georgia’s senseless act of brutality. They asked themselves: how could the state kill someone in the face of so much doubt about his guilt?

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Newspaper Nostalgia

Newspaper Nostalgia

It’s been a little more than 50 years since I first walked into the Des Moines Register newsroom to begin a career in journalism. It was a beat-up scruffy place filled with beat-up scruffy people, almost all men. They worked in a big room lined with gray steel desks piled high with newspapers, stacks of books, notebooks, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs. They wrote on manual, black typewriters. The phones, also black, had rotary dials.

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The GOP Loves the Federal Spending it Hates

The GOP Loves the Federal Spending it Hates

In 2009, even as the Kentucky senator was loudly deriding Obama’s original stimulus program, he was quietly urging Obama’s energy secretary to give a quarter-billion-dollar loan guarantee to Zap Motors for a clean-energy plant it wanted to build in McConnell’s state.

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Veterans, the Human Rubble of Our Wars

Veterans, the Human Rubble of Our Wars

Not long ago President Barack Obama, with great fanfare, presented a Congressional Medal of Honor to Dakota Meyer, a living hero. Presidents don’t often get to do that. Normally the recipients are dead. This one appeared to be a 100 percent all-American boy, and no doubt this set off a new surge of patriotic young men zipping to their recruiters.

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Mitt Romney Believes in Corporate America

Mitt Romney Believes in Corporate America

At an Iowa campaign stop in August, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a startling assertion. Asked about his refusal to raise taxes on corporations while millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, he replied, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

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