Today's Stories

May 24, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Slanguage

My Mother

By DANIEL CASSIDY

My mother Doris Frances Cassidy was a “hot sketch,” full of laughter and quick on the uptake. Smart, sharp, resourceful, and the most loving mother anyone could ask for.   She talked to everyone: doormen, neighbors, waiters, salesgirls, hackeys, someone sitting next to her on a bus, a lady in line at the supermarket. She liked people.

But she could sit by herself contentedly for hours; finish a NY Times crossword puzzle; follow a 12 inning Mets game on the radio; listen to Tony Bennett CDs all day; read Maeve Binchy romance novels, “I love stories with happy endings;” and finish Pete Hamill’s book The Drinking Life in two days -- one of her favorites. My mother could entertain herself as well as she could entertain others. She was a doozer (duasóir, duaiseoir, prize-winner, someone or something remarkable)!

Mom was seventeen in late 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, the first person in our family to graduate from High School, and the only person to have a full-time job -- as a phone operator for AT&T. At 74 she was still working full time as an executive secretary and living in midtown Manhattan. She walked to work every day and retired reluctantly. “I like the money. And I like the people I work with.” 

My grandmother raised my mother through some of the worst Depression-era conditions imaginable; the kind of poverty you just want to forget. Mom almost never talked about it, but she did a few times: evictions, furniture put out on the street, at times not enough clothing to go to school. “We ate mashed potatoes for breakfast, fried potatoes for lunch, and baked potatoes for supper. That’s why I love to eat,” she’d laugh. “And it’s probably why I eat so fast.” She never left anything on her plate.   

Mom always said she never envied anyone or anything in her life, except once. She told me: “There was a little girl around my age in one of the buildings where your grandfather worked as a “super” in Brooklyn. We lived in the basement apartment.  I remember watching that little girl go to school one morning dressed up in pretty new clothes and for that moment I envied her.” But that was it. I got over it.   “Forget it. Get over it.” That was Mom’s mantra.  Let the past go. Be strong. Love one another.

Mom not only survived, she flourished. She got into Julia Richman, the premier public high school for girls in New York City. Her grandmother, “Mamie” Byrnes, who worked as a maid for an opera singer and his wife, gave her a dollar a week for the subway fare to East 67th street.   Back then the average wage was $ 17.00 a week. Mom’s grandmother was lucky if she was making half that as a housekeeper. But that dollar insured that my mother became the first person in our family to graduate from High School. It was June 1935. She was 16.

The day my mother graduated Nanny hocked her wedding ring and bought her a typewriter as a present.  My grandmother said: “You see that typewriter, Doris?  That typewriter means you’ll be the first woman in our family that won’t clean other people’s houses.” Then Mom always joked: “Instead I cleaned up after you kids!”  Whatever we needed, she was always there for us

Mom was at home on 40th Street and 2nd Avenue.  She could stand on the roof of her building at night and see her history flow down the East River -- in reverse: from the Upper East Side, where she lived with my father in the late 1960s, just before Dad died, to Murray Hill, where she spent her last thirty years. Across the river -- the old Pepsi sign still lighting up the edge of Queens – she could see Sunnyside off in the distance, where she raised her first children. Then she’d follow the river across Newtown Creek to Greenpoint, where my father’s Irish-speaking grandfather settled in the 1870s. She could even see East New York, the neighborhood of her childhood, on the edge of the horizon. Further down the river was the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where I was born in 1943, next to Irishtown, where the O’Brien family landed as Famine immigrants in the late 1840s. My grandfather, Pop, was born there in 1895.

Perhaps sometimes on that roof, 40 stories above the East River, my mother imagined she could hear the Atlantic Ocean, breaking against the jetties of Rockaway Beach, and thought of old summer times walking along the boardwalk and of Playland with its Merry-Go-Round, Fun House, the Whip, Haunted House, loop-de-loop, bumper cars, and hordes of hucksters, selling cotton candy, popcorn, caramel corn, hot dogs, French fries, and candy apples. Old Rockaway’s boardwalk was crowned each summer night by a spiral necklace of lights that lined the tracks of the giant roller coaster we called the “Sinnig Railway.”  -- I only found out years later that its real name was “Scenic Railway.”  We just mispronounced it!

Rockaway Beach was the other “Irishtown” of our family history -- where we escaped from the sweltering city summers before air conditioning --  with its life-giving ocean breezes, and bungalows for rent with cold showers and porches a five minute walk from the boardwalk There were endless crowds, laughter,  Irish music spilling out of the bars lining the boulevard, dance halls featuring live bands, courting couples, hordes of teenagers, tired sunburned parents dragging tired sunburned, freckle-faced kids along with the umbrellas, towels, sandy blankets, and empty baskets of a day at the beach. High above it all like the racket (raic ard, loud uproar, noisy fun) of raucous angels, were the joyful screams of the roller coaster riders as the cars rose and dove down the tracks next to the breakers. It was in Rockaway’s “Irishtown” in all its noisy glory, seventy years ago, where Irish-Americans forgot about the Depression for a day or two, and my mother first met my father, Daniel Patrick Cassidy, and fell in love.

When my grandmother, who we called Nanny, went into premature labor in September 1918, the women in our family delivered a tiny premature baby girl who weighed less than four pounds. Aunt Tootsie rubbed her down with cooking oil, wrapped her in a towel, and put her in the oven with the door open. (I am not kidding.) That tiny baby survived nine decades. Her first months on earth, the fall of 1918, were spent making it through the greatest influenza epidemic in history, which killed 675,000 people in the U.S. But it didn’t kill that little baby. My Mom was born a survivor.  She was a true doozer (duasóir pron. duasór, al. duaiseoir, n., a prizewinner; someone or something outstanding or remarkable)!  

Doris Frances Cassidy, 1918 – 2008; R.I.P.

Daniel Cassidy is the author of How the Irish Invented Slang: the Secret Language of the Crossroads, CounterPunch/AK Press., 2007.
In a lecture sponsored by the N.Y. Public Library, on April 19, 2008, “Twenty Books Every Irish American Should Read,” the author and critic Tom Deignan designated  How the Irish Invented Slang number #1 on the list. This column first appeared in the Irish Echo newspaper: http://www.irishecho.com/index.cfm. Dan Cassidy can be reached at DanCas1@aol.com

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