Robert Penn Warren in True Life: The Politician, by Andrew Young

by Daniel N. White
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
December 22, 2010

Image by marlana via Flickr

There’s two good ways of looking at Andrew Young’s new book on John Edwards. First way is that it is a National Enquirer sort of trashy cashin dishing out all the inside dirt on John Edwards and his sex life, mostly at the expense of his saintly cancer infected and now dead wife Elizabeth. All that is there, sure. I suspect that most of the reviewing press looks at this book this way, and that academia, if they pay it any attention, will as well. The other way of looking at it is that the book is Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men in real life form, a political right-hand man’s story of his life in politics with a talented and charismatic and powerful politician, from his rise to his fall. That’s how I see it, and I see a great deal of value to this book because of that. Whatever the tabloid aspects are to this story, it is a most valuable truthful account of the inside of American politics and of the people in it. It also is a cautionary tale for us all, but not in the usual sense of “This could happen to you–beware!” of most cautionary tales. It has a more disturbing one than that, I’m afraid.

More Evidence of Medical Experimentation at Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
22 December, 2010

In an investigative report for Truthout, my colleagues Jason Leopold and the psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye have followed up on an important story they published three weeks ago, “Controversial Drug Given to All Guantánamo Detainees Akin to ‘Pharmacologic Waterboarding’” (which I cross-posted here, with commentary). In that article, they revealed how, in the months following the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, 2002, every single prisoner was forced to “take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called ‘pharmacologic waterboarding.’”

World’s Largest Environmental Lawsuit in Ecuador

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

Image by Rainforest Action Network via Flickr

TheRealNews | December 21, 2010

30,000 natives fight for compensation against Texaco (now Chevron), accused of 3 decades of toxic dumping in Amazon

Terrorist by Association by Jeremy Gantz

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

By Jeremy Gantz
In These Times
December 13, 2010

September 24 began like any other Friday for Joe Iosbaker and Stephanie Weiner. Then, at 7 a.m., FBI agents knocked on the door of the Chicago couple’s house in the city’s North Side.

Armed with a search warrant, more than 20 agents examined the couple’s home, photographing every room and combing through notebooks, family videos and books, even their children’s drawings. Some items were connected to their decades of anti-war and international solidarity activism, but others were not. “Folders were opened, letters were pulled out of envelopes,” says Weiner, an adult education professor at Wilbur Wright College. “They had rubber gloves and they went through every aspect of our home.” (See video interview with Weiner and Iosbaker below.)

Toby Hemenway: How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

nicholasschoolatduke | September 22, 2010

Hemenway is a frequent teacher, consultant and lecturer on permaculture and ecological design throughout the U.S. and other countries. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Natural Home, Whole Earth Review and American Gardener. He is an adjunct professor in the School of Graduate Education at Portland State University, a Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University, and a biologist consultant for the Biomimicry Guild.