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Gen. Petraeus gave his long-awaited report on “progress” in Iraq, and his recommendation came as no surprise: in the words of the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons: “Stay – just a little bit longer.” IAN WILLIAMS will comment – he’s UN correspondent for The Nation and writes the “Comment is Free” blog at Guardian Unlimited.

Plus: When people talk about black independent labels, they think of Motown first and then Chess in Chicago. But there was another Chicago label cutting its own groove in the fifties and sixties and racking up even bigger hits: Vee-Jay. CHRIS MORRIS explains – he writes for Rolling Stone, the LA Weekly, LA CityBeat, Billboard, and the Hollywood Reporter, and hosts “Watusi Rodeo” every Sunday from 9-11 a.m. on Indie 103.1 in LA. Playlist: Jimmy Reed, “Baby what you want me to do” (1959); Elmore James, “It Hurts Me Too” (1957); Gene Chandler, “Duke of Earl” (1961); Four Seasons, “Sherry” (1962). A new Vee-Jay 4-CD set is out now from Shout! Factory.

Also: UC Irvine fired its new law school dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, a week after offering him the job — on the grounds that he was too liberal. Chancellor Michael Drake made the decision. Conservative legal scholars are joining the chorus of outrage. LA Times legal correspondent HENRY WEINSTEIN will report — his story is online at LATimes.com.

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President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq’s Al-Anbar Province on Monday, part of his drive to persuade Americans we should stay in Iraq because “progress” is being made. JUAN COLE says “The ‘good news’ appears (I swear to God) to be that you can “walk” in Iraq. The 8 billion people in the world walk every day, in most of the world’s locales. Only, if you are American in Fallujah you might need a company of Marines with you so that you can . . . walk. Is al-Anbar Province really paradise, as Bush suggested?” Juan writes the indispensible Iraq war blog “Informed Comment” – his new book is Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.

Also: Update on the Republicans – with HAROLD MEYERSON. He says Bush and Cheney deserve to be impeached – but impeaching them will make it harder to end the US war in Iraq and win universal health care. Harold wrote “The Trouble with Impeachment” for The American Prospect; he’s also an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

Plus: Award-winning Nation magazine columnist KATHA POLLITT talks about some lessons she’s learned from her own life – about her boyfriend who deceived her (her driving instructor points out her weakness–“Observation, Katha, observation!”) and the noble final days of her leftist study group.
The stories are told in her new book LEARNING TO DRIVE: AND OTHER LIFE STORIES—it’s “painfully hilarious to read,” the Boston Globe said. “Pollitt’s tone of incredulous fury is pitch perfect.”
Katha writes the column “Subject to Debate” for The Nation; her blog, “And Another Thing,” runs at TheNation.com.

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Iraq and Vietnam – last week President Bush argued that we should stay in Iraq to avoid what he called “the tragedy of Vietnam.” The president said “one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields,.’” NYU history prof. MARILYN YOUNG will comment – she’s co-editor of the new book Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn From the Past.

Plus: ALBERTO GONZALES IS QUITTING – to spend more time spying on his family. “Domestic surveillance begins at home,” the A.G. said (according to Andy Borowitz). JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation says we still need to investigate the firings of eight US attorneys, who were “seen by the administration as insufficiently political in their investigations and prosecutions.”

Also: The Democrats’ argument about strategy for 2008: MATT BAI of the New York Times Magazine followed four progressive groups opposed to “Clintonism” – MoveOn, the bloggers led by DailyKos.com, the Howard Dean movement, and the billionaires’ group that includes George Soros. Matt’s new book is The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.

More stuff to read: my review of Matt Bai in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 12.
my new piece at TheNation.com, “Iraq: ‘Worst Day Since Vietnam’ for Hawaii.”

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Sometimes numbers can tell a story in ways nothing else can. TOM ENGELHARDT added up some key numbers at TomDispatch.com: Number of American troops stationed in Iraq: 162,000, an all-time high. Estimated monthly cost of the Iraq War: $10 billion/month. Number of Iraqis estimated to have fled their country: 2 million. Estimated number of Iraqi deaths from the invasion of 2003 through June 2007: Just over one million. Tom’s new book is Mission Unaccomplished, where he interviews American iconoclasts and dissenters.

Plus: The presidential races: “Democrats Say Leaving Iraq May Take Years” (New York Times) — JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation explains what’s going on with Hillary, Barak Obama and John Edwards; also, why that weekend Iowa Republican straw poll matters.

Also: Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of Elvis’s death in Memphis in 1976. PETER GURALNICK will take up the question of “cultural theft” — did Elvis rip off black music? We’ll listen to Arthur Big Boy Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” and Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” and compare them to Elvis’s. Peter is the author of the definitive bio Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley; his-op-ed, “How did Elvis get turned into a racist?“, ran in the New York Times on Saturday.

More stuff to read: my piece in the LA Times Book Review about The Argument, Matt Bai’s book about progressive Democrats.

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Can Democrats win in places they abandoned to the Republicans decades ago? BOB MOSER reports from “Bible-thumping, economically slumping” Wilkes County, North Carolina – and the news is good. Bob wrote the “Purple America” cover story in the new issue of The Nation, and his reports on politics in the red states will be running in the magazine through the campaign year.

Also: Opportunities in Abstinence Training: BARBARA EHRENREICH says “unlike any of the rest of the coaching industry–career coaching, life coaching, sales training, etc.–this form of training is generously subsidized by the federal government, and has been since President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill of 1996, which provided abstinence training for impoverished women (though not, alas, for him.)”  Barbara’s latest book is Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

Plus: JULIAN BOND on SNCC, the sixties, and civil rights: his essay, “The Movement We Helped Make,” appears in the book Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, edited by Alexander Bloom. (originally broadcast July 31, 2001).

More stuff to read: my Q&A with Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander
Your Minnesota Moment at TheNation.com, “Al Franken’s Rising Fortunes”

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First they said the war was justified to get rid of WMD in Iraq. Then they said war was justified to bring democracy to Iraq. Now they are saying war is justified to prevent genocide in Iraq. We’ll ask JUAN COLE what he thinks – he writes the indispensable “Informed Comment” blog on the war in Iraq and teaches Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. His new book is Napoleon’s Egypt:Invading the Middle East.

Also: Should corporations be bottling and selling our drinking water? The more the public accepts bottled water, the more it accepts that corporations, not local governments, should provide people with a shared common resource like water. That’s what GIGI KELLETT says—she’s director of the “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign of Corporate Accountability International.

Plus: our Washington political update with HAROLD MEYERSON. We’ll talk about Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and of course the opposition party. Harold is he’s executive editor of the American Prospect and op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

More stuff to read: in my new piece at TheNation.com, “President Rudy,” I ask Kevin Baker whether Giuliani would be a better president than Bush.

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The words “health care” and “comedy” aren’t usually found in the same sentence, but in MICHAEL MOORE‘s new movie ‘SiCKO,’ they go together hand in (rubber) glove. We’ll speak with KENNETH TURAN – he’s film critic for the LA Times – and he calls “SiCKO” Moore’s “most important, most impressive, most provocative film.”
Watch the trailer for “SiCKO”

Also: Bush’s new “ban” on torture: We have learned that when President Bush says, “We don’t torture,” it’s important to read the fine print. DAVID COLE explains – he’s a law professor at Georgetown University and contributor to Salon.com, The New York Review and The Nation.

Plus: RUDY GIULIANI is the leading Republican candidate for the 2008 race. President Giuliani would be “a fate worse than Bush” – that’s what KEVIN BAKER says – he wrote the cover story in the new issue of Harper’s.

More stuff to read: my interview with Carl Bernstein on Hillary’s politics from 1968 to 2008 – it’s at TruthDig.com.

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Is Hillary a closet leftist and radical feminist? Has she been targeted by a vast right-wing conspiracy? Or will she do whatever it takes to win? We’ll talk with CARL BERNSTEIN about Hillary’s 1960s; why she left Washington for Arkansas in 1974; why her 1993 health care plan ended in disaster; and why so many people don’t like her. Carl Bernstein of course is the Watergate Pulitzer Prize-winner; his new book is A WOMAN IN CHARGE: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Plus: KATHA POLLITT says Alexander Cockburn is wrong when he argues that the anti-war movement is weak because it fails to show “international political solidarity” with “Iraqi resistance fighters.” Katha writes the blog “And Another Thing” at TheNation.com and the “Subject to Debate” column in The Nation magazine.

Also: BIG COAL. If you think of coal as a relic of 19^th century industrialization, you’re wrong. Coal today supplies more than half of the electricity in the US today. George Bush calls coal our “economic destiny” – because we’ve got so much of it, and it’s so cheap. But as JEFF GODDELL explains, Coal-fired power plants in the US are responsible for nearly 40 percent of the emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, and air pollution from coal plants has killed more than half a million Americans in the last 20 years. Jeff’s book is Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.

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Since its founding in 1947, the CIA has consistently failed at its primary mission: to understand the world. Instead, it has been turned into a secret police force. TIM WEINER of the New York Times has spent 20 years studying the Agency, “an incapable and incoherent service whose deepest secret is its own weakness and ineptitude” —most evident on 9-11. Tim is a Puliter-Prize winning reporter who broke more than 100 page-one stories on the CIA. His new book is LEGACY OF ASHES: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA.

Plus: THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION: Nazi Germany and the Jews. UCLA Historian SAUL FRIEDLANDER discusses the cooperation of “bystanders” and the victims’ initial blindness towards their fate and then their willingness to follow orders. He also draws extensively on individual voices – perpetrators, collaborators, victims. Saul Friedlander wrote a magnificent memoir, When Memory Comes, about his boyhood in Nazi-occupied France.

Also: CHINA’S BRAVE NEW WORLD: JEFFREY WASSERSTROM explains what’s happening in the world’s most rapidly changing society by looking at its fast-food palaces, coffee shops, and bootleg video parlors – and asks why the Communist Party is still in power, and why, if tens of thousands of protests happen in China each year, the regime remains strong. Jeff teaches history at UC Irvine and has written for The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, and the LA Times op-ed page.