WASHINGTON POST: For the bruised and bitter staff around Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tuesday’s death-defying victories in the Democratic presidential primaries in Ohio and Texas proved sweet indeed. They savored their wins yesterday, plotted their next steps and indulged in a moment of optimism. “She won’t be stopped,” one aide crowed. And then Clinton’s advisers turned to their other goal: denying Mark Penn credit. With a flurry of phone calls and e-mail messages that began before polls closed, campaign officials made clear to friends, colleagues and reporters that they did not view the wins as validation for the candidate’s chief […]

WIKIPEDIA: Since Mussolini, there have been many conflicting definitions of the term fascism. Former Columbia University Professor Robert O. Paxton has written that: Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”[11] Paxton further defines fascism’s essence as: …a sense of […]

THE REFORMER: Seventy-five years ago, our nation was in the midst of one of the most dangerous and troubled periods in its history. In March 1933, about 15 million Americans — 1 in 4 workers — were unemployed. Five million American families — 1 in 7 — were barely surviving on an inadequate patchwork of private charity and public relief. In the little more than three years since the stock market crash of October 1929, more than 4,600 banks had failed. On March 3, 1933, a “bank holiday” was declared across the country and every remaining bank was either closed […]