Christinne Muschi for The New York TimesJulie Matlin was tempted by a pair of shoes on Zappos.com. Then the shoes started showing up in ads on other sites she visited.Read Article    

 By Chris Hedges/ TruthDig.comNoam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of…

 Iraqis want American to stay Six years ago, Sheikh Mohammed Naji led his tribe in Iraq’s greatest battle against the Americans. Now they are leaving, and he would much prefer that they were not.Read Article   

 Healthcare reform vote: sweet victory for ObamaWinning the vote for healthcare reform in Congress last night showed that Obama was right to keep fighting Richard Adams guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 March 2010 Article historyAfter winning the healthcare reform vote in Congress, President Obama took to the airwaves to sell it. Photograph: AFPSome myths got slain last night in Washington DC. For one thing, the Democratic party rediscovered its vertebrae and used it, for a change, to pass healthcare reform. For another, the myth that the US political structure is broken and cannot digest fundamental issues … well, it took a dent.Minutes after the final passage of the bills through the House of Representatives, President Obama got on with selling the reforms to the American public, going live on television despite the late hour. "This is what change looks like," Obama said, minutes before midnight, tying together his election promises of change with his commitments to reforming healthcare. "We proved that this government of the people and by the people still works for the people."Obama looked exhausted, having spent the weekend winning over House Democrats. Bismark's epigram equating the messy business of passing legislation and making sausages has been repeated so often during Congress's healthcare debate that US cable news viewers on Sunday night might have expected to see meat-grinders operating in Congress.But if there was any blood on the floor during the closing moments of the vote on healthcare reform, it came from the Republican party, whose members looked dangerously close to opening their own veins.

There was John Boehner, the most senior House Republican, giving a splenetic harangue punctuated with "Hell no!", in place of summing up his party's case. Then there was the mystery Republican congressman…

 As Health Vote Awaits, Future of a Presidency Waits, Too"If Mr. Obama falls short on health care, his hopes of passing other ambitious legislation like an overhaul of immigration and a market-based cap on carbon emissions to curb climate change would seem out of reach, at least for the rest of this year. Much of Washington would question whether he is weak, some Democratic candidates would run away from him and Mr. Obama would be forced to consider a narrower agenda like that pursued by Bill Clinton after his own health care drive collapsed."Read Article