Current Events and the Psychology of Politics
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Sep 11th, 2009

Summary: Today is the 8th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11. But with the timetable set for withdrawal from Iraq and the fighting in Afghanistan nearing its ninth year, U.S. war coverage has waned, often pushed off the front page by the economic recession, health care reform, and celebrity deaths. One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on the second day after losing his 2008 primary challenge against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Aubrey Immelman paid tribute to the victims and heroes of 9/11.


Aug 30th, 2009

Summary: Bombs struck Baghdad and remote communities in northern Iraq on August 29, 2009 as the visiting Iranian foreign minister warned that Iraq’s instability affected the whole region. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on the 47th day of his campaign against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann for the Republican nomination as House of Representatives candidate in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Aubrey Immelman, in line with his campaign focus on national security issues, issued his statement opposing the war in Iraq.


May 22nd, 2009

Summary: When former Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech on national security delivered May 21, 2009, lambasted the change in security policy under President Barack Obama, he was not attacking the Obama administration so much as the Bush administration itself — considering he was essentially repeating many of the same arguments he had made unsuccessfully within the Bush White House as policy decisions increasingly went the other way in President Bush’s second term.


Apr 19th, 2009

Summary: At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a truck bomb containing approximately 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring more than 800 at the hands of Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh. It was the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil until the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attack.


Mar 30th, 2009

Summary: Pentagon spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to fight terrorism elsewhere has reached $685.7 billion since 2001, according to a U.S. government watchdog agency. The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, said the Iraq war accounted for $533.5 billion in Defense Department spending obligations through December 2008, while spending on operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and the Philippines totaled $124.1 billion. The remaining $28.1 billion was for operations to defend the U.S. mainland, the GAO said in a letter to Congress dated March 30, 2009.



Summary: Calling the situation in the region “increasingly perilous,” President Barack Obama ordered 4,000 more military troops into Afghanistan, vowing to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” the terrorist al-Qaida network in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.


Feb 5th, 2009

Summary: With the reduction of violence in Iraq following a U.S. troop “surge” and other measures, foreign militants are now flooding into Afghanistan to join Taliban insurgents battling Afghan and international troops, according to Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak.


Jan 19th, 2009

Summary: President George W. Bush presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, with economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly viewing his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s thorniest fiscal challenges. Specifically, the number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush’s tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans’ incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush’s father George H. W. Bush.


Jan 18th, 2009

Summary: How can George W. Bush restore his legacy upon leaving office in a climate where 98 percent of historians view his tenure as a failure and only 13 percent of Americans believe Bush has helped solve the country’s problems? … Personality profile of George W. Bush.


Jan 15th, 2009

Summary: British foreign secretary David Miliband says the phrase “war on terror” — though capturing the urgency of the situation immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — is ultimately “misleading and mistaken,” because it gives the impression of a unified, transnational enemy embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.