Tag Archives: politics

Health of the Republic: Down 10% to 15%

With exactly 18 months left to go in office, this President has made a sweeping and unprecedented play for unchecked power. According to a Washington Post article, the President intends to claim that Congress cannot pursue its investigation into the … Continue reading

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Re-cap on the posters

It’s become clear that I’ve mis-tagged some of these, and I thought it was about time — 1/3 of the way toward a book! — to collect them in one place. More below the fold.

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Shameless me-tooism

Generally, I don’t like posting a simple link to someone else. But today, I feel compelled, because Glenn Greenwald has done such a masterful job outlining the facts and the reasons behind the catastrophic collapse of American support throughout the … Continue reading

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Scooter Libby and the Rule of Law

OK, first off, what the President did — commuting Libby’s sentence so that he serves no jail time — is itself well within the law. Perhaps unwisely, the Founders did vest that power in the President and he gets to … Continue reading

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Irksome metric

Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we … Continue reading

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Another criminal escapes justice on a technicality

Interestingly, that’s not how the right-wing noise machine is approaching this story, about how some of the indictments against Tom DeLay have been thrown out. You’d think that people who have spent literally four decades decrying “judicial activism” and unjust … Continue reading

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The Appeal of Apocalypse

What is so seductive about the end of the world? Evidence of the eschatonic impulse are around us everywhere. Disaster movies often reign supreme in the theaters — and the bigger the disaster (Independence Day, Armageddon, etc.) the more successful … Continue reading

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Are you safer?

In today’s NY Times, Richard Cohen writes a piece that praises Hilary Clinton for having the “courage” to assert “I believe we are safer than we were” (before 9/11). Mr. Cohen lambastes what he sees as the knee-jerk reaction of … Continue reading

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Ubi Dubium

There’s a nice little piece (“Better to Be Hamlet than President George” by Peter Birkenhead) in Salon today on the value of doubt and its sad lack in today’s political culture. It’s worth a read. (Perhaps I’m a bit biased, … Continue reading

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Defending, Defunding, and the Strength of Madness

Well, for reasons that escape me at 1:33 AM, I am off on our school’s Senior Trip to Florida for the next few days. But before I head out, I felt compelled to jot down my own thoughts on the … Continue reading

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