Tag: politics
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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 should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of…
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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 outcomes of people “clearly” guilty, would be a-twitter that a judge and then an appeals…
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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 the movie. Foreign policy seems more and more a push for one last throw of…
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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 her Democratic rivals, who (he says) reflexively bash everything associated with Bush, even those things…
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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, as I chose to name my original domain “ubidubium”, from the Latin “ubi dubium ibi…
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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 recent decision by the Democrats to send Bush a war-funding bill without any of the…
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Pondering Hate Crimes and Hate-Crime Laws
Apparently there’s something afoot in the House that has brought this back into national focus. Reading about it, I wandered across a blog post in Orcinus from 2005 January (!). I have to say, for the first time in many years, it gave me something to think about on this issue. I have always been…
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Vanishing Ink?
(written 2007 0412; extended 2007 0413) I’ll admit that this post is basically ripped off from Glenn Greenwald, whom you should read for details. I just wanted to collect all the points in a clean, stripped version. The subject? The amazing and disturbing “incompetence” demonstrated by the Bush administration in producing records that might put…
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More on Guiliani-as-Kaiser
Glen Greenwald continues to shine a welcome spotlight on the outright authoritarian — dare we say, totalitarian? — impulses of the Right’s new darling, Rudy Guiliani. Twice in the past few days, he’s made statements that, only a handful of years ago, would have been credible only coming from the mouth of some cartoonish caricature.…
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2 out of 3 Republican candidates prefer dictatorship
OK, so that’s not entirely fair. But Glenn Greenwald has a terrific piece on why it’s not entirely unfair, either. The short version: When asked if the President of the United States should have the power to detain indefinitely American citizens without any sort of review, Mitt Rommey said he couldn’t form an opinion without…