You can see how seriously Obama is taking the hot populist temper of the American people and their eagerness to strangle every banker in the entrails of every insurance executive. In an altogether welcome departure from past presidential form in State of the Union addresses at least since 1973 (the first time I listened to [...]
Republican Scott Brown takes over a seat held by the Kennedy family for over half a century and the dark cloud already hovering over Obama’s White House thickens. By any measure the energetic Brown’s emphatic defeat of Martha Coakley, believed only a month ago to be a sure thing as Ted Kennedy’s replacement, is a [...]
Even though he’s had to perform all the usual acts of contrition, tumid with “deep regrets” and “sincere apologies” Harry Reid of Nevada is surely getting a bum rap.
Look on the bright side. They finally found a WMD. Not in the desert wastes of Iraq, nor in the cellar of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Not in an Iranian nuclear facility. In Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear.
Hazlitt got gloomily drunk for a fortnight after the battle of Waterloo, accurately anticipating that decades of reaction lay ahead, now that Boney had been definitely put away, with the Holy Alliance in the saddle and the French contagion safely bottled up. Smart fellow, that Hazlitt. He should have stayed drunk for a month.
Sometimes, on [...]
In the early 1970s the UN spearheaded the progressive notion of a new world economic order, one that would try to level the playing field between the First World and the Third. The neoliberal onslaughts gathering strength from the mid-1970s on destroyed that project. Eventually the UN, desperate to reassert some semblance of moral leadership, [...]
A friend down the coast here in California called Wednesday to say that her mother, 95, had fallen, cracked her ribs, got a cough and told her daughters, “That’s it. I’m checking out.” She’s given up eating. I remembered all the arguments I’d had down the years with the old lady — a perennial optimist [...]
Ritual trumphalism about America’s righteous mission in the closing sentences of his speech did not dispel the distinct impression during President Obama’s 33-minute address to cadets at West Point Tuesday night that we were listening to a man defeated by the challenge of justifying the dispatch of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. [...]
You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, have got nearer than most to pulling it off. A week ago Holder announced that Khaled Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators will soon go on trial in federal court in New York for planning [...]
On official Pentagon statistics about 1% of members of the US armed forces today are Muslims, though the actual quotient is no doubt higher, since the 1% number is based on initial declarations of religious persuasion on an official form. The Army high command bristles at demands from the Christian right that there should be [...]
