NYT’s Matt Bai, today, describing Podesta re Obama’s supposed missing mojo: Mr. Podesta believes that his most consequential decisions on domestic policy stemmed from one overarching conviction — that the president’s most important job in a crisis, requiring nearly single-minded attention, was to pass huge legislation. “By focusing on getting big legislative accomplishments, which was understandable, they necessarily gave up a larger image of him as president,” [...]
Charles Krauthammer and I concur, today, on the state of the Obama administration in light of the upcoming, much anticipated midterm election that will supposedly determine the fate of the known universe. It’s a none-too-comfortable alignment – he, along with Newt, cause a particularly visceral nausea in me – but I’m nonetheless in total agreement with his major premise, that is, Obama and his political team are playing chess while nearly everyone else in Washington is playing checkers.
On my way to the gym yesterday after work, and who should I see standing right beside me in a drab grey suit at the corner of L and 17th Streets but one Donald Henry Rumsfeld, SECDEF from 1975–77 and 2001–06. There he was trying desperately to hail a cab, as if he had somewhere important to be. None would stop for him (though it was rush hour), and eventually he seemed resigned to the Metro. Avoiding [...]
Capital punishment is an abomination. Nothing more than state-sanctioned revenge killings. But at least the citizens of most states, unlike Utah, realize that in order to justify their blood-lust they must go to great lengths to make their executions appear humane to casual observers. “A five-member firing squad at the Utah State Prison took aim and fired .30-caliber bullets at a target pinned on the chest of Ronnie Lee Gardner, a convicted murderer, just after midnight on Friday.” [...]
Progressive journalists — God bless ‘em — are making me ill. Rachel Maddow and her mock Oval Office address was difficult to watch without having to swallow a mouthful of vomit. But Dan Froomkin’s HuffPo bit is simply too much to bear: “How unmoored from reality are Obama and his top advisers to think that some pretty words with so little substance could accomplish so [...]
I have a juris doctor degree from one of the so-called T-14 law schools. In 1999, I was accepted, I moved across country, and was fraudulently induced into believing believed for certain all before me was milk and honey. I graduated three years later without a job or much reason to be optimistic: I was a classic middle-of-the-roader in a not-particularly-good economy, with a staggering amount of student loan debt to pay down (and no means to do it). Nevertheless, [...]
I have to admit, our modern internets aren’t the first place to go in search of critical thought (i.e., philosophy). It’s out there, though, surprisingly along side all the sturm und drang of partisan political debate. Case in point is a fine online essay by J.M. Bernstein of The New School, taking a deep, dispassionate dive into the origin of the famous tea-bagger rage. Here’s the nub of his argument: Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is [...]
Fresh Air host Terry Gross, today, interviewed documentary filmmaker Josh Fox, whose GASLAND premiers on HBO, June 21. Shocking stuff.