Are You Sure You Want to Eat Cicadas?
Matthew Yglesias is a former writer and editor at The Atlantic.
Andrew Sullivan and Gene Healy both denounce Hillary Clinton's insidious plan to "take things away from you [a group of wealth people] on behalf of the common good." And I'm glad they did it. If I may plug my column again this is a debate that liberals will win every day of the week. And it's the debate we should be having -- this is the real ideological divide in the country. More »
Andrew Sullivan's ham-handed attack on William Raspberry's defense of Fahrenheit 9-11 really makes Raspberry's column (and, by extension, the film) seem a lot better than I felt like it was when I first saw it. We're seeing here the confluence of both the very severe inherent flaws of the "fisking" genre and, apparently, a rightwing driven absolutely batty by the prospect of seeing their president get hit below the belt. Meanwhile the right threatens to establish… More »
I tried to read the detainee case decisions, but really the only one I could understand was Scalia's dissent in Hamdi. That made a lot of sense to me. What I found most unsettling about the government's position in these cases is that everything seemed mighty ad hoc like they didn't have real reasons for treating Prisoner X like so and Prisoner Y like so. No real rules governed anything, and everyone was being shipped about in an arbitrary manner. The rulings… More »
Black man's got a lot of problems.But he knows how to throw a brick.Or so said Joe Strummer. Mark Schmitt thinks he may have forgotten, with the result that elites are no longer frightened into caring about urban poverty issues. Peter Levine in a related post calls me out as one of several prominent bloggers who ignores such topics. I'll admit that I mostly let my topic selection simply be determined by the news cycle, so things that are off the national radar… More »
Juan Cole makes an important point about the odd theory that the "real" motive for the Afghan War was a desire to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan: A pipeline to convey natural gas from Turkmenistan would be an excellent thing to have. Natural gas is something about which it's hard to say too many good things, it's a hell of a lot cleaner than coal or oil, it's relatively cheap, it can be processed into electricity by very flexible generators, you… More »
Instead of shifting right as many were predicting yesterday, Canadian politics seems to have taken a left turn, at least functionally. The Liberals have a rather large plurality compared to the Conservatives (Ontario voters seem to have panicked at the last minute) but will need to rely on the votes of the left-wing New Democratic Party and the hopes of picking up a few social democratic Bloc Québécois members to get anything done. More »
Via Laura Rozen who's got some thoughts on this, a good Fox News piece on the Iranian threat. I suspect that the hawks' efforts to push the panic button here are considerably more justified than their similar efforts vis-à-vis Iraq. The trouble is that they've already burned all the resources -- troops, prepositioned munitions, international and domestic political credibility, sheer will -- that they need in the Iraq venture.It's especially noteworthy that a… More »
Funny stuff, but one ought to speak no ill of John Edwards as long as the specter of Gephardtism is still stalking the land. The latter gentleman's candidacy is being considered very seriously, and it is incumbent on all decent people to help squash it. More »
Chris Bertram put up what I think is a rather churlish post about this thing I wrote that's produced some interesting discussion in the comments section. More »
Of course, the other thing to be said about Canada is that no matter how rightwing Stephen Harper may be, no one would be crazy enough to bestow upon their country the American health care system. His ideas may or may not constitute an improvement over the Canadian status quo (haven't examined the question) but they'd still certainly produce a better outcome than America's "worst of both worlds" approach to health care. More »
Obligatory haven't-seen-the-movie-yet-going-tommorrow-night disclaimer. That said, I think my friend Richard Just flies a bit off the handle with this assertion:There seems to be a growing sentiment among liberals that Moore is a bad guy, but dammit, he's our bad guy. I disagree. Liberalism is as badly served by liberal intellectual dishonesty as it is by conservative intellectual dishonesty.I'm not sure I'd want to be a forthright defender of intellectual… More »
The New Republic wonders if we're about to witness the dawn of Bush-style conservatism in Canada. This seems to me to be founded on a mistake. The Conservative Party is not very popular -- latest polls have them in the low-thirties. The Liberals' problem is that they're also in the low thirties since scandals and so forth are boosting the NDP and Bloc Québécois margins. This is bad for the Liberal Party and does create the very real chance that we'll see a… More »
For right now, consider this site a temporary expedient, as I'm having trouble getting the old one fixed. I may make a permanent move over to this service, however, so who knows. Right now I don't have time to try and configure the look to my satisfaction since I'm supposed to be doing some actual work. More political commentary soon. More »
Ta-Nehisi Coates
James Fallows
Alexis C. Madrigal
Derek Thompson
Garance Franke-Ruta
Steve Clemons
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