Shocking new evidence that Obama is secretly a Muslim: he’s hosting a Passover seder at the White House! Seriously though, this Times article about the Obama Seder warms my young Jewish heart. Like most holiday celebrations done well, theirs has nothing to with politics and little to do with religion; it’s just extremely sweet: Then came what is now remembered ... Read More
A lengthy NYT article on the Tea Partiers — which Sam comments on below — does a good job of sheding light on what this movement is all about. The Tea Party is obviously one of the biggest topics in American politics right now. Their recent convention showed that they are here to stay for quite a bit. But how ... Read More
If you’ve seen Avatar and haven’t yet read Annalee Newitz’s article “When will white people stop making movies like this?” then you’re missing out. Avatar — putatively anti-racist, seemingly simple and beautiful and extraordinarily entertaining — is in fact, she argues, mired with subtle racial biases and white ethnocentrism. She writes: These are movies about white guilt. Our main white ... Read More
Life after losing the Presidency Among the flurry of political maneuvering and intrigue surrounding the vacancy of Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat came the interesting proposition that a suitable placeholder might have been found in 75-year-old Michael Dukakis, a man The Boston Globe assured had “put his political ambitions behind him.” What seemed strange about this idea is not that Dukakis ... Read More
The U.S. Supreme Court may be about to render the most important business decision of the decidedly pro-business Roberts era, but one might not know it from the details of the case. The plaintiff is a small conservative advocacy group, not a major corporation; the focal point is a corporate-funded anti-Hillary Clinton documentary that was banned by the FEC, as ... Read More
Lessons from Hurricane Katrina, and where we stand today On Aug. 29, 2005, one million people were displaced overnight when Hurricane Katrina assaulted the Gulf Coast. “We plan for what we’ve experienced, but you don’t even begin to understand [a worst-case scenario] until it is upon you,” Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA employee who took refuge in the Superdome along with ... Read More
How much have Texan oilmen shaped America? Reporter Brian Burrough follows his last corporate epic, Barbarians at the Gate, with a new book, The Big Rich, replacing skyscrapers and three piece suits with oil wells and Stetson hats. It is a sprawling story set across several continents, chronicling gumption, love, betrayal, politics, family squabbles, and Muammar al-Gaddafi. But if the ... Read More
George Friedman’s geopolitical prophecy The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century is a book that admits it will not get everything right. The author George Friedman, founder of the private intelligence firm STRATFOR, takes up the prophet’s mantle and tells us what the 21st century might look like. His contentions seem, at first glance, fantastic: in 2050, ... Read More
Daring to end homelessness While the recent collapse of the U.S. housing market has prompted a renewed debate about American homeownership and its future, the related topic of homelessness has remained largely ignored. Hundreds of thousands of citizens live lives of addiction and mental illness on the streets of American cities. On any given day, 900,000 people — including 200,000 ... Read More
Times are tough. In just the last few weeks the Dow Jones fell to a level not seen since 1997 and the unemployment rate in the United States, now over eight percent, reached a 25-year high. The bulk of the finance industry, including our largest and formerly most successful banks, exists only because the federal government has decided it must. ... Read More
The future of the WTO and the Doha trade round July 29, 2008 witnessed the collapse of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round, high-level negotiations aimed at lowering trade barriers between countries. Immediate reactions were varied, reflecting international ambivalence about globalization. Free traders viewed the collapse as a disaster, poverty activists as a moral failure, and globalization’s malcontents as a ... Read More
I don’t know how many of you saw this interesting article in Politico yesterday about Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. For those who didn’t, the crucial paragraph is this: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) and his deputy, Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D.-Ill.) were called to Pelosi’s office late Thursday night and ultimately prevailed in their argument that Democrats should ... Read More
The need to balance food aid with long-term agricultural investment
Have you seen the Santelli clip? Watch it. Now. I’ll wait. Yes, that is a CNBC reporter channeling the rage of the common volk. Raging about the “losers” getting bailed out by gubmint money. Interestingly, he neglects to mention the orders of magnitude more money getting thrown at the losers who happen to already have lots of money and political ... Read More
