The manufactured controversy over what has ludicrously come to be called the “Ground Zero Mosque” has a lot of depressing aspects. But easily the most surprising and, for me, upsetting development is that the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish human rights organization, has sided with Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and the other opportunistic GOP pols who are exploiting this issue. A ... Read More
One of the many trends in this midterm election cycle, recognized and promoted by those whose job it is to recognize and promote trends, is that 2010 appears to be the “Year of the Woman.” Sharron Angle won her primary for the Nevada Senate race. Nikki Haley, with headline-making help from Sarah Palin, won her runoff primary for South Carolina ... Read More
In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,there has been no shortage of finger-pointing. There’s plenty of blame to go around, no doubt, but there is one group that the Right has mysteriously implicated in this disaster: environmentalists. In an editorial in the Washington Post last Friday, Charles Krauthammer wrote that environmentalists are partially to blame for the spill ... Read More
Today, I did something which went against the deepest instincts of my time at the Harvard Political Review: reporting. I heard two days ago that Sarah Palin was going to be in town for the Boston Tea Party rally, and I knew this was something that I simply had to see. So this morning I woke up bright and early, ... Read More
On Tuesday night I went to the Harvard Political Union’s discussion on climate change, which was centered around the question of what steps the University should be taking to be greener and on the issue of global warming in general. As part of what seemed to be a minority of non-affiliated observers at the event — i.e. not being part ... Read More
Can you blog Tweets? I don’t know, but let’s give this a try. For those of you who couldn’t spend an hour and a half at the Halperin/Heilemann forum last night, here’s a minute-and-a-half tweet rundown…. Waiting for Halperin/Heilemann forum to start. Definitely not packed. Maybe people are over the 2008 gossip? What about midterm gossip? Bill Purcell just said ... Read More
I remember the day when John McCain used to be that Republican that we Democrats kind of liked. Then came the 2008 presidential campaign. I can’t exactly fault McCain for steering hard to the right; he was, after all, trying to win the Republican primary and then energize the party’s base in the general election. Still, there are plenty of ... 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
The other day, my girlfriend (who’s not a math fan) sent me a link to a new New York Times post by Steven Strogatz, an applied math professor at Cornell who is writing a blog that will, over the next few weeks, give readers a quick tutorial on math, “from pre-school to grad school.” Strogatz starts slowly; his first piece ... Read More
It’s somewhat unclear what exactly Senators Nelson, Collins, Specter and Snowe were aiming for in the cuts they demanded from the Senate stimulus bill. They didn’t dispute the need for a large economic stimulus, nor did they offer a detailed critique of why spending on school construction or state aid would be “less stimulative” than other far less stimulative measures ... Read More
What’s so funny about the 44th president? No, seriously. Since November 4th, aspiring comedians, satirists, and pundits have all faced the same intractable dilemma: There are no good Barack Obama jokes. To be sure, there are jokes featuring the president-elect. Take Jay Leno: Barack Obama’s mother-in-law might be moving into the White House with him. See, Joe Biden was right. ... Read More
Lately, I’ve become more accustomed to seeing Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey as Governor Sarah Palin than Sarah Palin as herself. And apparently I’m not alone: The New York Times’ television blog, “TV Decoder,” noted on September 16 that the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler sketch, presenting the mock joint television appearance of Sarah Palin and Hillary Rodham Clinton, had been viewed ... Read More
When I first heard Gov. Sarah Palin say, in the vice-presidential debate, that she would not “attribute every activity of man to the changes in the climate,” I wanted to believe it was a mere verbal gaffe. I assumed she meant that she didn’t attribute every change in the climate to the activities of men. She meant that we might ... Read More
I was recently reading the Harvard Independent (a mistake, I know), and one of the writers had a piece discussing two widely-read articles over the summer trashing students from Harvard and other Ivy League universities. I skimmed through most of it, and what really struck me was a passage mentioning Harvard students’ homogenized, unfailingly reasoned and moderate political positions. It ... Read More
The presidential race has taken more of an interesting turn than I could have imagined with John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate. I’m not going to talk about Sarah Palin, but as a confirmed member of the East Coast Liberal Enemy (the Harvard Political Review is pretty much ground zero), I can’t say there’s a single ... Read More
