christopher_hallam

On Friday, the Anniston Star reported that Alabama State Senator Gerald Allen was introducing a sharia law ban that plagiarizes Wikipedia: The bill defines Shariah as “a form of religious law derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: The divine revelations set forth in the Qur’an and the example set by the Islamic Prophet […]

A lot of people are reacting negatively to this CNN piece titled, “are whites racially oppressed?” But I think they’re reacting more to the sensational headline than the piece itself, which is a rather interesting look at the way white racial identity is evolving in the U.S., particularly with regards to politics: A recent Public […]

Dave Weigel points to a memo sent to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlining some Newt Gingrich‘s “seven strategic necessities.” Gingrich observes that the military is great at eliminating bad guys (the first campaign) but less effective at building societies after whole cloths afterwards (the second campaign). In this vein,Gingrich seems to contemplate “total war” in […]

The New York Times describes the experience of Abdul Khaliq Farahi, who spent more than two years in the custody of al-Qaeda (via Gene Healy): “For the first six months, they gave me a lot of torture and a lot of questions,” he said. “After that, they treated me better.” He said he was blindfolded […]

Tim Cavanaugh wonders whether Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is a “pro-union mole” because of the political firestorm he’s created in attempting to strip public workers in the state of their collective bargaining rights: Just two weeks ago, the crisis of government employee pensions was an issue for Democrats. If you look closely at states around […]

I think Jonathan Chait is right about the broader implications about the conservative view of history in their fixation on Obama’s supposed “Kenyan anti-Colonialism.” Wouldn’t this theory mean that our Founding Fathers were also twisted by opposition to British colonialism? Or maybe the idea is that we had a right to throw off the British […]

Iran, in the midst of trying to suppress its own popular uprising, has threatened to boycott the 2012 Olympics over the fact that their logo spells out the word “Zion,” the Jewish biblical term for Jerusalem and one identified with supporters of a Jewish homeland in the state of Israel, and is therefore “racist.” My […]

Peter Beinart takes an optimistic view on the upheaval in the Middle East: Truman and his successors made terrible mistakes in the Cold War, but America’s ultimate success stemmed from this basic insight: that as an economically vibrant democracy facing an economically destitute tyranny, the U.S. could afford to wait. And because America did wait, […]

Georgia Rep. Bobby Franklin‘s bill urging authorities to treat miscarriages as potential instances of “prenatal murder” is really crazy. But Franklin basically has a record of proposing crazy bills that will never pass–Atlanta Journal Constitution blogger Jim Galloway dubbed him the “lone ranger” for proposing a bill doing away with driver’s licences. It hasn’t even […]