ehm1212

Gershom Gorenberg explains how the real legacy of regional conflict can be found in the smallest details — street names, curriculum choices — that painfully enshrine some of the worst violence: Walking along the beachfront street in Akko recently with a social activist from the town’s Arab community, I looked up at a sign and […]

Tim Fernholz on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission: In 1933, a New York assistant district attorney named Ferdinand Pecora came to Washington to write a Senate Banking Committee report on the financial crisis that kicked off the Great Depression. Realizing that the materials he received from the committee were incomplete, he called another month of […]

Michelle Goldberg on the attendance of high-profile conservative Christians at the upcoming tea-party convention: Next month’s Tea Party National Convention has been making news for the fat fee Sarah Palin is commanding — $100,000, according to many reports. But the gathering, to be held at Nashville’s Opryland Hotel, is interesting for another reason as well: […]

Gabriel Arana on the filming of Perry v. Schwarzenegger: Judge Vaughn Walker‘s decision to allow video cameras in his courtroom for the federal challenge to California’s Proposition 8 has been temporarily suspended pending a decision by the Supreme Court midweek. Proceedings from the trial, which began Monday, were to be broadcast on YouTube as part […]

Mark Schmitt explains how to fix the filibuster: As the Senate’s near-miss passage of health-care reform faded in the rearview mirror, the road ahead became visible: Such victories will be rare, at least under the current configuration of the Senate and partisan alignments. The primary obstacle, of course, is that the Senate’s right of unlimited […]

Lisa Dodson on how some supervisors of low-wage workers break the rules to make an unfair system a little bit fairer: Even though Andrew, a manager in a large food business in the Midwest, and his wife together make a decent income, he’s preoccupied by the issue of low-wage labor. Many of the workers in […]

Adam Serwer asks if the reassignment of the Bush-era head of the Justice Department section could mean real change on voting rights: Sometime during Christmas week, Christopher Coates, the chief of the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department, was quietly reassigned to an 18-month detail in the U.S. attorney’s office in Charleston, South Carolina. […]

Terence Samuel on early election hysteria: Two longtime progressive senators announced their retirement this week, and so the Democratic Panic of 2010 begins in earnest. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Chris Dodd of Connecticut faced tough re-election challenges, and both decided they were not up for the fight. Their decisions are as personal as […]

Holly Yeager writes that appointment of Stephanie Schriock as president of the PAC known for promoting female candidates has the potential to push the former fundraising powerhouse into the Internet era: When Ellen Malcolm, the founder of EMILY’s List, announced Wednesday that she is stepping down as the group’s president, she made clear that it […]

Matthew Yglesias explains why profiling will never be an effective tool: Conservatives looking to engage in their favorite sport of national-security hysteria got their wish Christmas Day, when a young man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded an Amsterdam-Detroit flight with incendiary chemicals stashed in his underpants. The would-be bomber failed to destroy the plane and […]