ehm1212

Gershom Gorenberg on the Israeli left’s leadership vacuum: Danny Ben-Simon has quit. If anyone needed more evidence of the disarray of the Israeli left, this is it — but then, no one actually needs any more evidence. Ben-Simon became the whip of the Labor Party’s Knesset delegation just five months ago. That sounds like a […]

Stephen Franklin on the illegal treatment of day laborers: Another dead day on the street corner and Gonzalo Mejia is wondering how he will get by. He’s been finding work just one or two days a week lately. Worse yet, a contractor recently stiffed him out of $400 worth of pay. “All the time there […]

Michelle Goldberg asks why the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham isn’t provoking more outrage: It’s lucky for Texas governor Rick Perry that he’s not suspected of doing something truly shocking, like having an affair. Instead, it merely seems that he’s helped cover up a homicide. Apparently that’s not enough to make much of a national […]

Paul Waldman on the insurance industry’s self-defeating campaign against the public option: For months, the insurance industry was remarkably quiet. Despite fears that it would publicly fight reform with a scorched-earth campaign of television ads like it did in 1993, until now it’s been subdued. It was part of a carefully planned inside-outside strategy: On […]

Michelle Goldberg on the Israeli reaction to the Goldstone Report: Richard Goldstone‘s report to the U.N. Human Rights Council on Israel’s invasion of Gaza appears to have struck a nerve. Even given the extreme defensiveness typical of Israel’s government and its apologists, the reaction to Goldstone’s investigation has been astonishing in its hyperbolic fury. “The […]

Tim Fernholz explains why the Marking Home Affordable program isn’t working: The Making Home Affordable program, announced last February and begun in earnest in April, consists of two primary components: The first involves helping borrowers in danger of losing their home modify their loans. The second allows homeowners who owe more than the value of […]

Peter Steinfels reviews Robert Wright‘s The Evolution of God : There are, it seems, two Robert Wrights — a tough-minded Robert Wright and a tender-minded Robert Wright — who have collaborated on a book about religion. The tough-minded Wright, like the much acclaimed “new atheists,” insists that widely held traditional beliefs cannot withstand scientific scrutiny; […]

Matthew Yglesias on the quiet ascendancy of the European Union: On Oct. 2, one of the year’s most important stories passed by with little notice in the United States: Irish voters supported ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon in a referendum that cleared the last major obstacle to a substantial overhaul of European Union institutions. […]

Tara McKelvey goes to kidnapping school: How do you dress for an abduction? That was the question on my mind as I prepared for my first day of kidnapping school — or, as it is officially known, Centurion Risk Assessment Services’ Hostile Environment and First Aid Course, a weekend-long training program designed to prepare foreign […]

Adam Serwer says that Democrats have dropped the ball on reforming Bush-era civil-liberties abuses: For a minute, it almost looked like Democrats were going to put up a fight on the PATRIOT Act as it came up for reauthorization. With a majority in Congress, a clear list of reforms set out by Russ Feingold and […]