picardow

TAP talks to the author of a book about the climate war raging inside and outside the White House: I expected that there would be a lot of battles in the climate war, but I didn’t expect to find one in the Obama administration, and I did. The conflict was between the green cabinet, people […]

Gershom Gorenberg looks at who won and who lost in the latest battle for Middle East peace: From Benjamin Netanyahu’s words, one might think he had just taken office, reviewed the previous government’s failed strategy for undermining the Hamas regime in Gaza, and dumped it. He doesn’t seem to remember that he avidly maintained that […]

Molly Ball describes how Sen. Harry Reid spent years engineering the Republican field against him, and got the race he wanted: The dean of the Nevada political press corps, television host and columnist Jon Ralston, frequently refers to Reid as the state’s “Meddler-in-Chief,” because nearly everything that happens in the Silver State bears his fingerprints. […]

Matthew Yglesias explains how China’s tighter monetary policy could be good news for China and the U.S. both — depending on how the world responds: China’s central bank announced that it would allow its currency, the renminbi, to trade up or down according to market demand for Chinese money — just in time for Rolling […]

An Army National Guard Soldier stands watch on a ridge above Nogales, Ariz., at the Mexican border. President Obama plans to send 1,200 National Guard troops to patrol the divide between the United States and Mexico, and has now put in a request for an additional $500 million in resources — including 1,000 more agents […]

Tim Fernholz on William Lerach, who went to jail for a crime that, at its heart, is no different than the white-collar crime he speaks out against: William Lerach, a legend of the plaintiff’s bar, finished up a two-year sentence in March for his part in an illegal kickback scheme. By June, he was in […]

Mark Schmitt on Bear Sterns, BP, and the reason “bailout” has become the defining word of the era: The last decade has been defined by the challenge of reacting to institutional failures. In the early 2000s, we worried about failed states, like Somalia and Afghanistan; now it’s failed companies, failed public agencies, and failed governing […]

Robert Reich argues that the policy-making process has become an extension of the market battlefield: If we define political corruption as actions causing the public to lose confidence that politicians make decisions in the public’s interest rather than in the special interest of those who give them financial support, the biggest corruption of our political […]

Tim Fernholz on the struggle of the financial world and its would-be regulators to understand the flash crash: On May 6, the Senate was locked in a heated debate over whether the government should impose size limits on the largest banks in the country, in effect breaking up the reviled giants of American finance. But […]

Noy Thrupkaew explores the debate over staying or going amongst dissident filmmakers in Iran: Bahman Ghobadi chose exile — although “chose” scarcely seems like the appropriate word. The Iranian authorities had suggested that the Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker leave the country numerous times over the years, and turned up the pressure two days before the June 2009 […]