Why does the right seem to have so many more serious, policy-oriented journals dedicated to hashing out intramovement questions? The National Interest, the newly-defunct Public Interest, and all the others lacking “Interest” in the title and traction in my memory comprise a pretty impressive group on the shelf. The left has Dissent, but even that’s […]
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Democracy Bonds
A big howdy-ho to our newest advertiser, the DNC. They — and their new online director, my former blog mate Joe Rospars — are pushing Democracy Bonds, an idea I like: Your “Democracy Bond” is a commitment to make a monthly contribution the Democratic Party in order to: * Reform the political process by building […]
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Why the FDA is in tatters
This is Matthew Holt from The Health Care Blog getting in a piece that I meant to publish while I was guesting last week: It’s time to dip into the murky waters of the FDA once more. This is a classic tale of politics intruding into an agency that should have science as its prime […]
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The (Republican) Nationals
I find this fairly scary. America is supposed to work differently.
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The Carpenters Find a Fold
Looks like the Carpenters have joined the breakaway unions (more officially known as the Change to Win Coalition). Jonathan Tasini has an excellent analysis up at Working Life, and I’ll have more to say on all this later. Bottom line, though, is that I’m happy to see Labor shook to the core. It’s become trite […]
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Firestorm
What a fitting epitaph to the Social Security fight: “I had hoped there would be, after four months, a firestorm of support for accounts, especially among young people,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “It’s not there. I’m very disappointed.” Back in March, I argued that the Republican reliance on the young […]
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More Machines
Tova Wang’s got an interesting piece on voter suppression in The Century Foundation’s Taking Note. According to her, it wasn’t high tech hackers doing the work, but old school class discrimination: Elections officials, whether through incompetence or intentional efforts to suppress the vote, did more damage than any particular technology might have done by failing […]
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Mouse You, Buddy!
Far from the revulsion experienced by New York Post columnist John Podhoretz as he read Ed Klein’s The Truth About Hillary, my chief reaction was of tedium: at the warmed-over, thrice-told anecdotes rendered in a prose so purple that one wonders how Klein and Sentinel (the publisher) forgot to link the book’s publication to the […]
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Debunking the Debunkers
Given the renewed attention being paid to global warming, it was probably inevitable that, sooner or later, some prominent conservative outlet would arch back its head and emit a barbaric yawp of climate-science skepticism. Forget the fact that virtually every week, new scientific work strengthens the conclusion that humans beings are heating the planet. Basic […]
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The Survivor
CJR’s got a good interview with John Harris, author of the Clinton assessment The Survivor. I’m on page 340 of the book and it’s a fun read; not much new if you’ve studied the era before, but about as good an introduction as you’re likely to find. Harris’s insights, though, are more interesting for what […]
