This is a hell of an essay. I tend to think Kos has calmed over the past year or two and his voice is positive these days, but the larger points of this critique, particularly about the false sublimation of ideological battles into partisan unity, really ring true. A sample: I am always struck by […]
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Treating Big Pharma
Brad Plumer’s got a good post on socializing drug research that you should all read. Folks following my Tapped contributions (I really need to remember to write those end of the day Tapped round ups/open threads that you all keep bugging me for) know I’ve been on an anti-Big Pharma kick and, judging from Brad’s […]
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Jailhouse Ruckus
In spite of Katrina’s looping right cross to New Orleans and Rita’s quick left jab to Lake Charles, Louisiana’s Angola Prison Rodeo — the self-proclaimed “Wildest Show in the South” — will be held as planned, on five successive Sundays this month at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Angola, some 135 miles northwest of New Orleans, […]
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The Report They Forgot
In February 2004, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSCI) announced that it had unanimously agreed to expand its investigation of prewar Iraq intelligence from focus on intelligence community blunders and into the more controversial area of “whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused” by U.S. government officials. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Jay Rockefeller, struck the agreement […]
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Taxing Wealth
Apparently, the Wall Street Journal has been using Sweden’s elimination of the estate tax to make the “even-the-Marxists-are-doing-it” argument for repealing our own. Putting aside the fact that Sweden is not often used as exemplar of the sort of taxation system the WSJ would like, liberals should offer a trade: we’ll do what they did […]
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Gilberto Gil Goes to Government
Cool happenings over in my father’s homeland, where the superlative Gilberto Gil (if you don’t know, go look him up in iTunes) was tapped by Lula to become Minister of Culture, and is proving himself just as provocative and amusing as we’d all hoped: For several years now, largely under the rest of the world’s […]
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How to Limit Government
Via John Cole, Jon Henke has some ideas on how to make the government live within its means. Some of them are, to a liberal like me me, bad, notable the flat tax. Some seem more ideologically desirable than economically smart (deficits can be a good thing, particularly for countercyclical stimulus: read your Keynes), and […]
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Croatian Pharmaceutical Terrorists
You guys should read this post of mine at Tapped. Just trust me on this.
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The Liberal Moderates
The 2006 elections may be a year away, but already Democrats are working hard not to get cocky. With Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the multiple corruption scandals swirling around the Republicans, the ruling party is looking increasingly vulnerable. The president’s approval ratings have slipped into the 30-percent neighborhood in some polls, and when people are […]
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It’s the Nukes, Stupid
Like pretty much everyone else in Washington, I have no idea what charges Patrick Fitzgerald is planning to bring in the Valerie Plame case, nor do I know who he might charge, or what evidence he has. But I sure am eager to find out. I also hope that whatever he does might refocus public […]
