With great fanfare, Trump went through the motions of carrying out a campaign promise when he negotiated a revised NAFTA. Supposedly, this would be better for the United States, and would appeal to the same blue-collar workers who deserted the Democrats to support Trump in 2016. It might even peel off some union support. […]
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Posted inTAP
Britain’s Unlikely Grand Coalition (Don’t Mention the War)
What on Earth are we to make of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s latest Hail Mary pass—her attempt to work with her arch-enemy, Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, to save the British economy from crashing out of the EU, and possibly save her own neck. The Brits, unlike the Germans and other continentals, tend to […]
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Orwell Watch: “Redacted”
When the government censors a document, reporters and editors should stop using the evasive word, redacted. They should use the right word—censored. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, redacted has been around since the 15th century. It’s proper meaning is “edited, or prepared for publication.” But in the past couple of decades, government bodies have […]
Posted inLaw and Justice
Prison Advocates Declare Win as Proposed Prison Phone Industry Merger Dies
Last year, two prison phone company giants, Securus and Inmate Calling Solutions (ICS) announced they planned to merge, sparking concerns of duopoly in an industry already dominated by a just a few major players. Such consolidation has long impacted poor people and those of color disproportionately, along with their families, as prison phone companies charge […]
Posted inTAP
Who’s More Inept Than the British Tories?
The never-ending Brexit follies in the U.K. have made unmistakably clear just how ragingly dysfunctional, divided and dumb that nation’s venerable Conservative Party has become. In the nearly three years since voters narrowly decreed a withdrawal from the European Union, the governing Tories have been unable to come up with a plan to put through […]
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Expect Trump To Be Back on the Defensive Soon
Some commentators contend that Mueller’s non-finding of criminal wrongdoing on Trump’s part paradoxically “did Democrats a favor.” In this view, the door is now closed on further investigations of Trump’s misdeeds, and Dems can now focus on the 2020 election, the surest way of removing Trump. This theory is nonsense. Trump’s misuse of office has […]
Posted inTAP
The Spurious Claims of Democratic Purplehood
“We’re actually a more purple caucus today than we were a year ago,” Rep. Jim Himes says in a story in today’s Washington Post. Himes’s own purpleness is beyond question: H’s a past chairman of the New Democrat Coalition, and is, to my knowledge, the sole Democratic House member who worked at Goldman Sachs. He […]
Posted inTAP
Connecting the Dots in the Catastrophe that is Europe
There is a direct connection between the three core elements of Europe’s deepening calamity. Those would be (a) the failure of the EU leadership to prevent the Greek financial crisis from crippling the EU economy as a whole; (b) the popular backlash in a worsening economy against refugees; and (c) the rise of the far […]
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Mueller Punts to Congress
By leaving open the question of whether Donald Trump obstructed justice, Robert Mueller fairly begs Congress to pursue it. We may or may not learn from the full text of Mueller’s report why he chose neither to charge Trump nor to exonerate him. It would be useful to know, but either way the duty now […]
Posted inTAP
Conservatives: Fighting the Blowback from Their Own Idiocies
Back when American conservatism was actually a body of thought, and not just an apologia for Donald Trump’s racism and narcissism, conservatives liked to warn against the unintended consequences of governmental activism. That said, some of the most catastrophic unintended consequences of governmental activism to have befallen us came from the governmental activism of conservatives […]
