Weekly Standard’s David Brooks has an article discussing the Democrat’s Bush-hatred and its likely sabotaging effects on their viability as a party:
NOW IT IS TRUE that you can find conservatives and Republicans who went berserk during the Clinton years, accusing the Clintons of multiple murders and obsessing over how Vince Foster’s body may or may […]
Great piece in the Guardian on the “crisis” in the British music industry.
The BBC have thus far offered only sketchy details of what the Great British Music Debate will contain, perhaps in fear of boring prospective listeners to death before transmission. The website proffers offers the usual hoary stuff: the music industry is obsessed with […]
Michael Tomasky’s American Prospect columns are invariably smart and inspiring that they’ve entered my weekly must-read list. This week’s piece is particularly good, taking on the Democrat’s hedging as well as the Republicans’ let’s starve the government philosophy:
The second line of attack on the tax cuts will take more courage and imagination. It has to […]
The PBS NewsHour last night had a good segment on the Congoese civil war. One of the pundits interviewed, Bill Fletcher, offered a harsh view of the problem in the U.S.’s attitude toward African affairs:
When it comes to Africa, both Democratic and Republican administrations have shown a callousness towards the actual concerns of the continent, […]
The blog is back from haitus. First, of note this week is a piece on tort reform in the Economist. This is one issue on which the Republicans are, in sum, right. On one hand there are the practical issues, in particular the staggering growth of health care costs, fueled in part by malpractice litigation. […]
From Slate’s candidate profiles (start here), here’s the list of Democratic pres. contender campaign theme songs:
Lieberman - We Are Family (Sister Sledge)Kerry - I Won’t Back Down (Tom Petty), No Surrender (Bruce Springsteen)John Edwards - Small Town (John Mellencamp)Dick Gephardt - The Best (Tina Turner)Bob Graham - The Best (Tina Turner)Howard Dean - A Little […]
I actually usually like Maureen Dowd’s commentary pieces and tend to defend her against her critics…but do we really need a piece telling us that straight men don’t like to shop for clothes?
The Economist has a polemic against New York’s rent control policies, which along with San Francisco’s are the strongest in the country, and with the most dysfunctional effects. The controls help mainly weathier tenants and do little for the poor in the outer burroughs. If nothing else, the historical track record of New York’s housing […]
David Warsh - who tends to lean conservative in his political orientation - gives a thoughtful and impassioned defense of the New York Times’ coverage (by David Firestone) of the recent legislative battles over the child tax credit:
the power of Firestone’s stories derive from the stark contrast between one of the Republican Party’s central claims […]
Hot off the presses:
The Justice Department has barred a group of employees from holding their annual gay pride event at the department’s headquarters, the first time such an event has been blocked by any federal agency, gay rights leaders said today.
Yes, it is a small matter, but it’s very smallness is what’s so maddening. That […]
From the Globe, a truly depressing reminder that Government Center is not going to be improved anytime soon, and in fact will likely get worse:
After nearly a decade of grand plans to transform City Hall Plaza from eyesore to important public space, it’s come to this: a suggestion to build a garage for cars and […]
The Guardian has an excellent and entertaining article on the dubious trend of reviving early 80s music and fashion as ‘genius’. I have to say I like a lot of the retro bands mentioned by the piece, and have recently really enjoyed the releases by Hot Hot Heat (retro Cars and XTC, with Cure vocals) […]
Things have been busy here at Marxists for Keynes, so haven’t been able to post as regularly…apologies. Dan Kennedy today weighs in on the WMD issue.
President Bush now has a chaotic mess on his hands — a mess that was predicted by those of us who opposed going to war without an explicit UN mandate.
Nevertheless, […]