After any massive electoral failure comes the backstabbing and recriminations, and the Republican Party is proving to be unexceptional in this regard. The only real question is who will win out in the GOP’s civil war: the reformers who would like to move the party toward a more inclusive form of Christian Democracy, or the […]
Americans will lose an hour of sleep tonight as the clocks get set back for Daylight Saving Time. (Unless you live in Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, or American Samoa.) This caught me by surprise, because until last year daylight saving time didn’t start until April. But DST was expanded by the […]
Anyone who follows political events in Venezuela knows that the government of Hugo Chavez narrowly lost a referendum to reform the constitution. If you read the American press, though, you’d have a hard time understanding anything more than that.
Mainstream U.S. media have consistently portrayed Chavez as a “would-be dictator” and and “authoritarian”. Never mind that […]
As political philosophies go, socialism has more than its share of historical baggage, competing incompatible versions, and popular misperceptions. So most socialists eventually give in to temptation, and tack on an adjective before “socialist”, to clarify what they mean by the word. Some might say that it’s a waste of time to argue over what […]
In a previous post, I noted that Michael Moore’s “SiCKO” is not just a film about health care, but a full-blown argument for European-style social democracy. Ezra Klein makes the same point in an LA Times editorial, where he zeroes in on a subject dear to my heart: working time.
Klein notes that Americans get a […]
One of the consequences of having a political system that can only accommodate two parties is that the parties inevitably become big tents, encompassing an incoherent patchwork of incompatible political views. What’s more, political perspectives that are far from the mainstream tend to be systematically disempowered, because there is only one party that can realistically […]
The latest Washington scandal revolves around the so-called “D.C. Madam”, Deborah Jean Palfrey. She is facing prostitution charges for running an escort service in Washington D.C. Recently, Palfrey released her phone records, which touched off a stampede of press muckrackers looking for prominent politician clients.
The one they turned up was David Vitter (R-LA). As so […]
As I write this, the Democrats in the Senate are settling in for a long night, as the Republicans use the filibuster to prevent the passage of the Levin-Reed amendment to the 2008 defense authorization bill. The amendment calls for troops to start redeploying from Iraq within 120 days.
It’s unlikely that the amendment will pass, […]
Anyone’s who’s been following the ludicrous and depressing Presidential primary spectacle knows that we’ve had to endure a lot of silly news stories about hair. Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen hair.
Now, I don’t care how much John Edwards or Mitt Romney paid for their haircuts. In my socialist utopia, we would all get $400 […]
Michael Moore’s “SiCKO” is, in certain respects, a perfect political movie. One film isn’t going give us single-payer universal health care in this country, but this one might just move us a little closer to it. In its portrayal of a perverse health care system that places profits before patients, “SiCKO” manages to do […]
