It’s Official: Republican Senators Deny Science, 49-5
In a series of resolutions introduced in the Senate, Democrats have used the debate over the Keystone pipeline to get Republicans to go on record on their views on climate change. Remarkably, practically all Senate Republicans are willing to acknowledge ...
Read MorePresident Obama on the State of the Union
President Obama in his SOTU address has proposed a number of worthwhile initiatives that he knows have no chance of passage. Many Republicans were outraged. Doesn’t he know that he lost the last (midterm) elections? How dare he propose ...
Read MoreThe Problem of Police Racism
In my last post I noted without elaboration that the problem of police racism is neither simple nor straightforward. Now I’ll try to explain. First, we need to consider the nature of contemporary racism in the United States. For centuries, ...
Read MoreDe Blasio and the Police (III)
An op-ed in today’s New York Times, “Why we’re so Mad at de Blasio,” provides a good, reasonable statement of the NY police case against the mayor. But it’s not good enough. The author is Steve Osborne, a retired NY ...
Read MoreDeBlasio and the Police (II)
A meeting yesterday between Mayor Bill DeBlasio with the leaders of five NYC police unions, though apparently fairly civil, yielded no clear progress toward a resolution of the current antagonism between City Hall and New York’s men in blue. That ...
Read MoreA note on Race and the NYPD
An illuminating story from Reuters reporter Michelle Conlin, who reported on interviews with 15 retired and 10 active black NYC police officers. Of the 25, all but one reported having had at least one off-duty experience of racial profiling by ...
Read MoreDeBlasio and the Police
I was planning on doing a post on the above topic when I came across this from The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky. It is so good that I’m passing it on without further comment–you should just read it. And, while ...
Read MoreThe US and Torture: A Brazilian Perspective
Thanks to the Washington Monthly’s Nancy LeTourneau, I was alerted to another torture report that came out in recent days, this one from Brazil. That country’s National Truth Commission reported on its investigation into the 21-years of dictatorship that came ...
Read MoreCuba and the US
I have sometimes cited US-Cuban relations as an unusually pure illustration of the effects of the US presidential electoral college on policy. Cuba had been a major locus of Cold War history: the site of the US’s most embarrassing Cold ...
Read MoreTorture and Its Apologists
A notably fatuous defense of the use of torture by the Bush administration’s CIA came unsurprisingly from ex-President Bush himself, before the Senate Intelligence Committee report came out: We’re fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the ...
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