Storm Over Ukraine (II)
I’m going to do something I almost never do: I’m going to go out on a limb. I’m going to say that I don’t think Putin will invade Ukraine. I think Putin holds to a maxim well-known to chess players: ...
Read MoreApartheid Today
You wouldn’t know it from reading the New York Times, but Amnesty International, one of the world’s leading human rights organizations, recently issued an exhaustively researched report accusing Israel of the crime of Apartheid. Maybe the Times didn’t cover the ...
Read MoreStorm over Ukraine
What to do about Russia’s threatened invasion of Ukraine? I think it altogether reasonable for the US and other Western nations to supply Ukraine with defensive weaponry to help deter Russian aggression. But I’m glad that President Biden has said ...
Read MoreNotes on Woke Language
A longstanding interest of mine is how the language we use when talking about politics can frame the discussion in ways that tend to skew the discourse in one way or another. In posts over the course of the years, ...
Read MoreBravo Biden
Finally, Biden said what needed to be said. Donald Trump is engaged in a war of lies aimed at subverting American democracy in the service of his endlessly needy ego. And, while nodding to the ideal of bipartisanship, Biden acknowledged ...
Read More“a man who…”
This isn’t really a post, just a nugget that I felt I had to share. It’s from the ever-incisive Fintan O’Toole, writing in the current NY Review of Books about Britain’s egregious PM Boris Johnson. Johnson, O’Toole tells us, is ...
Read MoreThe Continuing Crisis
Just a quickie today, mainly to pass on Thomas Edsall’s latest opinion piece, which provides an excellent summary of current academic scholarship on the fragile state of American democracy. I will just point to one poll result that Edsall cites ...
Read MoreRussia, the US and Ukraine
I’ve pretty much said it all before so this is going to be short. Certainly, the US should firmly oppose a threatened Russian invasion of Ukraine. But we still need a grand bargain with Russia that acknowledges and accommodates Russia/Putin’s ...
Read MoreDouthat on Abortion
[Note: I intended to reply immediately to Ross Douthat’s NYT op.ed. last week on abortion, but a computer disaster caused delay. Hopefully you will agree that my post today is better late than never.] For Ross Douthat, the case against ...
Read MoreHope for Honduras
Elections in Honduras have resulted in an apparently decisive victory for the leftist opposition candidate, Xiomara Castro, 12 years after a coup that ousted her husband, Manuel Zelaya, from power. The junta that followed was fortunately less than completely successful in ...
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