Brooks on the TPP

David Brooks is very upset at the Democrats for torpedoing President Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership. The Democrats’ move threatens to impoverish the world’s poor, damage the American economy and stifle innovation. It even imperils world peace, in a mini-version of ...

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More on how we got the TPP that we got

For those of you interested in learning more about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), this article by David Deyen in The American Prospect is must reading.  Among other things, Deyen does something I haven’t seen anybody else do: scrutinize the ...

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Once Again: Why is the TPP bad, and Why is Obama Promoting it?

I’ve dealt with both of these questions already, but re-reading the relevant posts, I realized there were points I would have liked to develop but left at best implicit, so here I go again. First: what’s wrong with the TPP ...

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Those Lefty Democrats

The New York Times has long included among its columnists a number of conservatives, presumably out of a desire to demonstrate an openness to diverse viewpoints by the otherwise liberal newspaper. Its two most prominent house conservatives, David Brooks and ...

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The 2016 Horserace

The horserace, of course, is for the presidency. We are still 18 months away from the election, but the many aspirants and pretend-aspirants to the top job in the US are already busy raising money and running around the country, ...

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Democrats Divided

The surprising rebuke that Senate Democrats delivered to President Obama on Tuesday has been reversed. A bi-partisan agreement among supporters of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) will enable debate to proceed on the president’s requested fast-track authority. Whatever its outcome, ...

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Free Speech and Bigotry

There should be no question that Pamela Geller had a right to organize the contest that became a target for two jihadist would-be assassins.   There can be no excuse for the jihadists’ assault, which surely qualifies as an act of ...

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Friedman on the TPP

Surprise! Thomas Friedman is in favor of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).  I‘m kidding about the surprise, of course: Friedman’s support for the TPP was entirely predictable. The TPP, as I argued in my earlier post, isn’t mainly about trade; ...

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The American Prospect at 25

After citing The Nation’s 125th Anniversary issue in my last post, I realized that I really ought to give a shout-out to another of my favorite magazines that has just had an anniversary. The American Prospect, a monthly journal of politics ...

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He ain’t seen nuthin’ yet (Or: Everything is relative)

The 150th Anniversary edition of The Nation magazine, out last week, is a fun read, with reprints of articles dating back to the time of the journal’s early years by the likes of Henry James, Fredrick Law Olmstead, and H.L. ...

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