The Statesman, the Senator and the Agitators

Last week Henry Kissinger was expatiating before a Senate committee when he was rudely interrupted. A bunch of females suddenly swarmed around the elder statesman, dangling handcuffs around his head and proclaiming him a war criminal. They were quickly whisked ...

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Moulitsas on Obama

I always enjoy reading stuff by well-known commentators that more or less repeats stuff that I’ve been saying for years. So, I was happy to see Marcos Moulitsas, the founder of the popular Daily Kos website, reflecting on the uncharacteristic ...

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The Greeks Say “Enough”

You don’t often find Paul Krugman and the Wall Street Journal editorial page in agreement, but this morning they did agree on one thing: the austerity that has been inflicted on Greece has been short-sighted and destructive, and the smashing ...

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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 ...

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President 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 ...

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The 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, ...

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De 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 NYC police case against the mayor. But it’s not good enough. The author is Steve Osborne, a retired NYC ...

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DeBlasio 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 ...

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A 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 ...

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DeBlasio 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 ...

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