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Archive: Oct 2009

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If you’re like me, you’ll agree there’s nothing so dispiriting as finding yourself in the lavishly appointed dining room of a luxury resort, flute of Prosecco in hand, about to…

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Rethinking the Drone Wars

Jane Mayer’s “The Predator War” in the current New Yorker (abstract here) is a must-read addressing an essential issue. I see the major question as simple: have our accountability and…

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A Foreign Service Guide to the World’s Hot Spots and Hellholes

As Scott Horton recently noted a few months back, no country in the world but the United States “regularly hands out choice ambassadorships as a favor for campaign funding bundlers…A…

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From Harper’s Magazine, November 1964:Hofstadter on the “Paranoid Style” From “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” by Richard Hofstadter, from the November 1964 Harper’s Magazine. American politics has often been…

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Putting Political Prosecutions on the Defensive

Earlier this month, in a courtroom in Savannah, Georgia, attorneys for former Georgia senate majority leader Charles Walker took on the prosecution. There was already some evidence that Walker was…

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The sheer scale of support to the banking sector is breathtaking. In the UK, in the form of direct or guaranteed loans and equity investment, it is not far short…

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The Washington Bubble and the Political Wink

I love when Washington political reporters inadvertently reveal that they live in a beltway bubble and talk to no one other than those inside of it. As was the case…

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Correction: Pork funneled to library, not museum

An email, slightly edited, from Martha Regula of the National First Ladies’ Library complaining about a piece I wrote discussing earmarks funneled to her institution: Let me point out just…

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They’re Back: Hill veterans back to lobby for drugmakers

From ProPublica: Four years ago, a group of lawmakers and aides crafted Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program for seniors that has produced billions of dollars of profits for…

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McPherson was born in 1943, in Savannah, Georgia. Later, as he writes in “Going Up To Atlanta,” he worked at odd jobs to help support his mother, brother, and sisters…

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Oink: News from the federal pork investigation

The Washington Post reported over the weekend on the ongoing federal investigation into defense earmarks, saying that it was “increasingly focused on a former top aide to Rep. Peter J.…

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How Awful Is Richard Cohen: Let us count the ways

“Does any of this matter, or is it merely interesting?” Richard Cohen of the Washington Post asked about his own column in today’s paper. Since Cohen wrote it, you already…

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Obama and the “Loony Left”

“Can I speak freely about the liberal whiners?” asks a well-connected Democratic strategist. “These are the same people who have never participated in, much less won, a campaign, who have…

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Is WaPo Opinion Section the Worst in America?

It’s a new Georgetown cocktail-party game: name the single stupidest piece to run in Fred Hiatt’s opinion pages this week. So many to choose from. After a week of colossal…

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Weekly Review

President Obama appeared likely to surge 40,000 troops into Afghanistan, thus adopting the key military tactic that the Bush Administration defined as successful in Iraq.NY TimesIn Afghanistan, a country with…

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Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective…

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Inside Jung’s Red Book: Six Questions for Sonu Shamdasani

The long-awaited publication of C.G. Jung’s Red Book is causing ripples in the world of psychology. Notwithstanding its enormous folio size and its hefty price tag, the book is already…

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CIA Efforts to Keep Torture Secrets Suffer a Key Loss in British High Court

Britain’s High Court issued a decision on Friday directing that classified information shared by the CIA with British intelligence services concerning the torture and mistreatment of a former Guantánamo prisoner…

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Hillel’s Silver Rule

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I am black and beautiful

? ????????? ????? ????????, ??????? ????????????; ?????????? ?????, ??????????? ????????. ? ???-??????????? ???????? ????????????, ???????????????? ??????????; ?????? ?????? ???????-???, ???????? ??????? ???-???????????–???????? ???????, ??? ??????????. I am black and beautiful,…

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Delusional in Dixie

It’s widely accepted wisdom in Washington these days that the Republican brand is tarnished. But what’s striking is the regional variation. In the last fifteen years, although there has been…

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How Obama Cracks Down on Lobbyist Influence

From Politico: At a meeting last April with corporate lobbyists, aides to President Barack Obama and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) helped set in motion a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, primarily financed…

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Thirty Republican Senators Oppose Corporate Accountability for Gang Rape

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart gives us a recap, focusing on Neoconfederate Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL):…

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Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which…

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Revealed: Bart Simpson behind helium balloon hoax

The story that captivated the nation ends with a whimper, not a bang. “A 6-year-old boy…thought to be inside a balloon that floated over Colorado for over two hours has…

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In 1906, famous composer John Philip Sousa took to Appleton’s Magazine to pen an essay decrying the latest piratical threat to his livelihood, to the entire body politic, and to…

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