The Obama administration has reached the unenviable stage in
which it’s almost impossible to determine where one scandal ends
and another begins.
The most recent case in point is President Obama’s decision to
kinda sorta intervene in the Syrian civil...
Conservative
politicians in the modern world generally despise their own voters.
They need them at election time, but they do not enjoy meeting
them, and find their views on morals, migration, education, and
crime embarrassing. This is a problem only when...
Despite his evident reluctance to take America into the Syrian
civil war, President Barack Obama appears to be traveling down that
road step-by-step. He has decided the U.S. will provide weapons to
the insurgents. If that action fails to transform the con...
“Wooly Bully,” the famous hit of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs,
was recorded almost fifty years ago. It begins with the bland
assertion, “Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw.” But today, the
mere existence of that innocent sounding conversation...
Remember the power ballad? It was a subgenre of rock music
pioneered by Boston in 1976 and Styx a year later. From
near-symphonic beginnings in “More Than a Feeling” and “Come Sail
Away,” the power ballad elbowed its way to prominence in the early...
The
ShahBy Abbas
Milani(Palgrave Macmillan, 496 pages, $18
paperback edition)
The Islamic Republic of Iran has elected a “moderate” successor
to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, infamous for his threat-laced
apocalyptic rhetoric. All the candida...
Although I enjoyed the first season of Mad Men, which
aired in 2007, I got a bit bored with it thereafter. It seemed to
me to have degenerated into mere soap opera. This was also true of
The Sopranos, which the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner,
had worked...
Just when it seems like things have hit a stride in the Middle
East, something new happens and turns everything on its head.
On Thursday, the U.S. announced its plans to intervene in Syria
on behalf of the rebels, and many
loud voices—including hawkish...
Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian has wrapped up an
online question-and-answer session with NSA leaker Edward
Snowden. He answered questions about his backstory, motivations,
contact with the Chinese government (none, he said), and claims of
awesome, unive...
There’s a report out there in a story by the New
Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that is written
up this way in Politico and was also quoted by Rush
Limbaugh. Here’s the pull quote:
Fox News has notably changed its tone since the election.…
McCain t...
Arguments about overpopulation—when the number of people in an
area is believed to have exceeded the carrying capacity of that
area—are traditionally grounded in environmental concerns about the
decline of global resources and irreversible damage to t...
Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray disclosed a
comprehensive welfare reform bill this morning that focuses on
helping welfare recipients find jobs. It includes the creation of a
“full-employment program” that focuses on job placement and no...
