The Other Half of New York City
For anyone living in New York City, or even vaguely familiar with the city and its mayor, this is not surprising news. But it’s still unwelcome: The rise in New York City’s poverty rate...
Author: Elias Isquith
Immigration Reform’s Big Tent
Here’s a pretty good New York Times piece on whether or how the Boston Marathon bombing has affected their views on immigration reform. (It’s got a touch of Jane Goodall with the plebes; but,...
The Little Children Suffer
I didn’t write anything about gun violence during the weeks leading up to what the president called a “shameful day.” I may have not written anything about gun violence ever, period, full stop. Lately,...
On Reinhart and Rogoff
As Nob deftly noted, there was big news on Tuesday as an influential 2010 study by professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff was found, to put it lightly, to be deeply flawed. The paper’s conclusions...
Rand Paul, Victim
Note: My thoughts and fervent best wishes go out to everyone in Boston. At this early juncture I feel that’s all that can be responsibly said. As Ta-Nehisi Coates notes, this report should put to rest any...
Outreach, Rand Paul Style
I’ve been thinking lately about Rand Paul’s recent attempt at what is called minority outreach at Howard University, “the historically black college” (apparently the mandatory phrasing). I’ve been thinking about what, exactly, Paul did...
The GOP’s Self-inflicted Wound
Ezra Klein flags an interesting Gallup result showing rare uniformity in American public opinion. Turns out near everyone, Republicans included, thinks the GOP is intransigent. And they don’t like it: [Twenty-two] percent of Democrats, 17 percent...
What Spurs the GOP’s Conservative Base
Andrew Kohut, former Pew Research Center president and founding director, has a big op-ed in WaPo arguing that while the GOP’s intransigent conservative base keeps it competitive at the Congressional level, it at the...
Dignity, Empathy, and the Iraq War
So Digby’s reading these Iraq War mea culpas — and thank god for that because I tried before quickly determining I can’t stands no more: David Ignatius wrote his Iraq mea culpa today and...
The Problem with Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage
Why even the most elegant or fairly put argument against gay marriage are doomed to failure.
A Few Thoughts on the Media’s Coverage of Steubenville
Among many others, I have an unfortunate habit of writing posts during the evenings that I ultimately don’t finish. By the time I’ve got a moment to return to the piece, it’s either old...
Cult of the CEO, Feminism Edition
One of my pet peeves, one I will just never be able to fix and should probably have dropped ages ago, is how bourgeois so much elite journalism is today. Yes, I know it’s...
The State of the Union’s Quiet Radicalism
Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast’s response to the president’s fifth State of the Union address sounds much like my own. It was Obama’s second liberal stemwinder in a row; and if nothing else, the...
Eric Cantor’s Self-Serving Nonsense
So Cantor gave his aforementioned big speech yesterday, the one about turning the GOP into an expansively inclusive party of multiple ethnicities and income brackets, and MSNBC was there to tell the tale. Their description is curious, however,...
Eric Cantor’s Plan to Save the GOP
Ron Fournier of National Journal is following Eric Cantor around as the House Majority Leader terrifies DC’s infants (“Eric Cantor grabs a plastic dinosaur from the pile of toys in front of 1-year-old Mekhi Scott, taps...
Establishment GOP to Tea Party: That Thing You Keep Doing? Stop That.
I feel like I shouldn’t laugh, because this remains a good idea, despite being extremely belated; but a New York Times report has found that following Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Richard Mourdock, and Todd Akin, some GOP heavies...
Blackmun on Roe, 14 Years Later
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/58205419 w=600&h=500] Via Digby I see this 1987 interview between Bill Moyers and Harry Blackmun, former Supreme Court Justice and author of Roe v. Wade. One thing to understand about Blackmun is that despite whatever assumptions...
System Failure: What David Brooks Doesn’t Get About Meritocracy — And Why He Never Will
David Brooks’s latest, this one on the meritocracy, is a good example of how all the right questions and smart anaylsis in the world is not going to make up for a totally wrong premise...
The Second Inaugural: A Big Speech
[A little late to post this, I know, but I just realized I had not shared it with the League when I first wrote it. — EI] I don’t know what I expected to...
