Like Veteran's Day, Memorial Day has now lost its original meaning. I'm generally against detaching remembrance holidays from the wars that generated them, because generalizing does damage to the experience of the particular. Rather than hazy recollections of all US wars (and of all US...
Month: May 2011
Iain Ballantyne's Killing the Bismarck undertakes the almost absurdly difficult job of saying something new about the Royal Navy' hunt for the German battleship Bismarck. I've mentioned Ballantyne's book a.
It appears that Sepp Blatter's cunning ploy succeeded. Mohamed Bin Hammam has pulled out of the race to serve as FIFA President, leaving the field about as competitive as a.
Senator Tom Coburn slams the National Science Foundation again in his latest report, and reiterates his at least twice-quashed suggestion that all NSF funding for political science be eliminated. Some members of the poliscigentsia are worried. I haven't read the report yet, but I find...
On the basis of what empirical studies I could find about the effectiveness of international tribunals versus execution of mass-murderers, I debunk the following in my latest Current Intelligence essay,.
Maybe he was a good restaurant critic -- although there's considerable debate on that point* -- but on politics, Bruni was awful. It's hard to know what the Times was.
Joe Nocera's pleas to accept the Ryan plan as a conversation-starter notwithstanding, there's no conversation less in need of starting than the conversation about how to reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits. It's hard to think of another topic Beltway pundits are more likely to...
Nice piece over at Democratic Strategist on this ongoing saga. Apparently Crazy Plan B had a bad day. It's in the interests of the Republicans that only one model of.
The terrorist threat that constitutes much more of a present danger to Americans than the kind that compels executive branch officials to ignore the Constitution.
Federal judge rules that the ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates is unconstitutional. It is still not clear whether the 5-4 decision ultimate holding the initial ruling will be written by Kennedy or Roberts; I'm definitely guessing that the former will see this as...
Yglesias: Watching Paul Ryan earlier today talking at the Peterson Fiscal Summit I was amazed by the number of times he said the word “Mediscare,” which is a conservative jargon.
Part of Rick Perlstein's ode to Hubert Humphrey: Was Humphrey really as hawkish as all that? Johnson didn’t think so; he actually preferred that Nixon win the election. He didn’t.