Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Alaska’s faux libertarian economics
At last, we have a legitimate criticism of Sarah Palin and her fellow Republicans in Alaska. But it’s worth noting that Alaska is just an extreme case of the US economy’s dependence on state support. In Thursday’s New York Times, Michael Powell wrote about how Republican politicians in Alaska have a contradictory relationship with the […]
The Culture War over the Ground Zero mosque
It’s hard to know who’s worse in the NYC mosque debate: the opportunistic, anti-Muslim right or the Muslim-loving, masses-fearing liberals. Read my spiked article in full here.
The unpopular political class
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that “voters are disenchanted with the political establishment in Washington”. Positive feelings for both major parties are at new all-time lows: the Democrats are at 33 percent, and the Republicans at 24 percent. There’s also greater pessimism about the economy and the course of the Afghanistan war. Moreover, […]
Charlie Rangel shouldn’t resign (at least not yet)
New York representative Charlie Rangel spoke with emotion and at length on the floor of the House yesterday, giving what some describe as a “trainwreck” of a speech. Rangel faces accusations of corruption: for violating congressional rules for soliciting donations for a City College of New York named after him; using a rent-stabilized apartment for […]
This is a “digital deluge”, not the Pentagon Papers
Some are comparing Wikileaks’ 92,000 Afghan documents to the internal US study of Vietnam leaked in 1971. But the differences are striking. Read my article in spiked, which is based on a recent blog post, in full here.
Not the Pentagon Papers
The release of classified documents on the Afghanistan war by Wikileaks to three major newspapers has been compared to the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret study of US Vietnam War. But this is an inaccurate comparison: in fact, the differences between the two whistle-blowing incidents highlight how today’s Wikileaks story is much less meaningful in political […]
The special relationship
Well, an end to my radio silence. I travelled to London last week, and thought I’d have time to post from there, but discovered that I did not. As it happens, the news while I was in London was about America – namely, David Cameron’s trip to America. The Prime Minister first visited Washington for […]
The Russian “spies”
Apparently we’ve had Russian spies in our midst, pretending to be ordinary folks, for more than a decade. They exchanged orange bags at train stations, used invisible ink and buried money in fields. Who knew the Cold War was still raging all this time? The New York Times and others reported today that federal prosecutors […]
McChrystal: Afghanistan war spins out of America’s control
UPDATE: This post has been re-published as an article in spiked (here). President Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal from his post as commander of US military forces in Afghanistan today, and replaced him with General David Petraeus, who led the 2007 surge campaign in Iraq. This was in response to comments made by McChrystal and his aides […]
Obama: the Gulf between words and deeds
Instead of all the dithering, lofty rhetoric and tough talk, the US president should be honest about the need to keep on drilling. Read my spiked article in full here.