Category: Politics
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Time to swallow pride, listen to Iran
Just do it. In the first official high-level talks with Iran in decades, the U.S. apparently managed to complain about Iran, while Iran’s representative suggested a constructive step forward: a regular trilateral group allowing the U.S., Iran, and Iraq to meet regularly and, with luck, hash out some security issues. The U.S. is balking, for…
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Wallowing in the misery of Bush’s mistakes
This evening to the splendid St. George’s bookstore here in Prenzlauer, which was hosting a discussion with New York Review of Books writer Thomas Powers, a longtime chronicler of intelligence agencies and their misdeeds. It turned out to be wholly retrospective, covering again the role of the CIA in setting the stage for the Iraq…
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Keeping order, with dangerous echoes
The G-8 Summit here in Germany early next month is already fulfilling its own prophecies. It almost doesn’t matter what happens at the meeting itself; it is the raw stuff of symbolism, for both sides. Europeans, and the UN, are hoping for an environmental breakthrough from the US that won’t happen. Russia will dig in…
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US health care system in last place, except for price
A new study from the Commonwealth Fund ranks big-country health care systems on a variety of measures, including such desirables as access to care, patient safety, cost, efficiency and equity. Perhaps predictably, the US comes in last in almost all categories, except for price. It’s a tired refrain now: We pay more, and get less,…
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Honoring the dead
The memorial to the Soviet war dead in Schönholzer Heide is monumental, in the true Soviet sense, unlike anything else I’ve seen in Berlin. It sprawls out an acre or two long, funereal marble everywhere. In the shadow of a soaring obelisk, a woman’s statue holds a dead soldier in her arms, almost Pieta-style. In…
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A techie’s view of unions
Paul Graham, a well-read programmer, venture capitalist and blogger, offers a view of unions filtered through Silicon Valley. It’s worth thinking about, if only because the tech industry has long viewed itself as having avoided the “mistakes” of older industries. The reasons unions were able to gain so much power, and economic benefits for their…
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Conservatives miss the entire point of evolution. Twice.
The apparent conservative debate over whether evolution is a real thing, and if so, whether it helps their movement, would be side-splittingly funny if it weren’t itself a real thing. Apparently three of the 10 candidates for the GOP nomination are now on record as saying it’s all bunk, this evolutionary theory. Which, btw, they’re…
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Halliburton moving to Dubai
Halliburton, Cheney’s baby, winner of all those no-bid contracts in Iraq, is moving its corporate headquarters from Houston to Dubai. Why, when it’s received such largess from the American government? It wants to improve relations with local state-owned oil companies, it says. Oh, and incidentally, they’ll be paying practically no corporate taxes there. Market types…
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The long view, in Afghanistan: Get out, while you can
Most everyone is familiar with how the Afghans kicked the Soviets out after years of bitter battle. I was less familiar with an earlier version of roughly the same story, almost 150 years earlier, when the British first decided to invade in order to put their own ruler on the throne, and forestall a largely…
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RIP Molly Ivins
A real loss to journalism and politics. There isn’t anyone in the US who can take her place, whose tongue is as sharp, but whose satire is made even more poignant by her real understanding of, and even sympathy for, the blemishes of democracy.
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Can’t teach an old Bush new tricks, apparently
Today Bush will give his State of the Union (“strong?” probably not. “Skeptical,” maybe), and amidst much sleight-of-hand, will continue to blame Iran for smuggling weapons into Iraq to destabilize the country. Ie, it’s their fault, not mine. LAT has a good piece today critiquing this claim, noting that there’s really very little evidence of…
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Uh… we don’t have a country anymore? Oh, ha ha…
Pity the poor folks in Belgium watching television who believed, ’cause it was on the news, that their country had split up and gone the way of the dodo. Or, say, Czechoslovakia. A state-funded channel ran a long broadcast Wednesday showing footage of fleeing monarchs, blocked train routes, and information about the “secession” of Flanders,…
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Three cheers. Now comes the tricky part.
Hoorah for the Dems, two years, or four years, or six years late, depending on how you count. This will mitigate the disasterous policies that Bush is able to pursue. I expect it will make other congressional Republicans extraordinarily wary of agreeing with him in public. The next two years will be positioning for 2008.…
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Pärt dedicates works to murdered Russian reporter
On this side of the Atlantic, the apparent contract killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya a few weeks ago has been big news. She has been consistently one of the strongest, and bravest, media critics of Putin and Russian policy. On the eve of publishing a big story about Chechnya, she was killed. Much speculation…
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Another Rome comparison. No, it’s not a happy one.
It’s getting way too easy to make comparisons between the current U.S. and the late Roman Republic. Sure, they’re not spot-on. But maybe someone there in Washington ought to be reading some Plutarch. Today in the NYT novelist Ed Harris points to a critical moment in the pre-Empire years, in 68 BC, when pirates attacked…