Even before the polls opened for voting in the U.S. midterm elections, the finger-pointing had already begun. The Obama agenda, instead of coming to term after four years, was suffering a miscarriage halfway through. The potential culprits were many and diverse. President Barack Obama was to blame because his populist attempt to rally the economically… Continue reading Midterm Miscarriage
What were NBC executives thinking? The unemployment rate remains near double digits, and many Americans have simply stopped looking for work. And what does the network premier this fall but a sitcom called Outsourced about an American manager sent to run a call center in India. The jokes revolve around funny names, unappetizing food, Sikh… Continue reading What’s So Funny about Outsourcing?
Writing about it didn’t, alas, prevent it from happening. In the late 1940s, Gore Vidal lived in Guatemala, where he shared a house with the writer Anaïs Nin, lived on the cheap, and wrote Dark Green, Bright Red. Published in 1950, this undeservedly obscure novel describes how the operatives of the World Banana Company work… Continue reading Not-So-Magical Realism
In the high-vaulted main hall of Union Station in Washington, DC, the sound of a drone attack interrupts the morning rush hour. A dozen people suddenly freeze in place. Some point up into the air. Others crouch with hands over their heads in a vain attempt at self-protection. The commuters on their way to and… Continue reading The White Noise of War
The song Take This Job and Shove It hit No. 1 on the country music charts in 1978. The blue-collar worker in the song that Johnny Paycheck made famous was working up the nerve to leave the factory after 15 years on the production line. It wasn’t necessarily the best time to mouth off at… Continue reading Take This Job and….
The Great Recession may be officially over but the United States is stuck in a prolonged economic crisis, with joblessness hovering around 10 percent. Millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans are fed up. They want jobs. But many lawmakers are reluctant to invest more revenue in job creation because of concerns over the national debt.… Continue reading More Jobs, Less War
With the unemployment rate still hovering stubbornly around 10 percent, everyone is talking jobs. The White House is pressing for an extension of a subsidized jobs program that was part of the 2009 stimulus package. Candidates in the upcoming midterm elections are touting their own schemes to boost employment. The Tea Party movement and the… Continue reading We Have to Trim the Bloated Pentagon Budget
When he took over the top job in the Soviet Union in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev wasn’t tasked with — nor did he envision — dismantling the Soviet system. Yet after six years of economic and political reforms, the unintended consequence of Gorbachev’s restructuring was the 74-year-old empire’s collapse. In his prescient Granta essay on Gorbachev… Continue reading Gorbachev of the Pentagon
My neighbor two doors down flies a Confederate flag alongside his more conventional stars and stripes. He drives a pickup truck, sports a number of provocative tattoos, and is about as white as Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich. I don’t know if he would vote for either Sarah or Newt, but he’s a pretty conservative… Continue reading “They” Are Not Taking “Our” Jobs
It seems to be an open-and-shut case. Nuclear weapons are bad. It’s best for the world if no more countries acquire nuclear weapons. Iran is currently engaged in uranium enrichment that could eventually produce a nuclear weapon. It built a secret facility to advance this program and might now be building another one. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s… Continue reading Dealing with Iran
To: Leon Panetta, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, Sana’a office Re: Memo XE1850 Leon: Greetings from Yemen. It’s been a year since I corresponded directly with you. Perhaps you remember my 2009 memo in which I recommended outsourcing our assassinations – er, sorry, our “targeted killings” – to China. I suggested that China would do… Continue reading Repackaging Assassination
Except for a few residual Know-Nothings, Americans wouldn’t think twice about voting for a Catholic president. In the last election, President Obama abolished the presidential race taboo. And we’re likely to have a woman president in the next decade or so. Of course, we haven’t elected a Catholic since Kennedy, we might not break the… Continue reading My Weak Muslim President
Law became sexy in the mid-1980s. I still find this a bewildering transformation in American society. At the time, I thought that there could be nothing quite so boring as a court case or a legal brief. But then the TV show L.A. Law debuted in 1986, and lawyers never looked so good. The following… Continue reading Can We Talk?
I have a simple question for Robert Gibbs, the outspoken press secretary of the Obama administration who recently told the “professional left” to quit criticizing the president. Yes, the president has successfully pushed through some major legislation on health care and financial reform, has negotiated an important arms control treaty with Russia, and has brought… Continue reading Where’s Our Money?
Relations between the United States and North Korea, never particularly warm, have truly frosted over in recent months. The Obama administration, in the wake of the Cheonan incident, has added financial sanctions to a lengthening list of efforts to box in Pyongyang. In conjunction with Seoul, Washington has ramped up military exercises in the region.… Continue reading North Korea: Why Engagement Now
The big news in the reality TV world is the intersection of Sarah Palin and Kate Gosselin. The Alaska governor is preparing her own show called “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” while Kate Gosselin runs her own pimp-my-children show called “Kate Plus Eight.” Kate has reportedly brought her kids up to Alaska for a big scramble through… Continue reading When Reality Shows Collide
July was the deadliest month yet for U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan. In Iraq, while political factions continue a five-month squabble over who will lead the government, insurgent violence is growing. The WikiLeaks info-dump of more than 90,000 documents, in addition to proving to the few who had not yet realized that the United States… Continue reading War in Eastasia
President Obama, who played on a high school team that claimed a state championship, knows basketball. He famously sank a three-pointer during a 2008 campaign visit to U.S. troops in Kuwait. He continues to play at the White House, where he has installed a basketball court on the South Lawn. And he has imported some… Continue reading Obama: Faking Right?
Who would have thought that the evil team bent on destroying the world would be composed entirely of people of color? In the imagination of Hollywood, after all, the bad guys are now white guys like the scientists gone bad in Spiderman or those jokers in Batman or the military privateers of Avatar. Occasionally, scriptwriters… Continue reading Shades of Evil
In espionage, as in sports, we generally see the heroism of our side and the perfidy of the opponent. The latest spy scandal involving the Russian “sleepers” is a case in point. The coverage of the Russian spy ring has been full of intriguing and salacious details: forged passports, fake identities, and secret coded texts… Continue reading Spy vs Spy
Anti-government rhetoric is all the rage these days. And “rage” is the operative word here. Small-government enthusiasts are like the drivers of Hummers incensed at all the difficulties they encounter on the roadway — pesky speed limits, red lights, construction-related delays. Fuming at these restrictions on their liberty, they suddenly have a profanity-laced meltdown and… Continue reading Hummer Rules
Aside from the occasional asteroid and volcanic outburst, human beings are responsible for the greatest messes on the planet. We’ve polluted the air and water, punched holes in the ozone, and pumped enough carbon into the atmosphere to overwhelm the global thermostat. Nor is this merely a modern attribute of homo sapiens. As Jared Diamond… Continue reading BP and Sado-Messochism
According to the business plan of the 10,000 Women project, an investment of $100 million over five years will create 10,000 female entrepreneurs in the developing world. The money goes to business education – MBAs – for women in the global south who, in turn, are expected to create businesses that employ people and grow… Continue reading The Talented Tenth
In this age of Amazon recommendations and Kindle downloads, I still rely on the old-fashioned services of a book buyer. My personal book buyer has an uncanny ability to anticipate my tastes. He has introduced me to out-of-print novelists, obscure playwrights and classic philosophy tracts. I’ve enjoyed nearly all of his choices, though quite a… Continue reading My Backlogged Pages, New York Times
The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film The Graduate insisted. Rather, the future is in China. If a multinational corporation doesn’t shoehorn China into its business plan, it courts the ridicule of its peers and the outrage of its shareholders. The language of choice for ambitious undergraduates is Mandarin. Apocalyptic… Continue reading Pax Ottomanica
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has been going back and forth on the Okinawa base issue. As a candidate he pledged to close the Futenma air base and not relocate any of its personnel within Okinawa prefecture. But then, after Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan won the elections last year, the U.S. pressure campaign began.… Continue reading Okinawa and Obama’s Base Addiction
Last year, Lauren Rosenberg was walking across a four-lane highway in Utah when she was hit by a car. Now she’s suing Google for $100,000 in damages because Google Maps told her to take that route. The lawsuit is patently absurd. If she had come to an edge of a cliff that Google Maps said… Continue reading Blaming Turkey
The full-page ads in The Washington Post seem so reasonable. The military contractor Pratt & Whitney has been arguing that America doesn’t need to spend $485 million to develop a second engine for the F-35 jet fighter. It’s a compelling argument. We’re in a serious economic crisis, so why on earth would we build another… Continue reading The Trillion-Dollar Question
Kim Jong Il must work for the American Enterprise Institute. Or maybe it’s the Heritage Foundation. The North Korean dictator doesn’t talk much about his non-resident fellowship at a right-wing U.S. think tank. It might not go over well with the Politburo in Pyongyang. But actions speak louder than words. North Korea’s sinking of the… Continue reading Kim Jong-Il: Right-Wing Mole?
“I need a little space.” When lovers utter these words, it’s usually a bad sign for the relationship. They feel suffocated. They’re reexamining their commitment. They’re checking out other options. But they don’t have the courage to make a clean break. Britain is the latest country to question its “special relationship” with the United States.… Continue reading The Break-Up