The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

Blog Posts

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The Morning After The Day Before

            The Monday morning quarterbacks are in full flow, and the post-mortem is already on. The alternatives are being immediately staked, and the relevant policy changes demanded. Depending on whom you read, the Democrats lost so many seats in the mid-term election because Obama wasn’t centrist enough or because he was too centrist.

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Countering the Enthusiasm Gap

            What a difference two years make in times as serious as these. Two Novembers ago, all was hope and glory on the center-left in American politics, all was despair and despondency on the center-right. But that is not how things stand now. The political momentum has shifted back, and shifted back very quickly, into the hands of the very conservative forces whose future looked so bleak when Obama first entered the White House.

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Contemporary Poverty and the Tasks of the Left

…Our imperial endeavors alone, if Chalmers Johnson is right, “will, sooner or later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency.”[1] And even if that fear is overblown – and it probably is not – there is certainly trouble looming at home, trouble for which we all need to be prepared, and trouble that we would do well to avert by systematic and extensive social reform before it occurs.[2] For if the challenges abroad are linked to empire, at home they are linked to poverty.

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“Turning the Page” in Iraq and Afghanistan


 

Obama envisions no major changes in Afghan strategy.

Despite discouraging news from Afghanistan and growing doubts in Congress and among the American public, the Obama administration has concluded that its war strategy is sound and that a December review, once seen as a pivotal moment, is unlikely to yield any major changes”

(The Washington Post, September 18, 2010)

 

Pages

TypeTitleAuthorRepliesLast updated
Reader blogTurning Down the Radio, Slice by Budgetary Slice coatesd113 years 9 months ago
Reader blogDiluting the Tea Party: The Importance of Supping With a Long Spoon coatesd513 years 9 months ago
Reader blogObama and Housing – Is Anybody Home? coatesd413 years 10 months ago
Reader blogFact and Fiction in the “State of the Union” Debate coatesd713 years 10 months ago
Reader blogDefending Health Care Reform – Again! coatesd213 years 11 months ago
Reader blogSanity in a Time of Madness coatesd713 years 11 months ago
Reader blogAmerica’s Bleak Mid-Winter coatesd514 years 5 days ago
Reader blogPresident Obama and This Generation’s “Sputnik Moment” coatesd414 years 2 weeks ago
Reader blogEating the Old at Thanksgiving coatesd014 years 1 month ago
Reader blogFIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS coatesd1114 years 1 month ago
Reader blogThe Morning After The Day Before coatesd414 years 1 month ago
Reader blogCountering the Enthusiasm Gap coatesd614 years 2 months ago
Reader blogContemporary Poverty and the Tasks of the Left coatesd314 years 3 months ago
Reader blog“Turning the Page” in Iraq and Afghanistan coatesd214 years 3 months ago

Pages