You know, I'm starting to think Joe Biden might not be The Most Progressive President Since FDR™ after all: https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/1329466536231276545 He seems nice: In 2010, Reed served as executive director of the Bowles-Simpson Commission, one of Barack Obama’s worst blunders. The commission was created in order to put the federal budget on an automatic pilot … Continue reading wE cAn pUsH hIM lEFt
Category: politics
Fraying nerves
Something stood out to me in Daniel Bessner's post-election column at Foreign Exchanges: 2020 was the most important election of our lifetimes.Just like 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, and so on. Since the 1984 presidential elections, as the Google N-gram below suggests, American media has argued that every subsequent election is the most important in history. … Continue reading Fraying nerves
What Wheels?
I swear I keep trying to stop blogging, but every time I think I'm out, Donald Trump pulls me back in. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1075878792168685568 Mattis is quitting because he opposes the withdrawal from Syria that Trump announced yesterday. That much is plain from his relatively (for DC) frank resignation letter: My views on treating allies with respect … Continue reading What Wheels?
Irredeemable
It can be challenging to write about things like Donald Trump's immigration executive order, which has by now gone through so many clarifications and legal challenges that it's hard to say exactly what it is beyond red meat to his terrified white nationalist base. When discussing public policy, the reflexive thing--at least for me--is to … Continue reading Irredeemable
Death in the family
Like any mostly closed/insulated group of people--Fortune 500 CEOs, Catholic clergy, the mafia, Congress--there are a lot of ways in which Iran's religious (and increasingly military) ruling class resembles a family. There are a lot of things binding them together: everybody knows each other, they all share some common backgrounds and life experiences, they probably … Continue reading Death in the family
Corruption Matters
Amid all the post-election "how the hell did we get here" analysis, a lot of which has focused squarely and rightly on the myriad failures of the Democratic Party, another piece of the puzzle has gotten lost a bit, and that has to do with what Donald Trump represented to a lot of voters--a vote … Continue reading Corruption Matters
What He Said (second in a series)
So the piece I wrote yesterday got a lot of attention, and a lot of positive feedback, for which I'm grateful. When I stray beyond foreign policy and world affairs I'm the first to admit that I'm out of my comfort zone, and I certainly didn't intend that post to be anything more than a … Continue reading What He Said (second in a series)
Things I Think (first in a series)
As I process what happened last Tuesday, and how I can help do something about it, I'm going to start an irregular series here where I lay out some of my thoughts. Maybe, hopefully, this will spur some discussion about how we--all of us who want to--can organize a real left opposition to what is … Continue reading Things I Think (first in a series)
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 