“The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”-Gramsci The etymology of the word “morbid” is the Latin word morbidus meaning disease. Let us consider the particular disease that grips America right now. Students of Germany in the early part of the Great [...]
I’m going to show you three charts that are part of a much larger presentation prepared by the Defense Business Board, an advisory council to the Secretary of Defense that was created in 2001. It is not classified and was sent to me by one of our readers who is as concerned as I am [...]
The wonderful John Judis writes a “counter-history of the Obama Presidency” in the New Republic. He argues that Obama’s fear of populist rhetoric, not his political program, is the problem. In the United States, politics pivots around the allegiance of the middle class, even as its identity has changed from yeoman farmers and mechanics to [...]
I’ve been trying to understand the Republican Party long-term electoral strategy. Basically they are hitching their wagon to pissed off, old, white people. Now that may work in November of 2010, but how could that be a long-term winner? Start with the Fox News audience. In a survey released by analyst Steve Sternberg, Fox News [...]
The Republican Candidate for the Connecticut Senate presents her qualifications for office. Abe Lincoln is rolling over in his grave.
In their groundbreaking essay, The Death of Environmentalism (2004), Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger called for an end to enviro-scare tactics and the beginning of a positive vision of a low carbon energy future. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream speech” is famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision that carried [...]
The United States has three DEFCON 5 level crises happening at once. The first is an ecological disaster in the American Gulf region. The second is a foreign policy disaster in the Arabian Gulf region. And the third is an economic disaster being caused by the Bond Vigilantes in the Canyons of Wall Street. They [...]
Cognitive dissonance is defined as the “uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously.” That would pretty much define the results of the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll. On the one hand you have the generic ballot favoring Republican 45-43. But then in the same poll come these rather startling statistics. Nearly two-thirds [...]
As I have been saying for months, the conventional wisdom of a Republican resurgence to the majority in November is fatally flawed. What the primaries this week have shown is that on the Republican side a combination of too many candidates and Tea Party enthusiasm have pushed the most radical right candidates to the front. [...]
In the good old days of Tamany Hall politics, an enterprising politician could buy a vote for a 50 cent beer. Meg Whitman’s 1,101,528 votes in the California Republican Governor Primary came at the cost of $77 per vote, most of the money coming from her own fortune. So what is she willing to spend [...]