Robert McNamara has died. Notwithstanding his previous career at Ford in the
1950s and his later career as president of the World Bank, Robert Strange
McNamara will always be remembered for his service as secretary of defense for
the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the height of the Second
Indochina War, known in the U.S.
as "the Vietnam War." In death, as in life, he is likely to prove to
be a Rorschach test for what people think about that conflict and the
four-decade Cold War of… more
Now that the
president and the Democrats in Congress have set a fall deadline for
legislative action on universal police protection for all Americans,
battle lines are being drawn on Capitol Hill. On the right are
conservative defenders of America's system of for-profit, private
mercenaries. The Democrats are divided among progressives who favor
universal, publicly funded police who would protect all citizens
against crime, and moderate and conservative Democrats who argue that
any citizen security reform should leave America's existing system of
soldiers for hire in place.
In the summer of 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to end the brief period of liberalization known as the "Prague Spring," W.H. Auden composed a poem titled "August 1968":
Picture, if you will, an America apparently like our own. A country like ours bogged down in war on two fronts and suffering from the greatest economic slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s. An America indistinguishable from ours in every respect except that when you turn on the nightly news you see the face of President John Sidney McCain ...
The populist backlash that many have predicted would follow the crash of 2008 is here. Well, not here, exactly. Over there, in Europe.
In the June 7 elections to the European Parliament, center-left social democrats were devastated, while far-right nationalist and populist candidates made big gains. The center-left fell from 217 seats to 159, while the center-right coalition remained the largest bloc with 267 seats.
If the bankruptcy and restructuring of GM proceed according to the Obama administration's plan, then the U.S. government will end up owning about 60 percent of the ailing carmaker. The de facto nationalization of GM, added to the de facto nationalization of AIG and various banks and the renationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is a threat to the healthy distinction between the private sector and the public sector.
On Tuesday, May 12, the trustees who oversee Social Security and Medicare will issue their annual report. I don't know what will be in the report. But I do know what the response will be. Conservatives, libertarians and center-right Democrats will take whatever the report says as evidence that there is an "entitlement crisis," which should require us not only to address spiraling healthcare costs (a genuine issue, affecting the private sector as well as Medicare and Medicaid) but also… more
Are we in danger of discouraging the best and the brightest from entering
public service? According to Richard Haass, the former Bush administration
official who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations, prosecuting former
Bush administration lawyers who argued that torture was legal under domestic
and international law would deter talented Americans from careers in public
service. Haas, who served as director of policy planning in the State
Department, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on May 1 that while in the Bush
Is it secession, then? Tell me, sir -- is it war? At a faux populist, or rather Fox populist, "tea party" in Austin on April 15, Texas Governor Rick Perry warned that "we've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to… more
