“CDC director orders agency overhaul, admitting flawed Covid-19 response”, says today’s Politico. “Walensky, Citing Botched Pandemic Response, Calls for C.D.C. Reorganization”, says today’s New York Times. “Inside America’s monkeypox crisis — and the mistakes that made it worse”, says today’s Washington Post. Yeah, you can’t make this stuff up—and, most unfortunately, you don’t have to,…
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CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.
OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…
Passive-aggressive hypocrisy hath made its masterpiece: The Volokh Conspiracy’s conspiracy against the rule of law
The Volokh Conspiracy is a website that describes itself as “Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent”. They forgot to add “Frequently Lukidist”. The eponymous founder of said conspiracy is Eugene Volokh. To call Gene’s c.v. “glittering” is probably the understatement of the decade. A bona fide mathematical genius, he…
President Biden proposes a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package. What could go wrong? Well, I can think of a few things.
Sure I can. For example, suppose we spend that $2,300,000,000,000 and end up with 1,000,000+ $2,000,000 bike shelters, like the one at the East Falls Church, Va. Metro station. Since that shed, the time that I visited it, was only utilized to, you know, 2% capacity, a lot of people—mostly Republicans, of course—might think we…
Roy Jenkins was part of the solution, and part of the problem. Was that part of the problem?
Roy Jenkins had a fascinating life. Born in 1920 in Abersychan, a mining community in Wales, he came from a strongly “Labour” family—his father, Arthur Jenkins, was a leading official in the Union of Mineworkers, eventually becoming a member of Parliament. Jenkins himself was elected to Parliament at the age of 28, working his way…
Please, Mr. Beinart, try harder
Over at the New York Times, Peter Beinart has a column, “Why Are There So Few Courageous Senators?”, which takes as its text—well, in its first half, anyway—John F. Kennedy’s “famous” book, Profiles in Courage, citing two profiles, “two legendary Southerners, Thomas Hart Benton and Sam Houston, who a century earlier had become pariahs for…
Some “conservatives” are whistling past the graveyard of American democracy; others are busy swinging a shovel
I like to keep track of what the “responsible right”, as I like to call them, is up to, a task that I perform by rounding up the usual suspects—Ross Douthat, Jay Nordlinger, Kevin Williamson, Ramesh Ponnuru, David French, and Jonah Goldberg, among others—finding most of them at either the National Review or the American…
Barack Obama, still not getting it after all these years
I confess that I have not read President Obama’s recent memoir, A Promised Land, nor am I likely to, because I have convinced myself that the political pressures on American politicians make it impossible, or at least exceedingly unlikely, for them to ever write anything that resembles an honest book. I would say that this…
Political Notes from All Over: Paul Krugman is cool, Ross Douthat is mad, Kamala Harris is “necessary” (probably), and Black Lives Matter is living down to Billy Barr’s expectations
Tough to be a man! Or a woman! Or even just a little kid. But stuff happens, as Donnie Rumsfeld liked to say, and this is some of the stuff that’s happening. First up is the good news: Paul Krugman is cool! I’ve frequently though not necessarily bitched about the way the Krugman too often,…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?
We’re in such a mess these days, one can either bemoan that mess, or wonder how we got here. I feel a little helpless to be just bemoaning, and, as the situation changes from day to day, one is compelled to constantly update one’s bemoans, which in retrospect can begin to sound both repetitive and…