Chasing Ghosts

Green Zone’s conspiratorial world Nighttime. Baghdad. March 19, 2003. The city bursts into light as “Shock and Awe” sweeps across the desert. Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum) begins his latest release, Green Zone, with a black screen as the sounds of air-raid warnings and the crescendo of American bombs slowly fills the … Read more

Revenge of the Wall St. Nerds

An exposé of the math guys who broke the economy The quants: how a new breed of math whizzes conquered Wall Street and nearly destroyed it, by Scott Patterson, Crown Business, 2010. $27.00, 337 pp. Wall Street titans like Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, AIG CEO Hank Greenberg, and scam artist Bernie Madoff have emerged … Read more

Rejecting extremes

A global examination of church and state Taming the gods: religion and democracy on three continents, by Ian Buruma, Princeton University Press, 2010. $19.95, 132 pp. In his new book Taming the Gods, British-Dutch writer Ian Buruma recalls the outrage and death threats that greeted the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The incident … Read more

Rand Paul a Racist? I Think Not.

Sam Barr’s most recent post makes the rather shocking claim that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky being vacated by the retiring Jim Bunning, is a racist, or at least that he is not a non-racist. Sam deduces this from the fact that Mr. Paul is not a “consistent … Read more

Young Liberal American Jewish Zionism

In his recent essay “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” Peter Beinart laments the disconnect young liberal American Jews feel from Israel and the American organizations that support it (i.e. AIPAC). He argues that Zionist organizations have moved rightward with the Israeli government and have largely shut out liberal dissent: “…by defending virtually anything … Read more

Rand Paul: Against the Civil Rights Act

As I said yesterday, the Kentucky Senate race between Rand Paul and Jack Conway should be a real battle. Paul is probably not helping himself by insisting, as many libertarian ideologues but few Senate hopefuls do, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was wrong to ban racial discrimination in private establishments like restaurants and movie … Read more

Blumenthal Follow-Up

Like Scott Lemieux and Nate Silver, I foolishly trusted the New York Times bombshell about CT attorney general Richard Blumenthal. I jumped immediately to the question of what should be done about Blumenthal assuming he lied about his military service. It’s very easy to assume the worst about politicians, but sometimes (probably not too often) … Read more

The New Moral Majority?

Young evangelicals shift left, change focus. “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” With this declaration, Congressman Mike Pence (R-IN) summed up the philosophy with which white evangelical Christians have long identified. Yet the ordering has sometimes seemed the reverse of Pence’s. Since 1980, born-again Christians have been among the Republican … Read more

Generational Inadequacy

I just finished watching Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ The Pacific, an HBO miniseries following a group of marines in WWII. And it was truly epic. Melodramatic and overwrought maybe, but the war in the Pacific was no jungle romp. As The Pacific vividly shows, it was unimaginably gruesome, traumatic, and relentless. The marines battled the unyielding … Read more