Taking on the foreign policy elite Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, by Andrew Bacevich. Metropolitan, 2010. $25.00, 304 pp. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the … Read more
A Harvard law professor explores Gates-gate The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America, by Charles Ogletree. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. $25.00, 256 pp. One hundred and forty seven years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, four decades after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered … Read more
War spending is out of control and a cause for worry. We get weekly reports of the costs of the war and the burden placed on tax payers. This week the Washington Post reported that U.S. government agencies cannot account for spending in Afghanistan before 2007. This presents yet another point for citizens and the … Read more
The Gandhis, the Kennedys and the Bushes: these are but the most famous political dynasties in the world. The seeming persistence of political families holding the reins of power in a democratic country has always raised concerns about the imperfections in popular representation. If Hillary Clinton had won the US presidential elections in 2008, someone … Read more
Last week, Danny Wilson, our environment columnist, posted a very thorough analysis of a very thorough Yale report about climate change. He notes that Only 39% [of respondents] believe that “most scientists think global warming is happening.” This statistic is by far the most damning, and the most revealing. I agree that this is the … Read more
Part of the Supreme Court’s appeal, at least for me, has always been its sense of mystery. Nine robed justices sit on the high bench, question the lowly lawyers, retreat to their conference room to debate, and a decision finally emerges many months later. What goes on behind the scenes? Few know, but sadly few … Read more
Harvard Political Review has joined with other college political publications to form the Alliance of Collegiate Editors (ACE), hoping to generate cross-campus dialogue on political issues. Recently ACE interviewed Mark Rudd, a former member of the Weather Underground and current activist. From his website: “Since the summer of 2003 I’ve crisscrossed the country speaking at … Read more
Why the Tea Party makes this midterm different from others Throughout this election season, political commentators have been comparing the upcoming contests to the 1994 midterms, when the GOP took back Congress during the first term of a Democratic presidency. While 1994 makes for an apt comparison in some respects, the emergence of the Tea … Read more
On my first night living in Poland last summer, I asked my host mother, a 44-year-old Polish elementary schoolteacher and mother of two, her opinions of President Barack Obama as we sat in her rural farmhouse eating slabs of unidentifiable meat on rye bread. She gave me two responses, meaning, she pointed to the two words in … Read more
On Saturday October 2, President Barack Obama came to Boston’s Hynes Convention Center to rally the troops for the November 2 election in support of Democrats running across the state, especially Governor Deval Patrick. 10,000 people were expected to fill the convention center that day, yet 15,000 showed up and waited in long lines to … Read more