Over the weekend I started idly jotting down some thoughts about the impeachment process which is currently spinning up against Mr. Trump. Before I had the chance to get very far, Ari Paul posted a piece entitled “The Left Case for Impeachment.” (More…)
It’s happening. The House of Representatives is pushing forward with an impeachment investigation against President Donald Trump, on allegations he sought assistance from Ukraine, through the threat of withholding US aid for the country, to interfere in next year’s election. (More…)
America prides itself on nothing so much as excellence. This applies as much to political dysfunction as to anything else. (More…)
The national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America in Atlanta this August attracted a fair amount of attention, partly because the event happened as the group is growing and its favoured presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, is still doing well in the polls. (More…)
What follows is in the nature of a thought experiment. I am not a lawyer, and I have only a layman’s familiarity with the ins and outs of the law. (More…)
Oregon Governor Kate Brown recently signed a bill mandating study of the Holocaust in the state’s public school systems. As an ageing millennial, I was surprised at this need. (More…)
To read the press in the United States, one might as well conclude we are living through a period of flux. Hardly a day passes without some organ of the serious media publishing a paean to the passing of the nostrums that had governed American political life since time immemorial (or at least since the Kennedy administration). (More…)
When the story broke that Donald Trump intended to refashion the Fourth of July celebration in the nation’s capital into a partisan display of American military might, there was widespread concern. But the dismay was undoubtedly strongest among past and current residents of the Washington D.C. area who had participated in previous years’ festivities. How dare he break with tradition in order to promote his political agenda? (More…)
For better or worse, the Holocaust has taken on the status of a metonym in American culture, now designating not simply the attempt to exterminate the global Jewry but, at a broader level, the most horrific event in human history. (More…)
For better or worse, usually the latter, there is a rule of thumb in US higher education: what happens at Harvard gets noticed. (More…)
There was a time in the long, long ago when the politics of eastern Washington were moderate and relatively civilised. People there tended to be more conservative than they were in Seattle, but that was a pretty low bar. In any case, it was generally the case that politicians from either party could get a reasonable hearing. (More…)
Finally, after years of tease and denial, the unicorns are going public. These phenomenally valued firms, pumped up by venture capitalists (VCs), remained private for far longer than they did in previous startup manias, most notably the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s. That’s changing. (More…)