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Baby Steps with Eric Holder
February 13, 2014
Eric Holder’s Justice Department has been a disappointment more often than not. The reefer madness, an absurd and abusive political foray into sensitive academic archives, that ghoulish speech about the power of the federal government to kill U.S. citizens overseas in ...

Congress Stuns World with Minor Hint of Functionality
February 12, 2014
Yesterday, the world witnessed a major breakthrough in contemporary United States governance: the speaker of the House of Representatives decided, for the first time in years, that it would be counterproductive and perhaps even strange to threaten the arbitrary destruction of ...

Do As He Says, Not As He Does. That Would Be Unprofitable.
February 12, 2014
Chamath Palihapitiya is a partner at a wealthy venture capital firm, Social+Capital Partnership, which aims “to create value and change on a global scale.” Being interested not just in profit but in social change, Mr. Palihapitiya appeared Sunday before a marginalized group ...

Minimum Wage Debate Focusing Less on Poverty, More on Lobbying
February 11, 2014
A sharp piece of reporting in the New York Times this week pulls the very thin mask off the expertise-for-hire industry that clusters around the District of Columbia. Reporter Eric Lipton paid a visit to the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit “economic research ...

Obamacare May Also Mean No More Employee Parking Spots
February 10, 2014
Could it be that corporate executives are among the biggest “winners” in the implementation of Obamacare? We don’t just mean health insurance company executives, either. We mean executives everywhere, from Delta to AOL to UPS, who now get to eliminate the ...

Glenn Greenwald Will Not Be Doing Trust Falls with the U.S.
February 07, 2014
Suppose you were, say, an ex-pat living in Brazil who wanted to be free to come and go to your home country, America, without much hassle, but the potential for hassle was greater than 0 percent. See, you had been publishing documents exposing the United States ...

When Separating Art from the Artist Doesn’t Work
February 06, 2014
By now, the lines have been drawn. A disturbing number of responses to Dylan Farrow’s February 1 New York Times blog concerning the alleged sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her father, Woody Allen, have run the gamut of rape culture apologias. Her memories ...

Breaking News: Opinion Page Stilted, Old-Fashioned
February 06, 2014
I’ll admit it: I had a long, blank moment. The New York Observer reported this week on “how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at the New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of the New York Times,” and I couldn’t bring the opinion pages ...

In Search of Unspun News
February 05, 2014
The Congressional Budget Office, which partisans observe as either a neutral, omniscient force of total knowledge or a coven of innumerate hacks depending on how it scores one’s preferred policies, released a report yesterday on the effects of the Affordable Care Act. The ...

Your Soda Now Includes a Stance on International Affairs
February 04, 2014
Ah, the Super Bowl. As one of your other Baffler blog correspondents recently pointed out, there’s nothing more American, for unclear reasons. Like any big event, it was not without controversy. There was the young gentleman we got mad at for acting in a manner consistent with ...

Fox News: Not Worthy of Our Attention Until We Say So
February 04, 2014
Stranded referents, a shotgun spray of clashing claims and jumbled ideas, half-completed gestures. If you put two potted geraniums side by side and pointed a television camera at them, they would trade as much information as Bill O’Reilly and Barack Obama exchanged in the ...