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The Obama Method, or, How to Complicate Everything
October 23, 2013
There is the hard way to get something done and then there is the most difficult way possible, otherwise known as the Obama administration method. In fairness, introducing insurance exchanges to millions of previously uninsured people was always bound to be difficult, regardless ...

Unmanned War Crimes
October 22, 2013
The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. Two new reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch describe the American drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen that have boldly taken on the terrorists who hate America. One such terrorist is ...

Tales from the Health Care Exchanges
October 21, 2013
According to media reports, since the October 1 launch of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges, if you try to sign up for insurance through the HealthCare.gov website, your computer is likely to spontaneously combust out of sheer frustration. In the weeks leading ...

A Love Letter to a Columnist
October 17, 2013
I love you, Jonathan Chait. I never want to be without you or your ridiculous brilliance. In a stroke of accidental genius, New York magazine columnist Chait stripped bare the mask of establishment journalism, revealing himself and his ilk so perfectly that I wanted to pull over ...

You’re a Strange One, Mister Graham
October 16, 2013
People: A deal has been struck. Congress is poised to pass a short-term government funding measure and a slightly longer-term hike in the never-ending quagmire that is the debt ceiling. Obamacare will not be defunded. The House and the Senate will get to work on long-term budget ...

Does D.C. Repeat Itself? Very Well Then, It Repeats Itself
October 16, 2013
The nation’s capital has been all but overtaken by blurry, doubled vision. At the Phillips Collection, one of the few museums open during the partial government shutdown, there is, starting this month, an exhibit of Vincent van Gogh’s repetitions, thirty-five repeated ...

A Safe Space Nuzzling the Powerful
October 15, 2013
It’s an interview that has to be seen to be believed. BBC anchor Kirsty Wark lashed out at the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald as he explained his reporting on the U.S. National Security Agency and the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters. Wark also carefully avoided ...

Cruz’s Value Voters Vortex
October 11, 2013
Watching a few minutes, or even a few seconds, of the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, you’d have no idea that the GOP is struggling—or even, as ABC News says, “working out the terms of their surrender.” The conference, which began Friday, October ...

Incredible Exploding Contracted Government Stuff
October 10, 2013
Before they try to hear a mouse fart in Abbottabad, those clever government hacks should first run down to the breakroom and unplug the toaster. The National Security Agency is building a massive new data center in Utah, all the better to store your weekly phone call to grandma ...

Cheney and His Clowns
October 09, 2013
Quick! Think of the worst possible event to attend ever. What? They make you do what with a fishing pole? Yeah, that sounds pretty bad, but still not as bad as this. On Monday, October 7, the conservative muckety-mucks came together at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan to roast the ...

The Eau de Politic
October 08, 2013
A federal shutdown closes government, and a staggering 800,000 employees are sent home. A tiny skeleton crew of just three or four million struggles to keep the machine going, as the Washington Post explains: “That leaves about 1.3 million ‘essential’ federal ...

Catotonic History
October 08, 2013
If you glance at the names of conservative think tanks, you may notice a touching solicitude for the past. This species of head-piece heritage is, alas, a foreign country. The U.K.-based Adam Smith Institute, for example, is dedicated to the kind of free-market thinking you may ...