America as a Developing Country
Along with lots of caveats.
In a week when America’s Covid fatalities topped 500,000 – an official figure that might actually understate the real toll and that in any event represents more than all of our overseas wars’ combat deaths combined – it seems incongruous but useful to summarize some good vaccination news.
So here goes.
[Continue Reading]Hitler, the Confederacy and today’s authoritarians show the price we could pay for not pushing back in a big way.
It’s been almost a month since Twitterless Donald Trump flounced down to Florida. Some hoped that, having lost his presidential and social media platforms, his Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen would flame out.
No such luck. In voting to acquit him at his impeachment trial, 43 out of 50 Republican senators yet again caved to his control. In the House, Arizona, Texas and Michigan, his loyalists keep pushing his party line or pushing out figures who don’t fall in line.
[Continue Reading]A Brief Democratic Kerfuffle. A Possible Republican Debacle.
That was fast. Five days after Donald Trump’s impeachment trial started, it ended on Saturday, as planned.
On Friday night, however, evidence from Republican Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler and other sources kicked off a last-minute kerfuffle over extending the trial. In the wake of Beutler’s earlier statements at a town hall, they confirmed to news outlets that, amidst the Capitol riot, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had an expletive-laced shouting match over the phone with Trump. McCarthy urged presidential action to stop the attack; the president dismissively focused only on his political fortunes.
[Continue Reading]The good, the bad and the ugly of GM’s Super Bowl ad.
If you watched the Super Bowl, or even if you didn’t, you might well have seen the General Motors ad that features Will Ferrell pitching GM’s electric vehicles. It opens with Ferrell explaining that “Norway sells way more electric cars per capita than the U.S.” He then declares, “Well, I won’t stand for it,” before punching a globe and claiming that, with GM’s new electric battery, “we’re going to crush those lugers. CRUSH THEM! Let’s go, America.”
[Continue Reading]Lessons for the Republicans’ leadership, starting with 1917.
Adopting a policy of “no enemies to the left,” Russian prime minister Alexander Kerensky freed Vladimir Lenin from jail shortly after he tried but failed to overthrow Kerensky’s government in July of 1917.
In November, Lenin succeeded.
An excellent essay by Slate’s Fred Kaplan draws parallels between Kerensky and most of today’s Republican leaders. Kerensky thought that his greatest threat was forces seeking to return czarist rule to his country. He accordingly sought to align with the very Marxists who soon toppled him.
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