A New Day for Labor
Richard Trumka
Articles By: Alex Copulsky 
My Visit to the Tea Party
Today, I did something which went against the deepest instincts of my time at the Harvard Political Review: reporting. I heard two days ago that Sarah Palin was going to be in town for the Boston Tea Party rally, and I knew this was something that I simply had to see. So this morning I woke up bright and early, ... Read More
From the Department of Pathetic Rhetoric
There was really no justification for the status quo ante in the federal student loan program. The model was this: Students applied for a loan from a private loan company, which loaned them money guaranteed by the federal government. They pocketed the profits, and all risk was assumed by the federal government. Students who had access to this program’s version ... Read More
Quick Thoughts on the Healthcare Summit
Watching live. I think that the main audience here is nervous Congressional Democrats. Not in the sense that this will actually move public opinion; it won’t, nobody other than real political junkies watch this stuff. I think it’s more to give them a sense of how the midterm election debates are going to play out. The Republican talking points are ... Read More
The Enthusiasm Gap
I think Glenn Greenwald is quite right about this. The Democratic Party has spent the last few years more or less conspicuously failing to deliver on every single one of its campaign promises. I count cap-and-trade, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the end of the Iraq War, a restoration of civil liberties, the closing of Guantanamo Bay, the end of domestic ... Read More
Silly Things Published in the NYT
I’m hardly an expert on modern warfare, but this New York Times op-ed is pretty clearly silly and deserving of refutation. Defense consultant Lara Dadkhah is discussing the way that NATO air forces have voluntarily drawn down their airstrikes and are thus tying one hand behind their back. She argues that this is incredibly harmful since “America does not have ... Read More
Israel and Americans
I’m not always wild about The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, but I think he has a very perceptive post about Israel’s relationship with the United States. He points out that the ultra-conservative governments that have been in power lately have been doing their best to alienate their potential American supporters, particularly young American Jews. Namely, that actions like Gaza or their ... Read More
At Least We’re Not Greece Yet
So today the European Union issued its long-awaited statement on whether or not it would bail out Greece. The answer was a clear and unambiguous signal to global financial markets: maybe-kinda-sorta-let’s-see-where-it-goes-from-here-and-then-we’ll-talk. For those who haven’t been keeping score at home, Greece is in quite a bit of financial trouble (much like California), due to government revenue dropping dramatically and spending ... Read More
The Dim Prospects for Meaningful Financial Reform
Well, the Senate just spent a year trying and failing to pass a moderate, compromised-to-hell health reform plan. Which, incidentally, if that is comprehensive reform I’m not really sure I’d like to see their “tinkering around the edges”. However, the important thing is that they managed to defuse special interest anger by buying them off with legislative goodies. Wait, that’s ... Read More
The Fierce Urgency of Whatever
In a culture that often values boldness above all else, American politics is surprisingly allergic to big ideas. Despite the clamor over President Obama's health-care reform plan, it is important to remember that it proposes fairly incremental changes.
Vampires v. Zombies, 2009
Twilight is big. Yes, I realize that that was not exactly an original observation nor a particularly timely one. However, I just wanted to posit that quite aside from the merits of Twilight as such (have neither read nor seen it), the cultural prominence of Twilight/vampires in general really does speak to the conservative trope that America is a “center-right ... Read More
Has Health Reform Failed?
The question is not intended substantively. The bill that is being debated by the Senate is an ugly mess from the perspective of any reasonable observer, left, right, or center. However, as inefficient and messy as it is, it will still do a much better job than the status quo of providing healthcare to the people in the country who ... Read More
This is basically another Munich situation right here.
Iran has backed down from a nuclear deal that would have significantly eased American tension with them. The deal was to send Iranian low-enriched uranium abroad to be enriched up to reactor-grade. While this first seems odd, the crucial point is that currently their uranium is in the form of uranium hexaflouride, a gas that can be endlessly enriched up ... Read More
Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize
I wasn’t aware they graded on effort.
Strategy and Lord of the Rings
It’s a rainy afternoon, and so I’m watching The Two Towers, the second film in the Lord of the Rings series (Ed: I hated the books and didn’t even finish, but those movies are great). Tolkien’s politics are not my own, not so much because of their noxiousness as simply their anachronism. Regardless, the novels are rich in pretty interesting ... Read More
