James Gardner, formerly the architecture critic of the New York Sun, now writes on culture for several publications.
It must be nice to be the president. In addition to having helicopters, jumbo jets, and motorcades, you get to rifle through the cellars of the National Gallery and the Hirschhorn for artistic masterpieces to adorn your home for the next four to eight years.
Nine months into Barack Obama's administration, a few of his appointees still haven't been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. What's the hold up? Click through this TNR slideshow for a rundown on some of the remaining people who haven't been confirmed, and why
If you take a look around at what is happening in states and localities across the country, the time for immigration reform seems ripe. In 2009 states considered more than 1500 laws concerning immigrants and immigration, and 353 became law in 48 states, according the National Conference of State Legislatures. In various municipalities, countless others were proposed and/or passed. Many of these measures--both restrictive and inclusive--are borne out of frustration with the status quo.
Not long ago, Tavis Smiley did something I would not have expected, which is rare. He announced that he was discontinuing his annual State of the Black Union conferences. These have been powwows where the Usual Suspects are invited to make the usual points: roughly decrying racism while genuflecting to the radical idea that people are responsible for repairing their own culture too. They have had black conservatives sprinkled in for “balance,” to be sure, but we all know the drill.
For decades, various Chinese officials and outsiders have reassured the world that the country’s Communist Party leadership eventually planned to open up its one-party political system. The regime would undertake major political reforms and liberalization, it was said, to accompany the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late ’70s. It was merely a question of choosing the right time. Writing in Foreign Affairs two years ago, John L.
Maureen Dowd spent a week in Saudi Arabia, presumably without having to wear the hijab or be smacked on her tush by themutaween to get her to pray. But now that she’s been to Riyadh, she is also an expert, an expert not so much on the huge peninsula but on Israel. Great place to learn!
The controversy over the "deem-and-pass" strategy will probably end very quickly. (I expect Democrats to conclude it's not worth the hassle.) But it's another telling episode in the health care saga. Conservatives have spent the last day in a fit of outrage at the prospect that House Democrats might enact the Senate health care bill and changes to it in one vote rather than two.
Yes, many—likely most—Israelis want this or that part of the city to go ultimately to the Palestinian Authority, a larger portion more forthcoming than less… But none want any of it to go to Hamas. Who will be the legatee, however, is not something that Israel has the ability to decide.
Some Israelis want the whole of Jerusalem to remain under their sovereignty. That is neither feasible nor desirable.
Barack Obama is gunning for a confrontation with the Supreme Court, and Chief Justice John Roberts has signaled that he welcomes the fight. Last week, the chief justice described the president’s State of the Union condemnation of the Citizens United decision as “very troubling” and complained that the speech had “degenerated to a political pep rally.” Roberts was making an argument about etiquette--dissent was fine, he said, but Obama had somehow transgressed the boundaries of civilized discourse by delivering his attack to a captive audience.
I have argued that rising unemployment inevitably imperils the political prospects of a president and his party. So I’m not surprised that President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have steadily fallen over the last year, or that Democrats have fared poorly in recent elections. And it’s fair to say that if unemployment continues to rise, or stays at the same elevated level, the Democrats will have trouble in the midterm elections this November.
Last month, the Heritage Foundation had some fun with what it called a "flip-flop" by the Obama administration:
LONDON -- Could Prime Minister Gordon Brown become the Harry Truman of British politics?
For many long months, Brown and his Labor Party were written off as sure losers in this year's election, likely to be called for May 6. David Cameron, the young, energetic and empathetic Conservative Party leader, was all but handed Brown's job by the chattering classes, so consistent and formidable had been his lead in the polls.
On the front page of the Sunday Boston Globe “Ideas” section, there’s a photograph of East Belfast—or, rather, of a concrete demarcation “that separates the Protestant community from the Catholic residents on the other side of the wall.” It is called the “Peace Line,” and maybe it’s what George Mitchell, who negotiated the settlement that ended “the Troubles,” thinks of as peace.
Mark Skoda, one of the organizers of the first-ever national Tea Party convention in Nashville, is no revolutionary. “I get irritated when people say, ‘Let’s take our country back.’ We have a country,” he told one interviewer at the three-day-long gathering earlier this month. “In America, we only have to move the dial a little bit. We’re not off the rails.
Yesterday, Gallup released a poll suggesting that Americans seem to be less and less concerned about climate change. Here was the big headline-grabbing chart:
Pollsters Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell have a Washington Post op-ed urging the Democrats to abandon health care reform out of their own self-interest:
One of the things that distinguishes libertarians from regular conservatives is that libertarians really like to think of themselves as scrappy underdogs, and are far less comfortable with the idea that they're aligned with powerful economic interests. So, for instance, libertarians have an unusually strong emotional investment in the idea that their opposition to health care reform is a way of standing up to powerful interests like the insurance industry.
Chris Cilizza reports a nice scoop:
I am a little embarrassed to be so self-referential this morning, but I am going back to my Spine from yesterday, “The Relentless Facts of Palestine.”
“Let’s talk about why you plan to kill me.” It was March 1987, and Milt Bearden was sitting in a spare interview room at the Islamabad headquarters of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Bearden was then the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, serving as the link between Washington and the U.S.-funded Afghan rebels bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan. He had come to see the mujahedin’s most lethal warlord, a radical Islamist named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
As we all understand, Republicans are about to have a pretty good election in November. Much of the GOP excitement revolves around congressional races that could unseat “red-state” Democrats who won during the 2006 or 2008 cycles, along with a number of incumbents (some of whom have decided to retire) who have been around much longer. Ground zero for the Republican tsunami is, of course, the Deep South, where in some areas John McCain did better in 2008 than George W.
As we all understand, Republicans are about to have a pretty good election in November. Much of the GOP excitement revolves around congressional races that could unseat “red-state” Democrats who won during the 2006 or 2008 cycles, along with a number of incumbents (some of whom have decided to retire) who have been around much longer. Ground zero for the Republican tsunami is, of course, the Deep South, where in some areas John McCain did better in 2008 than George W. Bush did in 2004, and where every available indicator shows the president to be very unpopular among white voters.
Republicans can't seem to stop themselves from revealing their master plan to destroy the Democrats:
I have always believed that the key to getting health care reform through Congress lay with President Barack Obama, not with Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. Obama had to win back public support for health care reform so wavering Democrats wouldn’t feel they were risking their jobs by voting for it. Well, it may be too late, and those of us who favor reform may have to rely on Pelosi’s skill to get this through, but there are signs that Obama’s health care summit has changed some minds.
Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince
By Mark A. Vieira
(University of California Press, 504 pp., $34.95)
There are times of such chaos and promise, danger and daydream, when all of us hope for a superb and flawless leader. If he can swing it, we are off the hook. But he need not be a hero who turns into a tyrant. He is not necessarily strong, fierce, and Herculean. Indeed, it may add to his charm, to his magic, if he is slight, youthful, on the pretty side, and--better still--dying. He should be gentler than other leaders, more reliant on reason, calm, and explanation than those commanders who insist on being obeyed. In modern times, I can think of three such figures--Michael Corleone (Ivy League, good military record, the clean boy in the family), Irving Thalberg (the sickly genius who led MetroGoldwyn-Mayer in its great days), and Barack Obama, the once-marginal man who was so wise and so far-seeing that he believed he did not have to behave like an American politician to save America.
