Like a fine wine, Nancy Pelosi just gets better with age. Disinviting Trump to give the State of the Union address in the people’s House, of which she is now Speaker, is a stroke of genius. It must be driving Trump nuts, if that’s not redundant. Trump is simply not accustomed to strong women, much less strong women exercising power that he can’t control. How could any Democrat have thought it would be smart politics to topple Pelosi, other [...]
You may have missed it, but an outfit called Digital First Media (DFM) is trying to buy the Gannett newspaper chain. Last year, I wrote a lengthy investigative piece on how private equity and hedge fund companies like DFM are destroying what’s left of America’s metropolitan dailies. You can read about it here. The basic model is to borrow money, buy a shaky newspaper (or in this case a whole shaky chain), charge the debt to the target company’s [...]
It will likely end one of two ways. An increasingly demented Trump could go ahead and declare a national emergency, order the military to build the wall—and his order will end up being quickly reviewed by the Supreme Court. It’s not quite a slam-dunk that the Court would approve it, because Chief Justice Roberts is showing signs of disgust with Trump’s extra-constitutional tendencies. To the extent that Trump listens to political advisers at all, he’s being told that this [...]
With more than two dozen Democrats likely to declare for president, how on earth do they stage debates? We all remember what happened with the Republicans in 2016. With an immense field, there was no discussion of issues; it quickly turned even more nasty and personal than usual, paving the way for the most negative and outrageous candidate to win the nomination. Uh-oh. With a field this large and more than 15 candidates onstage, anything could happen. Supposed charisma [...]
The very talented David Dayen, whose writing you probably know from our pages and other national publications, will be joining the Prospect in the spring as executive editor. In addition to adding immeasurably to our magazine, this will enable me to reach a long-sought personal goal of pulling back from management, to focus on writing, for the Prospect and other magazines and blogs. The rest of our leadership team will continue, joined by our wonderful new publisher, Ellen Meany, [...]
As you may have read, the latest ploy by the Netanyahu government and its allies in the U.S. Senate is a provision that would apply criminal penalties against U.S. corporations that boycott companies that operate in the occupied West Bank. This is opposed by the liberal pro-Israel organization, J Street, and the ACLU. The measure, in the form of a Senate rider to the emergency bill to keep the government open, is one of those ideas that gives bipartisanship [...]
Just about everything they are doing manages to backfire politically: the threatened government shutdown, Trump trying to lie his way out of an increasingly likely impeachment, and now health care. On Friday, a federal judge in Texas, Reed O’Connor, who was appointed by George W. Bush, decided to overrule the Supreme Court and hold the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. He ruled that because the individual mandate was unconstitutional, the entire law is unconstitutional. Very ingenious. The only problem [...]
Uh, it’s probably not a great idea for Democratic leaders to play Trump’s game of pretending to have serious budget negotiations on live TV. This is nothing if not Trump’s terrain. Trump uses the others as props, to demonstrate his swagger and their supposed lack of concern for “border security,” spelled W-A-L-L. In this case, in line with Trump’s own short attention span and penchant for changing the subject, the stunt was also intended as a diversion from his [...]
A year ago, I bet a pint of Guinness with an old friend that Britain would never leave the European Union. I’m beginning to think I just might collect. My point, then and now, was that as the degree of likely damage sank in, British voters would come to their senses. Both major parties, in their own ways, colluded to prevent that salutary outcome, but history sometimes has its own logic. Last week, the European Court of Justice, the [...]
Oh, those Dems. You’d think they’d be feeling pretty good, but no. It’s more than a year before the first primaries, and the fratricide has already started. Actually, the opening gun was more like sororicide, which the dictionary defines as the act of killing one’s sister. Sister Nancy Pelosi beat back the naysayers handily, and more power to her. But in the next ring of the circus, we have nasty infighting between the party’s center and left about whether [...]