Tag: politics washington
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Fighting nonsense and spin, climate-change edition
You are driving, and almost out of gas, but you have two passengers who both need a ride. One fell at a construction site and has a steel bar through her chest. The other needs to quit smoking or she will develop emphysema in thirty years. With your limited resources, is it better to go…
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Two Riffs on Edward Snowden
1) The Great Success of “Operation Snowden” Three months ago, the Washington Post’s alpha-wonk Ezra Klein noted the double-think in Washington, that we could obviously create a vast enterprise to monitor all human information (using closed-source tools), but obviously the effort to provide healthcare to all was inevitably doomed by the same contracting procedures. Of…
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I met the President for fifteen seconds
So, obviously, it’s a photo-op at a fundraiser. Two hundred people line up in a U, along the walls of a largish beige hotel conference room. Our bags and purses taken away. No bar. Still there’s a buzz. A third of the room is hidden by navy blue sheets on movable barriers, like privacy curtains…
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Political naiveté and general uselessness
A little while ago I posted a thought that perhaps the Republicans might see their way to backing some form of congressional voting for DC, with an eye toward upping the party’s standing among the moderate and meritocratic citizens of our nation’s capital. My, I am naive. I have been reading Geoffrey Kabaservice’s excellent and…
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Hey Republicans – show DC some love!
My hometown of Washington DC has a poor tradition of executive governance — or a tradition of poor executive governance — for many historical reasons, from patronage to developer money to strong social divides. It also hurts us to be so monolithically of the Democratic Party. Last Tuesday was the primary election, which is effectively…