By embracing a neoliberal, pro-austerity agenda, Poland’s mainstream left opened the way for a government of Polish Ted Cruzes.
Poland’s Tea Party Movement
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Rand Paul’s Foreign-Policy Flip-Flop Not Likely to Win Him Many Friends
What does the Republican Party want with Rand Paul if his extremist constituents feel too betrayed to follow him to its center?
Disrupting Hillary
What would it take for Hillary Clinton to reconsider her knee-jerk American exceptionalism?
The OPEC of Outrage
Rage is an important energy source. It fueled the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and is powering the ongoing protests in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. People in the Arab world have directed their anti-government anger at corruption, economic mismanagement, and human rights abuses. There’s no shortage of things to be angry about. The regimes may control the oil. But the people have access to the renewable resource of rage.
Tea Party at the Pentagon?
It’s a cold morning in January 2011. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Rand Paul (R-KY) wake up early to put on their Revolutionary War costumes. They’re joined by a miscellaneous group of anti-government protestors, libertarian activists, and all-around hotheads. With their supporters in tow, the tea party movement’s Adam and Eve drive to the Pentagon and use their congressional passes to get into the building. They proceed to the office of Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, where the Pentagon plans the future of the huge weapons systems that dominate military spending.
A Progressive-Tea Party Foreign Policy Coalition? Don’t Hold Your Breath
Once “official,” Tea Partiers drop their flirtation with defense cuts and libertarian non-intervention in favor of good old American exceptionalism.
The Political Consequences of Stagnation
My apologies to T. S. Eliot, but September, not April, is the cruelest month. Before 9/11/2001, there was 9/11/1973, when Gen. Pinochet toppled the Allende government in Chile and ushered in a 17-year reign of terror. More recently, on 9/15/2008, Lehman Brothers went bust and torpedoed the global economy, turning what had been a Wall Street crisis into a near-death experience for the global financial system.
Blood Sport
In the Mayan game of pitz, the first team sport in human history, two sets of players squared off in a ball court that could stretch as long as a football field. The object of the game was to use hips and elbows to keep the ball in the air and, if possible, get it through a hoop set high on a stone wall. The ball was roughly the size and heft of a human head. Indeed, given the sheer number of decapitations in the Popol Vuh, the sacred Mayan text that prominently features the game, scholars have not ruled out the possibility that the teams sometimes played with the heads of sacrificial victims. It’s also probable that, at the conclusion of the game, one team or the other fell en masse beneath the priests’ daggers.