• Week of 23.01.2017
The Legacy of President Barack Obama: an interview with Terry Glavin
The Roundtable Podcast 77
Tag Archives: President Obama
Ignore the Optimists: the World Isn’t About to End
SOME DAY the world’s going to end. No one knows the someday, nor the somehows. That hasn’t prevented speculation. For as long as there’ve been human brains able to theorize, there have been theories.
Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America is now Ted Cruz’s Contract on America
WHILE WRITING this I received an invitation to Washington. At the end of the message, this: “in case of a federal government shutdown, the event will be canceled.” All these years later, I was left thinking, could it be 1995? Only, Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America is now Ted Cruz’s Contract on America, the intervening years providing sources of irony as well as of discouragement. Mostly however discouragement, as I notice that the Continuing Resolution is a continuous thing, alright, but more like an irresolution.
The Roundtable Podcast 48
• Week of 21.07.2013 
Boston suspect Tsarnaev ‘manhunt photos’ leaked | Detroit bankruptcy: Is it a warning sign of things to come? | President Obama: “Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago” | Recommended Article: Makers of War, by Matthieu Aikins | War not part of human nature: Science study | Russian Security Now Using Typewriters to Thwart the NSA | Russian band Pussy Riot release new anti-Putin video | ‘Pink Mass’ Has Made Westboro Baptist Church Founder’s Mom Gay In Afterlife, Satanists Claim | Charities should reject Gawker’s ‘Crackstarter’ funds
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The Egyptian People Are Ready for Democracy: Too Bad About the Politicians
IN A MAY 2013 Ahram Online interview, the US ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, fielded a question about her government’s delicate relationship with the Morsi regime:
The fact is [the Freedom and Justice party] ran in a legitimate election and won. … Of course it is challenging to be dealing with any new government. However, at the state institutional level, we are for instance still liaising with the same military and civil service personnel, and thus have retained the same long-established relations.
One month later, footage of Tahrir Square brought to the world an outpouring of hostility, aimed at Ms. Patterson and President Obama. Why, ask the Egyptian critics of Morsi, did Obama keep up the flow of money and other material supports, as the Freedom and Justice Party undertook to replicate the authoritarianism of earlier regimes? Or to put it another way — the way Patterson did — why did the American government “retain the same long-established relations”?
Barack Obama’s Oath, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Infidels
MUCH HAS BEEN made this week of President Obama’s deference to the Bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., on which he has sworn his oaths inaugurating a second presidential term. Cornel West, who has taken especial affront to Barack Obama’s exploitation of King’s “prophetic fire for a moment of presidential pageantry,” has for months now referred to the present Oval Office occupant as a Rockefeller Republican in blackface.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 