John Cassidy's Blog, page 48

It’s Time to Let Edward Snowden Come Home

Now that Congress has passed, and President Obama has signed, the U.S.A. Freedom Act, which places some limits on the domestic-surveillance powers of the National Security Agency, there’s still unfinished business to deal with.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Three Big Questions About the N.S.A.’s Patriot Act Powers
How Mitch McConnell Proved Rand Paul Right
N.S.A. Compensates for Loss of Surveillance Powers by Logging on to Facebook

Bernie Sanders: A Man With a Cause

Six days after formally entering the 2016 Presidential race, Senator Bernie Sanders is having some time of it. After attracting overflow crowds at a number of stops in Iowa late last week, Sanders moved on to Minnesota on Sunday, where he appeared at the Minneapolis American Indian Center and declared, “Our country belongs to all of our people and not just a handful of billionaires.” According to a report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, about three thousand people turned out. A local television station estimated the number of attendees at four thousand.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 1st
Hillary Clinton’s Strong Start
Republican “Survivor”: A Proposal for Culling the G.O.P. Field

Hillary Clinton’s Strong Start

On Thursday, some of Hillary Clinton’s top campaign officials held a briefing for about three dozen members of the 2016 hack pack. Their message was a positive one. “The view inside the campaign is that voters are concerned about kitchen-table issues Clinton wants to talk about, rather than media reports and Republican attacks on the [Clinton] foundation, the officials said,” Vox’s Jonathan Allen reported. “There’s no conflict between her promise to represent ‘everyday Americans’ and the access big donors have had to Clinton and her husband over the years, they said, arguing that voters will trust her to represent them in the White House.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Legal Logic of the Case Against Hastert
Bernie Sanders: A Man With a Cause
How Mitch McConnell Proved Rand Paul Right

FIFA’s Sepp Blatter Has Finally Met His Match

When I heard about the latest accusations of corruption against FIFA, the global governing body of soccer, my initial reaction was to think of Captain Renault’s disingenuous response to gambling at Rick’s Café in the movie “Casablanca.” Like many other long-suffering soccer fans, I was “shocked, shocked!” to learn that the U.S. Justice Department had charged nine FIFA officials with conspiring to enrich themselves through such practices as selling their services to the highest bidder, siphoning off millions of dollars in “sports marketing contracts,” funnelling money through offshore shell companies, and, in some cases, receiving suitcases full of cash.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sponsoring FIFA Corruption
Sideline Poetry
McCain Urges Military Strikes Against FIFA

Republican “Survivor”: A Proposal for Culling the G.O.P. Field

A couple of weeks ago, I was driving along the Belt Parkway, listening to Sean Hannity’s radio show, when the right-wing commentator said something that surprised me about the ever-expanding field of Republican primary candidates. This is getting ridiculous, Hannity complained—how are they all supposed to fit on the same stage for a debate?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bernie Sanders: A Man With a Cause
Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 1st
Hillary Clinton’s Strong Start

The Triumph (and Failure) of John Nash’s Game Theory

Thanks to the sterling efforts of Sylvia Nasar, Ron Howard, and Russell Crowe, many people are aware that John Nash, the Princeton mathematician who was killed over the weekend in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, lived a remarkable life. It included early academic stardom, decades of struggling with schizophrenia, and, in 1994, a shared Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. But outside the field of economics, Nash’s contribution to game theory, for which he was awarded the Nobel, remains rather less well understood.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Everywhere
Patagonia’s Anti-Growth Strategy
When Presidents Attack

A Fascinating Minimum-Wage Experiment Is About to Unfold

This week’s decision by the Los Angeles City Council to raise the local minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour by 2020 is part of an intriguing development in urban politics and social policy. Reacting to grassroots campaigns carried out by labor unions and other progressive groups, some of the biggest cities in America are now defying several decades of economic orthodoxy, as well as challenging a set of social norms that regarded low-wage jobs as unavoidable and acceptable.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, May 21st
Obama’s Well-Earned Victory Lap on the Economy
Sheryl Sandberg’s Divisive Pitch to #leanintogether

Why 2016 Is So Very Important

Like my colleague George Packer and many others, I feel some trepidation about the upcoming 2016 Presidential election. What with the sheer length of the process, the obscene amounts of money involved, and the prospect of another Bush vs. Clinton contest following the primaries, it’s not surprising that a lot of Americans, and particularly progressives, aren’t exactly enthused.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Legal Logic of the Case Against Hastert
How Mitch McConnell Proved Rand Paul Right
Dennis Hastert’s Secrets

Hillary Clinton’s Iraq Dilemma

A week after it began, the flap over Jeb Bush and Iraq still hasn’t fully died down. With his changing answers to the question that Megyn Kelly first posed to him, last Monday on Fox News, about whether he would have ordered an invasion in 2003 knowing what he knows now, the former Florida governor has provided campaign reporters with something juicy to write about, and Republican fretters with something to fret about.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bernie Sanders: A Man With a Cause
Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 1st
Hillary Clinton’s Strong Start

Obama’s Cognitive Dissonance on Trade

It’s been more than twenty years since the United States entered its last big trade agreement, with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It has been more than ten years since Barack Obama stood up at the 2004 Democratic Convention, in Boston, and said, “We have more work to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that’s moving to Mexico, and now they’re having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Legal Logic of the Case Against Hastert
How Mitch McConnell Proved Rand Paul Right
Dennis Hastert’s Secrets