Politics
Debashish Bakshi
Jeremy Bernard is the White House’s newly chosen Social Secretary, an individual charged with leveraging the institution’s prestige for political currency—or “party planner.” Bernard is currently chief-of-staff to the U.S. Ambassador to France, prior to which he raised heaps of cash for the Obama campaign. (Sometimes correlation does indeed imply causation.) Bernard is the first man to become Social Secretary. He is also the first openly gay person to do so.
Politics
Jonathan Pope
Dahlia Lithwick’s recent piece on “the sad state of the liberal law student” is rehash of an article written four hundred times in the past year about how the confirmation process and the media and whomever else have made any non-Scaliaesque school of constitutional interpretation allegedly radical. That’s true and awful. But repeating that and trying to make it about students undercuts the actual issues around conservatism and progressiveness that liberal law students should be sad about.
Politics
Kevin Hilke
The immediate reaction from the Republican National Committee to the passage of the historic healthcare bill Sunday night, ostensibly penned by Chairman Michael Steele and intended for the party faithful, is a gracefully deranged gem of ad hominem missives. Now that the Republican propaganda campaign to “kill the bill” has proven unsuccessful, the GOP’s sole substantive response is a fundraising gimmick centered on convincing Americans that the Speaker of the House is one colossal B.
Politics
Megan Stacy
Those who deride this honor as an award of aspiration are missing the point. It’s not about what Obama hopes or intends to do; it’s about the hope and intention he inspires in others. It’s about changing the way people see the world and what the world can be and what the world can produce. There’s nothing wrong with honoring someone whose eloquence and prominence brought about a November night filled with mass gatherings of happy tears, shouts of glee, and hugs for strangers in the streets of Chicago, Kenyan villages, Indonesian hamlets, and towns across the world that see Barack Obama as a little bit of their own.
Politics
Megan Stacy
When I went to nursery school, I remember my mother folding my pancreatic enzymes, mixed with raspberry jam, between soft slices of bread, sparing me the long walk to the office for my medicine. I also remember three-hour car rides with my parents to spend 15 minutes with the most innovative doctors, crowded waiting rooms and watching a frustrated receptionist search for a translator to explain to an immigrant father that his son’s pulmonary function test might not be covered by his minimal insurance policy. By the age of six, I had a sense for health care in America.
