The closest Tony Soprano ever comes to saving his appalling soul is late in Season 1 of “The Sopranos”. His daughter Meadow’s friend has become depressed to the point of cutting herself (“a suicidal gesture,” Dr. Melfi memorably clarifies) and the cause, Tony learns, is that the talented high school soccer coach—his daughter’s soccer coach, with unfettered access to his daughter--has been sleeping with Meadow’s friend. Tony is all set to kill the coach: Tony Soprano has killed men for much smaller offenses; he kills for business.
The nominal occasions for a conference call today with “Julian Assange & Whistleblowers” were, obviously, Edward Snowden’s recent leaks; the ongoing Bradley Manning court-martial; and the one-year anniversary of Assange’s “embassy confinement” (he took aslyum in Ecuador’s embassy in London; during the call, he accused Britain of violating international law by refusing to allow him to travel from the embassy to Ecuador itself).
John Harwood has a piece in The New York Times today that exemplifies such astonishing levels of silly conventional wisdom that it must be read in full. Harwood's contention, which is almost too boring to summarize, is that Obama has ignored the "red" areas of the country, rarely visiting them and thus failing to heal our country's divisions. (Sorry, cliched writing is almost impossible to avoid on this subject).
Last night LeBron James came through for the Miami Heat. Can he also come through for Obamacare? As Politico’s Kyle Cheney is reporting, the Administration has approached the National Basketball Association about helping to make the public aware of the new health insurance options that Obamacare will make available next year. It’s not clear exactly what the NBA or its stars would be doing, according to Cheney, or even if the league has agreed to participate.
During the fourth quarter of the instant-classic Game Six of the NBA Finals last night (one of the “two or three” best games in NBA history, said Magic Johnson), I flipped over to Twitter—it’s the way we watch now—and refreshed several minutes’ worth of tweets.
Yesterday, that venerable institution, the U.S. House of Representatives, passed yet another Republican-backed bill that will never become law. No, it’s not their thirty-eighth attempt to repeal Obamacare, though that’s surely around the corner. It’s a restriction on abortion that flies in the face of Roe v.
It was no surprise that, after speaking in private for two hours in Northern Ireland, President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin looked “tense and uncomfortable,” or, as the pool report put it, “serious and unsmiling.” Not only did the meeting come on the heels of a year and a half of Russia cynically ratcheting up anti-American sentiments—and harassing Obama’s ambassador—in the country, or g
Vice's June fiction issue does what the magazine does best (or worst, depending on your taste): combine culture and controversy.
The president’s approval rating has dipped, probably because of the NSA surveillance revelations or the accumulated effect of supposed or actual scandals. As Mark Blumenthal has pointed out, the decline probably isn’t as large as suggested by yesterday’s CNN poll, which pointed toward a big, 8 point decline in the president’s approval rating.
Barely had the executive jets departed Boston's Logan Airport filled with disappointed Mitt Romney backers after the 2012 election than Bobby Jindal was out of the box declaiming on what the Republican Party needed to do to win back the White House.
