2018-12-11 14:57
Facebook is caught in a trap of its own making. Despite calls to slow the spread of disinformation and protect user privacy on its platform, the company cannot seem to deliver on Mark Zucker… Read More
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Occasonal Commentary Blog
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A sporadic, progressive, historically-minded look at the news and events of the day.
2018-12-04 13:39
We are the future’s past. That can be hard to wrap your mind around—particularly for young people. So when I teach intro-level college history courses, I like to do a quick thoug… Read More
2018-10-30 14:05
2018-09-07 17:45
Mexican President Carlos Salinas is sworn in.
Prior to the 1988 Mexican presidential election, outgoing president Miguel de la Madrid selected his fellow Institutional Revolutionar… Read More
2018-07-20 22:09
Since the Supreme Court’s landmark 2013 Citizens United decision that political donations by independent entities (i.e. unions, corporations, etc.) are a form of free speech, Vladimir… Read More
2018-06-20 13:38
2018-06-15 21:51
The Trump administration bears the markings of incipient dictatorship. You can see it in the abdication of congressional oversight, and the rapid concentration of political power into a hier… Read More
2018-02-28 20:04
These kids are going to save lives. Maybe they'll change everything.
Glance at the history of this country, and you’ll notice that humiliation and shame have long been potent… Read More
2018-01-30 23:04
I’m reading Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs (h/t Josh Marshall). It is, in its unpretentious way, a brilliant piece of prose and a remarkable historical document.
I am particularly s… Read More
2017-11-30 20:32
“All I’ve done is have a child murdered and I’m trying to create something positive out of that. And for someone to attack me for that — I just can’t unders… Read More
2017-09-21 21:06
The Graham-Cassidy bill is the Republicans’ latest effort to “repeal” Obamacare. Named for its two Republican Senate sponsors, the bill doesn’t just end the exchanges… Read More
2017-08-21 22:01
Nope.
There are many ways to measure a president. C-Span’s 2017 Presidential Historians Survey ranks every American president up to Obama based on such hard-to-quantify… Read More
2017-08-02 01:09
Last year, Donald Trump ran for president. Now I'm a different person.
If nothing else, the last year and a half have been a humbling lesson on how some events, although utterly beyond my c… Read More
2017-07-14 17:52
Good fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes. For more than three quarters of a century, the United States has maintained its fences in an adversarial but remarkably stable relationsh… Read More
2017-06-26 19:15
The Transportation Security Administration — one of the many component bureaucracies of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security — is reportedly prep… Read More
2017-05-15 21:35
Every second of every day, hundreds of American servicemen and women around the world wait in readiness for a presidential order to launch a nuclear weapon. For most civilians, the idea of g… Read More
2017-03-15 21:06
As a historian, I rely on federal data to help tell stories about our collective past. So I am proud to work with Data Rescue Austin (#DataRescueATX), which is one of many local citizen arch… Read More
2017-03-02 22:57
The Republican Party has won for itself all three branches of national government by a combination of chicanery and sedition. They have secured the House thanks to gerrymandered districts an… Read More
2017-01-30 22:17
In the landmark 1974 Supreme Court case United States v. Nixon, the embattled President Nixon invoked executive privilege to stop the release of his taped conversations with indicted subordi… Read More
2016-12-13 21:46
It's hard to predict the timing of massive systemic failures. But once complex, interconnected systems start to fail, they tend to do so in predictable ways. "Cascading failure" describes a… Read More
2016-11-10 19:38
So Trumpism is a thing now. The specifics of Trumpist ideology are still unclear, since the president-elect himself is too obtuse, dishonest, and contemptuous of the American tradition of re… Read More
2016-10-17 20:01
Last Sunday was a busy and confusing day in Trumpland. That morning, Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani went on national television to warn that the Democratic Party would leverage its control of… Read More
2016-09-16 18:16
“For some months, I have traveled and traversed the border in every sense of the word. I have seen, investigated, and inquired about the needs of the population. To the Dominicans… Read More
2016-08-19 14:48
The other day, my wife forwarded me an ad for a non tenure-track teaching position at a Texas community college. As is now increasingly common, the pay for the position is calculated based o… Read More
2016-07-26 22:19
At last week’s RNC convention, “Make America First Again”—an isolationist twist on Donald Trump’s basic campaign catchphrase—was one of the gathering&rsqu&hell…Read More
2016-07-12 22:09
In the US, the justified use of deadly force by law enforcement must meet one of two legal requirements: it must either be to protect an officer’s life or the lives of others, or to pr… Read More
2016-06-24 17:25
The only certainty on this, the day after Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, is that one historical era has ended, and another now begins. Specifically, Brexit marks a decisiv… Read More
2016-06-21 16:41
About a week after any particularly shocking or spectacular mass shooting, the nation is usually treated to the thoughts of Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association. Recall that one… Read More
2016-06-09 22:16
In a now-infamous 1981 interview, Republican strategist Lee Atwater opined that the New Right no longer needed to be explicitly racist to carry the South. In fact, Atwater argued, by refusin… Read More
2016-05-20 21:07
In 2013--about the same time that the State of Michigan enacted a law enabling 'emergency managers' to take over financially-distressed municipal governments like Flint--the North Carolina G… Read More
2016-05-13 21:48
To talk public policy in the context of Donald Trump's presidential campaign kind of misses the point of Trump-as-politician. This should worry Democrats. Earlier this week, Paul Krugma… Read More
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