Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi tried to steal third base on Sunday, announcing that he was calling back into session the dissolved Egyptian parliament. It would continue to meet, he said, until new parliamentary elections, to be held within 60 days of the completion of the new constitution. He thus took on both the Supreme Court […]
Top Ten Surprises on Libya’s Election Day
Most Western reporting on Libya is colored by what is in my view a combination of extreme pessimism and sensationalism. It has been suggested that because most reporters don’t stay there for that long, many don’t have a sense of proportion. It is frustrating to have faction-fighting in distant Kufra in the far south color […]
States with Highest Infant Mortality Rates most Opposed to Obamacare
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Voters in Libya: Indescribable Joy, “Libya is Free”
Saturday morning, 2.8 million registered voters in Libya went to the polls to choose a parliament for the first time since 1965. One woman standing in line to vote said she was filled with ‘indescribable joy’ at this opportunity to participate in democracy. A Reuters correspondent tweets about tears in the eyes of women voters; […]
Omar Khayyam (492) “What’s with your supposed zodiac?”
What’s with your supposed zodiac, then, that it is so helpful to the nasty? It bestows on them palatial baths, and mill works, and long walkways to their mansions– while the honorable have to pawn everything to earn their nightly bread crust. Who would give a fart for such a constellation? Translated by Juan Cole from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, […]
Libya’s Elections Hold Vast Promise, Pose Hard Challenges
Libya goes to the polls on Saturday for the first time since 1965. Since in that 1965 election parties were banned, and since King Idris’s establishment tampered with the ballots, it wasn’t an election very much like the one to be held on Saturday. There is a sense in which this election is unprecedented in […]
States with fewest Passports most Opposed to Obamacare
Only about one third of Americans have passports, and if it weren’t for the post- September 11 requirement that one travel to Canada and Mexico on a passport, it would no doubt be an even smaller proportion. (Hence the high number of passports in states with large Latino populations). But take Latinos out of the […]
Romney Praised Individual Mandate in 2010
Andrew Kaczynski points out at Buzzfeed that in a 2010 interview, Mitt Romney compared his Massachusetts universal health insurance plan to that of President Obama, listing positive similarities and negative differences. He cited as a good similarity the individual mandate, in which everyone is willy-nilly made part of the pool, reducing costs, which also allows […]
Ghoul’s Glossary
Offshore account: Something that a gentleman creates, puts in his wife’s name, and carefully hides when he goes into politics because good breeding forbids him to utter obscenities in public. Frerrorist: (on the model of ‘frenemy’ or friend/enemy): Person with whom you are friends, who belongs to an organization that deploys violence against the civilians […]
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