Elias Isquith

5 Historical Monsters Arguably Less Terrible Than Christopher Columbus

Despite the fact that an increasing number of states are deciding they'll pass on the opportunity to commemorate a man who by any reasonable measure has to be remembered as a vehicle for world-historic levels of death and destruction, the truth remains that Christopher Columbus Day is, as John Oliver recently called it, very much still a thing:

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'It’s Shameless Financial Strip-Mining': Les Leopold Explains How the 1 Percent Killed the Middle Class

While the fate of the presidential campaign that talks about the issue more than any other remains uncertain, this much is clear: Despite the general public’s mounting anxiety and awareness, the economic inequality that’s done so much to change American society over the past 40 years has not abated. It may, in fact, be getting worse.

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Paul Krugman Is Wrong: Why His Case Against Bernie Sanders Misses the Point

For the first time since his strident defenses of globalization ruffled some fair trade feathers in the 1990s, Paul Krugman is in a protracted debate with the American left.

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Why Chris Christie's Beatdown of Marco Rubio Was the Only Moment From the GOP Debate That Mattered

The moment when Saturday night’s Republican presidential primary debate was effectively over came long before the seven candidates left the stage at the St. Anselm’s College Institute of Politics in Manchester.

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Now You Can Start Worrying: Two Bold New Moves Reveal Trump’s Campaign Is No Laughing Matter

For most of the second-half of 2015, whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is “serious” (definition: unclear) was arguably the question of American politics.

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The 6 Worst Moments in U.S. Politics of 2015

Before we get this listicle started, let’s get something out of the way first: That headline is not intended to be taken literally. We are not so callous or shallow to think that anything could be “worse” than what happened in Charleston this summer, or Colorado Springs this fall. Those were two atrocities, yes; but they were profoundly political acts, too. They resulted in the murder of innocent people; human beings who loved and were loved, and will never come back. Nothing could be worse.

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Why Mass Death Is Our New Normal: The Real Root of America’s Gun Violence

As you likely know by now, there was another mass shooting in America yesterday. Actually, according to Shooting Tracker, there were two.

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Sorry, Conservatives, But Denying the Gender Wage Gap Is 'Truly Delusional'

For all of her talk of wanting to be (arguably) the first avowed feminist president, and wanting to use the office in order to champion the interests of working women and middle-class families, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 campaign has by and large chosen not to frame its economic proposals as being especially pro-women. That’s not to say that Clinton’s policy recommendations wouldn’t disproportionately affect women — many of them would. Instead, it is merely to note that the former secretary of state has opted against treating inequality and economic dysfunction as a women’s issue.

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This Man Is Not a Wonk: Why Marco Rubio Is Just Another Intellectual Fraud

After spending most of the past few months either kowtowing to Donald Trump or forestalling complete anarchy in the House of Representatives, Republicans now find themselves on the verge of what they hope will be a much better position. Former vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan is the new Speaker of the House and Senator Marco Rubio seems poised to overtake Jeb Bush as the establishment’s favored candidate. The adults, some elite Republicans hope, will soon be back in charge.

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Hillary vs. Bernie: Here's What's Really at Stake

I’m going to skip right past the question of whether Sen. Bernie Sanders or Hillary Rodham Clinton “won” Tuesday night’s debate, for two reasons: First, because no one can seem to agree what the criteria are for “winning.” Second, because it would only matter if the result were dramatic enough to change the overall dynamic of the campaign, which in this case rather obviously did not happen. Whether you’re feeling the Bern or ready for Hillary, you probably feel the same way now that you did before the debate.

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What a Billionaire's Nuisance Suit Reveals About American Plutocracy

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling is a consummately extreme and ideological document, the product of the Federalist Society mindset through and through. So if you’re trying to elevate one specific part of the ruling as especiallydisconnected, you’ve got a lot to work with. In fact, it’s one of those questions for which there is no “wrong” answer.

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Scott Walker Is a Pastier Trump: The Wisconsin Governor’s Ethno-Nationalism Is Just As Egregious

A few days ago, the Daily Beast published an article by self-styled Reasonable Conservative Matt K. Lewis on “cuckservative,” a relatively new term of abuse that has recently set off some intramural sniping within the conservative movement. As Lewis rightly noted, the term is tribalist and racist. It’s also misogynist, paternalistic and xenophobic — the nasty consequence of racial panic and toxic masculinity, but in word form.

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It’s Not Who He Is, It’s Who He Hates: The Secret To Donald Trump’s Toxic Appeal

Now that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is no longer a bizarro mid-summer distraction but a real-life thing that is actually happening, the response of the political class is beginning to change. At first, they treated “The Donald’s” candidacy as a welcome distraction from Hillary Clinton. But then Trump broke one of their cardinal rules — “Thou shalt nottake cheap shots at Sen. John McCain” — and from that point forward, the relentless snark has been traded for “smarm” as far as the eye can see.

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Charter Schools’ Worst Nightmare: A Pro-Union Movement May Change Charters Forever

When you think of charter schools, there are probably a few people and concepts that come to mind: Michelle Rhee, “grit,” Bill Gates, Eva Moskowitz, KIPP, etc. And if you happen to think of teachers unions at some point during this education policy reverie, you’ll probably have them in the role they’re traditionally assigned by the media — as anti-charter and anti-reform. Just like Israelis and Palestinians, Crips and Bloods, Yankees and Red Sox, teachers unions and the charter movement simply don’t like each other. That’s just the way it is.

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"We're the Market. We Buy the Drugs. We Create the Demand"

Don Winslow, the celebrated author of more than a dozen books — including 2010′s “Savages,” which the New York Times described as a beguiling mix of “the grave and the playful,” and which Oliver Stone adapted in 2012  — has done something he said he wouldn’t do.

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'We Are In a Revolutionary Moment': Chris Hedges Explains Why An Uprising Is Coming - And Soon

In recent years, there’s been a small genre of left-of-center journalism that, following President Obama’s lead, endeavors to prove that things on Planet Earth are not just going well, but have, in fact, never been better. This is an inherently subjective claim, of course; it requires that one buy into the idea of human progress, for one thing. But no matter how it was framed, there’s at least one celebrated leftist activist, author and journalist who’d disagree: Chris Hedges.

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Elizabeth Warren Is Winning: How the Progressive Icon is Remaking Politics - Without Running For President

With most of the political press having finally accepted that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is indeed not running for president, it’s only fitting that the Economist, a neoliberal and generally clueless British magazine that American elites like to pretend they’ve read, has an essay in its new issue all about how she’s too liberal and could never win.

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Marco Rubio’s Murderous Myth: Why His “Noble Lie” About American History Is So Dangerous

As my colleague Simon Maloy has already noted, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio delivered a big policy speech on Wednesday, his first since announcing his intention to be the Republican Party’s next presidential nominee. The speech, which was billed as an attempt to define a “Rubio Doctrine” for U.S. foreign policy, was a substantive disaster. (Or at least it was to anyone who grimaced when, in 2012, Rubio described George W. Bush’s record as “fantastic.”)

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What Ted Cruz and Rand Paul Fail to Grasp About the Constitution

With the 2016 election cycle having kicked into first-gear already, any American who hasn’t inured themselves to the monotonous (and often ultimately meaningless) repetition of the word “Constitution” is advised to get to self-desensitizing — and quick.

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The Age of Selfishness: What Made Ayn Rand Tick and Why She's a Right-Wing Favorite Today

With Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul having recently announced his intention to be the next U.S. president (an announcement he delivered, incidentally, from Louisville’s Galt House Hotel), now seems as good a time as ever to reexamine the life and legacy of one Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, a woman better known as Ayn Rand.

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White Supremacy’s Gross Symbol: What the Stars and Bars Really Represent

As Paul Campos noted earlier this week, the Supreme Court will hand down a ruling later this year on whether a state can stop its citizens from purchasing specialty license plates featuring the Confederate flag. The case is a complex and interesting one that raises all sorts of questions about free speech. But while the court has been grappling with the limits and mandates of the First Amendment, the outside world has been engaged in a different, less esoteric discussion.

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Why Elizabeth Warren Freaks Out Elite Washington

Let’s play a little compare and contrast, shall we? I’m going to share two quotes from two different speakers. Your mission in this game, should you choose to accept it, will be to determine each quote’s original speaker. With all that being said, let’s begin.

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Rahm Emanuel's Huge Embarrassment: What It Means for Liberals and America

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party can be susceptible to the “moral victory” fallacy, which in its most degraded form considers a righteous loser preferable to a compromised winner. All the same, it’s hard not to interpret Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Pyrrhic victory on Tuesday as a major win for the party’s economically populist wing. After all, this is Chicago we’re talking about; incumbent mayors expect to be crowned, not subjected to the indignity of actually campaigning for reelection.

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The Media May Wish the Tea Party Crowd Is Becoming Mainstream, But They Are as Crazy as Ever

It is a cardinal rule of horserace-style political journalism in the U.S. that no two elections can have the same narrative. That’s not to say certain tropes aren’t repeated ad nauseam. But it is to say that that the press corps’ desire to mitigate the unavoidable, soul-crushing monotony of a campaign often causes it to flip the script from one election to the next, despite politics in the real world changing much more slowly. If you look at the way the media’s covered the ongoing “invisible primary” to be the GOP’s next presidential nominee, you’ll see the narrative for 2016 is being pre-written already.

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The Tea Party is Getting Worse: Media May Want a New Narrative, but GOP is Still Nuts

It is a cardinal rule of horserace-style political journalism in the U.S. that no two elections can have the same narrative. That’s not to say certain tropes aren’t repeated ad nauseam. But it is to say that that the press corps’ desire to mitigate the unavoidable, soul-crushing monotony of a campaign often causes it to flip the script from one election to the next, despite politics in the real world changing much more slowly. If you look at the way the media’s covered the ongoing “invisible primary” to be the GOP’s next presidential nominee, you’ll see the narrative for 2016 is being pre-written already.

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Jon Stewart Outgrew 'The Daily Show': Why His Leaving Is a Good Thing

Judging by the the emails that flowed through my inbox like a massive torrent of sewagein response to my last piece on the guy, this message might only apply to around five people — but Jon Stewart deniers all over the Internet, listen up. I’ve got some news that’s both good and bad.

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The Right’s Inequality Ruse: What GOP’s Faux-Concern For Needy Americans Really Shows

With the economic recovery finally beginning to reach the millions of Americans in the bottom 95 percent, there’s a temptation among political reporters (for whom the Great Recession was more of an abstraction than a lived experience, anyway) to move past the gloom and negativity of recent years in favor of a new narrative. True, the last six years may have been characterized by economic stagnation, political dysfunction and a growing chasm between the power and priorities of the wealthy and the rest. But that was before the dawn of “morning in Obama’s America.” Nowadays, as Politico Magazine put it, everything is “awesome.” Well, at the risk of being a wet blanket, I’ll ask you to count me among the skeptics.

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The Right's Textbook Freakout: What the Fight Over A.P. History is Really About

Say what you want about the tenets of American conservatism, but at least it’s entertaining. But while things are likely to quiet down a bit this year on the federal level, what with the GOP’s many presidential aspirants spending their time on under-the-radar activities (like wooing donors and glad-handing state-level party hacks) and delaying their public courting of the GOP rank-and-file, it appears that that conservative base is more than ready to pick up the slack. Take the recent saber-rattling against Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) coming out of Georgia’s legislature as a case in point.

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Ted Cruz & the New McCarthyism: Inside A Dangerous Response to the Atrocity in Paris

Here are a few sentences I should not have to write but apparently must, all the same: Taking the life of another human being is an absolutely terrible thing for a person to do. By definition, murder is a crime — perhaps the most heinous one there is. No one should be physically threatened, much less killed, for sharing an opinion. Everyone should have the right to say, write, draw or otherwise express whatever sentiment they’d like without fear of violent reprisal. And anyone who thinks it’s not only appropriate, but righteous, to use violence or the threat of violence in order to silence those they disagree with is as profoundly wrong as they could be.

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The Right’s Vile Ferguson Ploy: Why They Really Want to Focus on the Riots

From the very beginning, before St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch had uttered the first word of his defensive and dissembling speech, the fix was in. The conspiracy this time was not to protect Officer Darren Wilson from standing trial for the killing of Michael Brown, though that was certainly related. This time, the conspiracy was to organize the announcement of Wilson’s exoneration in as provocative a way possible. The ultimate goal was to manipulate the public and the press into forgetting the real story of Ferguson, and bicker about the morality of rioting instead.

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