Some commentators thought it was unwise of Starmer to adopt so many of the Blair mannerisms in his Observer article at the weekend. His riposte has been to copy Blair’s mannerisms in person and tell his critics that it is worse than they thought … he actually believes in this stuff.
After all, Starmer has been on what the Master might call ‘a journey’ over the past three years, in which he has had to be Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair rolled into one.
Blair doubters will shake their heads, complaining that the prime minister from different times long ago is now “toxic,” and that Starmer should strike out boldly as his own person. But Starmer’s appearance on Blair’s stage was his answer to that.
Starmer recognises that Blair has transformed his reputation in recent years; that his institute is the source of some of the best ideas for government and opposition. Not only is Blair the glue that holds the centre of British politics together, after a long spell in the wilderness, but for many voters, his endorsement conveys a simple message: Keir Starmer is the mirror image of the most successful Labour prime minister. You may safely vote for him.
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Excerpts from a review of ‘In Heroes or Villains?’
Headline: In Heroes or Villains? The Blair Government Reconsidered, Jon Davis and John Rentoul seek to counter the negative prevailing view of Tony Blair and the New Labour government, focusing on key areas of criticism.
The legacy of the Tony Blair government continues to be the topic of some debate, as shown by the former Prime Minister’s recent defence of his record following a sustained attack from the Jeremy Corbyn-supporting wing of the Labour Party. This makes Jon Davis and John Rentoul’s new book on the Blair era, Heroes or Villains? The Blair Government Reconsidered, all the more pertinent. The authors believe that the ‘prevailing view of Blair and New Labour is too negative’ and that this book should ‘provide a counterweight, so that the independent-minded reader is better placed to reach a considered view’ (312).
Heroes or Villains? takes an innovative approach to its subject, having developed out of a number of university courses taught by Davis and Rentoul at Queen Mary, University of London, and King’s College London. One of the strengths of the book is that many of the key protagonists—including Blair himself—spoke to the classes and provide at times fascinating detail.
Mrs. Thatcher might have amended her statement about Tony Blair, being her greatest accomplishment? With praise for Jon Davis and John Rantoul as the newest apologists for Blair in 2019, and into the political present ?
The ‘Cult of Blair’ is about the erasure of Jeremy Corbyn, as practiced by an utterly corrupt British Corporate Media, and it’s hirelings.
As a long time reader of The New York Review of Books: 1971 to the present: Mr. Remnick was part of a ‘Left Coterie’ that included Robert Silvers, the editor of NYRB. Silvers idolized Kennan , he appeared often, and NYRB sold his books through ‘The Readers Subscription Service’.
So it cannot escape the attention of a reader that Silvers provided publication space to New Cold Warrior Timothy Snyder, as early as 2014:
The Haze of Propaganda Timothy Snyder
From Moscow to London to New York, the Ukrainian revolution has been seen through a haze of propaganda.
FORUM: George F. Kennan and the Cold War: Perspectives on John Gaddis’s Biography
Editor’s Introduction Mark Kramer
Gaddis, Kennan, and the Cold War: An Assessment of the Biography David Mayers
Analyzing and Assessing Gaddis’s Kennan Biography: Questionable Interpretations and Unpursued Evidence and Issues Barton J. Bernstein
Gaddis’s Achievement: Taking the Measure of Kennan Vladimir O. Pechatnov
An Assessment of John Lewis Gaddis’s George F. Kennan: An American Life Ivan Kurilla
Contained? The Religious Life of George F. Kennan and Its Influence James C. Wallace
Commentary on John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life Binoy Kampmark
George F. Kennan and the Division of Europe Vít Smetana
Gaddis’s Kennan: A Different Kennan? Anders Stephanson
Reply to the Commentaries of John Lewis Gaddis
This is too important an issue, to let the Neo-Con/Neo-Liberal alliance, now self-presenting as American Political Centrism , attempt to Control The Narrative- David Remnick seeks to discredit Kennedy, as a part of a political toxin of The Left, a Putin Apologist, or in the parlance of the McCarthyites, a Putin fellow traveler, via his notion of ‘The Alternative Facts of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’ . Mr. Remnick lives in a fools paradise, that doesn’t think that a potential Reader, might explore other alternative sources of information? or that that reader might be suspicious of Mr. Remnick’s political agenda, in his badgering, bulling tone that he adopts to his guest? That now has become the political weapon of choice of the Neo-Con/Neo-Liberal alliance. Also Mr. Remnick lacks the political savvy, to even conceive, that a Reader might look to the toxic object lesson of Jeremy Corbyn, that stares us in the face?
Last thought : Kennan was a thinker/ writer who traded upon his past, in the political present: The Reader catches some sobering glimpses of him in ‘The Georgetown Set’ .
Note that ‘Liberal Zionism’ is not just moribund, but dead! While Tom Friedman was the ‘middle ground’ of Israeli Loyalists/Apologists, at The Paper of Record. His latest 1,819 word essay is anguished in its way, yet still hewing to the received wisdom that he helped to construct.
Headline: The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun
Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I’m a translator from English to English. I try to take complex subjects and make them understandable, first to myself and then to readers — and that is what I want to do here regarding three interrelated questions: Why is Israel’s cabinet trying to crush the country’s Supreme Court? Why did President Biden tell CNN that “this is one of the most extreme” Israeli cabinets he’d ever seen? And why did the U.S. ambassador to Israel just say that America is working to prevent Israel from “going off the rails”?
The short answer to all three questions is that the Biden team sees the far-right Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, engaged in unprecedented radical behavior — under the cloak of judicial “reform” — that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values and the vitally important shared fiction about the status of the West Bank that has kept peace hopes there just barely alive.
If you want to get just a whiff of the tension between the U.S. and this Israeli cabinet, spearheaded by extremists, consider that hours after Biden mentioned to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria just how “extreme” some of Netanyahu’s cabinet members were, one of the most extreme of them all, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told Biden to butt out — that “Israel is no longer another star in the American flag.”
Nice, eh? According to a 2020 Congressional Research Service report, Israel has received the most U.S. foreign assistance of any country in the world since World War II, at $146 billion, not adjusted for inflation. That’s quite an allowance and one that might have merited a little more respect for the U.S. president from Ben-Gvir, who in his youth was convicted of inciting racism against Arabs.
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The Reader need only look to Friedman’s final anguised paragraphs to understand …
Israel’s very decent, moderate president, Isaac Herzog, who has been pleading with Netanyahu’s coalition to step back from forcing any changes in the judiciary and to do so only by national consensus, will be meeting with Biden in Washington next week. It is Biden’s way of signaling that his problem is not with the Israeli people but with Bibi’s extremist cabinet.
But I have no doubt that the U.S. president will arm the Israeli president with the message — out of sorrow, not anger — that when the interests and values of a U.S. government and an Israeli government diverge this much, a reassessment of the relationship is inevitable.
I am not talking about a reassessment of our military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, which remains strong and vital. I am talking about our basic diplomatic approach to an Israel that is unabashedly locking in a one-state solution: a Jewish state only, with the fate and rights of the Palestinians T.B.D.
Such a reassessment based on U.S. interests and values would be some tough love for Israel but a real necessity before it truly does go off the rails. That Biden is prepared to get in Netanyahu’s face before America’s 2024 election suggests that our president believes he has the support not only of most Americans for this but of most American Jews and even most Israeli Jews.
He is right on all three counts.
I’ve highlighted the sentence: ‘I am not talking about a reassessment of our military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, which remains strong and vital.’ Friedman is, as always, a political conformist. In sum ‘tough love’ is the answer to the arrival of The Zionist Faschist State, and it’s toxic actors Netanyahu and his thugs Smotrich and Ben-Gvir ? The Genocide On The Installment Plan against the indigenous Palestinians does not merit mention, Friedman is a Loyalist …
Political Observer reads this crap, so you won’t have too!
I recall Joe Conason calling Ralph Nader a ‘spoiler’ during the 2000 Presidential Election, in that once very trendy, salmon pink newspaper, The New York Observer. Also look at the treatment, in a word defamation, of Jeremy Corbyn, in the British Press, as an object lesson, about the possibility of the power of American Corporate Media, to message an American Electorate, into believing that candidates like RFK Jr., Marian Williamson, and Cornel West represent a threat to respectable bourgeois politics.
‘Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer’ follows the lead of others:
Headline: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Real Motive
Sub-headline: He’s not actually trying to become president.
Mr. Shafer brings a talent that @mtomasky nor @joanwalsh can’t quite equal! Mr. Shafer reads the mind of his protagonist, RFK Jr. This essay is what used to be called ‘a hatchet job’, so as such, I offer The Reader some samples of the Shafer Methodology. Shafer trades in a dull-witted pastiche of a Borscht Belt Comic.
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If Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s three-month-old presidential campaign were a newly opened restaurant, it would have already succumbed to its negative reviews and closed its doors.
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Kennedy — and this comes as a surprise to nobody — is about as likely to win the Democratic Party’s nomination as, say, Donald Trump.
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A sharp CNN piece last month by the network’s analyst Harry Enten attached an anchor to Kennedy’s chances and sunk it into the depths of the Mariana Trench.
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This inevitable defeat is self-evident to everybody, including Kennedy, one suspects. But RFK Jr. doesn’t care about losing because there’s little evidence he was very interested in becoming president in the first place.
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Some people give more forethought to picking a dressing for their salad than Kennedy seems to have given to his run for president.
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Or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, it could be that Kennedy has always craved power but wanted to start at the top.
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The political gene, which often comes bundled with the one for narcissism, never adequately thrives until fed by some form of adulation. Even the negative adulation of the recent profiles can be read as “I must be doing something right because they’re all knocking me” for somebody as thirsty for attention as Kennedy. He’s winning there, too.
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The current Kennedy moment will soon be swamped by the Biden machine. But every day this final heir to America’s second greatest political dynasty spends on the hustings, he will continue rolling up winnings like an undetected card counter in Las Vegas.
The opening paragraph of Mr. Colvile’s latest political corrective:
How did you mark the great occasion? Personally, I’m worried I didn’t do enough. Sure, I got the tattoo and renamed both of my children “Aneurin”. But it’s Our NHS. Its 75th birthday deserved much more.
Like his political idol Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Colvile is a humorless ideologue. Mr. Colvile version of Thatcherism engages in a self-serving ‘changing the subject’ at will, that mimics political concern for the welfare, and the greater good of children? Thatcher’s Household God was Hayek’s ‘Road to Serfdom’, she passed it out like party favors. We still live in that political collapse: so in propaganda terms, ‘changing the subject’ is advantageous in ‘cover your ass’ terms! That the NHS is being ‘privatized’ is inconvenient to Mr. Colvile:
This from 2022:
Headline: NHS privatization drive linked to rise in avoidable deaths, study suggests
Sub-headline: Outsourcing accelerated by Lansley’s shakeup in 2012 linked to drop in care quality in landmark review
The privatisation of NHS care accelerated by Tory policies a decade ago has corresponded with a decline in quality and “significantly increased” rates of death from treatable causes, the first study of its kind says.
The hugely controversial shakeup of the health service in England in 2012 by the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, forced local health bodies to put contracts for services out to tender.
Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash has since been handed to private companies to treat NHS patients, according to the landmark review.
It shows the growth in health contracts being tendered to private companies has been associated with a drop in care quality and higher rates of treatable mortality – patient deaths considered avoidable with timely, effective healthcare.
The analysis by the University of Oxford has been published in the Lancet Public Health journal. “The privatisation of the NHS in England, through the outsourcing of services to for-profit companies, consistently increased [after 2012],” it says.
“Private-sector outsourcing corresponded with significantly increased rates of treatable mortality, potentially as a result of a decline in the quality of healthcare services.”
With a record 6.5 million patients now waiting for care, and private companies being lined up to help tackle the backlog worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic, the research will prompt new fears over the potential harms of the increased outsourcing of NHS care.
“Our study suggests that increased for-profit outsourcing from clinical commissioning groups [CCGs] in England might have adversely affected the quality of care delivered to patients and resulted in increased mortality rates,” the authors said.
“Our findings suggest that further privatization of the NHS might lead to worse population health outcomes.”
Mr. Colvile attempts to cover his political tracks by introducing his concern ‘we’ve forgotten schools need intensive care’ . The next 929 words show him at full gallop , while the NHS is left in the clouds of self-created political dust, Mr. Colvile’s has kicked up born of that vital ‘change of subject’!
Headline: Mark Zuckerberg says extent of opioid crisis was biggest surprise of US tour
Sub-headline: Speaking about his 30-state tour that sparked rumors of a presidential run, the Facebook CEO added: ‘We have a responsibility to remain optimistic’
Headline: Facebook is the world’s most powerful adolescent
Sub-headline: And like many teenagers, it needs to be set some rules
Mr. Rachman’s accusation:
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg was once reluctant to acknowledge the company’s political power — initially rejecting the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the 2016 election as “crazy”. This attitude may have been naive or disingenuous, but it was certainly not sustainable.
‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ continues? Macron/Sarkozy will share the same Political Fait? The Financial Times as the Advocate/Apologist for a Political/Moral Colonialism, within the State that practiced these Crimes, against Self Determination of the refugees that held aloft France as the junior partner of The British Empire… This Writer has not the canvas to properly draw a complete illustration of ‘Western Mendacity’ , in the face of this ‘Rebellion From Within’ …
StephenKMackSD
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Reply to:
Thank you! You have 9 recommendations at 11: 43 AM PDT. The utter political fragility of Macron, post his ‘Pension Reform’ debacle, or call it a betrayal of Democracy… Like Sarkozy, he is not just ‘tone deaf’ , but blissfully unaware of the ‘Have Not’s’ : gilets jaunes , gilets noir, Algerians and others. No surprise that ‘you’ fail to grasp a possible explanation, for what might be a deep discontent of the ‘Lower Order’ of French Citizenry? Look to the life experience of Macron and yourself for a possible explanatory frame?
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
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Macron’s Swift Justice: After Protests, France Holds Hasty Trials for Hundreds
The streets are calmer, after days of unrest over the police shooting of a teenager, but the courts are going into overdrive. Lawyers for those arrested often have just 30 minutes to prepare.
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Some 3,400 people were arrested as a massive police presence set out to restore order. The justice system is running almost around the clock to process them. Many are being funneled through hasty trials, known as comparutions immédiates, where prosecutors and court-appointed lawyers traditionally churn through simple crimes like traffic violations, theft or assault, often when the accused is caught in the act. After flooding the streets with 45,000 officers night after night, the French state is looking to send a second harsh message. Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti advised prosecutors to systematically seek prison sentences for people charged with physical assault or serious vandalism. “Very clearly, I want a firm hand,” Mr. Dupond-Moretti told France Inter radio on Monday. …
Its called Fascisms for a reason: half an hour to prepare a plea !
Headline: The Con Artists Who Blame Ukraine Aid for America’s Social Problems
Sub-headline: RFK Jr., Glenn Greenwald, and other Putin apologists are making disingenuous, pseudo-populist arguments against U.S. support for Ukraine.
The Reader has to be patient with Alaric DeArment’s first two paragraphs of his ‘essay’ that are mere preamble:
A scene of squalor unfolds as the camera moves along a city street lined with apparent drug addicts to the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A caption reads, “While American citizens live on the streets and take drugs not to feel the pain, the United States would rather finance a proxy war against Russia,” while a bar graph says the U.S. has sent $46.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
The video, on TikTok, is but one of the countlesspostsacross social media that convey the same underlying message: By helping Ukraine defend itself from bloody subjugation by Russia, the U.S. is depriving its own citizens of critical aid. This pernicious narrative has spread in part thanks to fringe yet popular media and political figures who already had a history of littering the discourse with Kremlinesque talking points, and who now have weaponized and monetized the perception that the U.S. has been too generous to Ukraine and too stingy to its own people.
This kind of hysteria mongering is familiar to those of us who were alive in the McCarthy era, and who eventually read American History, after that dark period. Of what The Republicans of the period called The New Deal as a ‘Generation of Treason’ ! This ‘News Magazine’ it’s editor Tomasky and it’s hireling DeArment are taking their strategy from those desperate Republicans: to defame, discredit and impugn Greenwald, Dore and Kennedy. The Reader need only look at the defamation of Jeremy Corbyn, for a similar exercise in political mendacity, carefully hidden by the whole of the Corporate Press of Britain.
For Propaganda to ‘work’ it must be repeated over and over again to be established as ‘truth’ in the readers thought.
The ‘Evidence’ against Greenwald
Among them is Glenn Greenwald, whose Substack has more than 300,000 subscribers and whose online talk show, System Update, draws hundreds of thousands of views. In December, on Tucker Carlson’s since-canceled Fox News show, Greenwald said, “I’ve been asking since February, in what conceivable way will the lives of American citizens be materially improved? How will you or your family’s lives be protected or fostered by sending tens of billions of dollars, now in excess of $100 billion, for the war in Ukraine?”
The ‘Evidence’ against Dore:
Jimmy Dore, whose YouTube show has more than 1.2 million followers, was a featured speaker at February’s Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington. There, he criticized the “over $100 billion” sent to Kyiv, telling the crowd, “We could have spent that money saving lives with universal health care, but instead we spend that money taking lives overseas, which is our specialty.”
The ‘Evidence’ against Kennedy:
And then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer running a long-shot challenge to President Biden for the Democratic Party nomination. In his campaign announcement speech, Kennedy contrasted the “$113 billion committed to the Ukraine” with the “57 percent of Americans [who] can’t put their hand on $1,000 if they have an emergency,” “one-quarter of Americans [who] go to bed hungry,” and homeless veterans.
That all three use polemics, to not just sharpen their arguments is questionable? or simply just another persuasive strategy ?
All three figures are peddling a false dichotomy and perverting the traditional guns-versus-butter debate, but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustration over economic inequality as well as concern and distaste for foreign entanglements, particularly in the wake of the Iraq War and misadventures in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. It’s especially salient in the context of polls indicating that Americans’ bipartisan support for aid to Ukraine, while still strong, has softened considerably, and amid a but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustratiopresidential campaign whose outcome could play a pivotal role in Ukraine’s ability to procure aid from the U.S., its strongest backer by far.
How long has it been that American readers have confronted the ‘Guns & Butter’ argument? Since Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the War in Vietnam, led by Technocrat Robert McNamara?
The Charges Against Greenwald, Dore, Kennedy:
All three figures are All three figures are peddling a false dichotomy and perverting the traditional guns-versus-butter debate, but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustration over economic inequality as well as concern and distaste for foreign entanglements, particularly in the wake of the Iraq War and misadventures in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan., but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustration over economic inequality as well as concern and distaste for foreign entanglements, particularly in the wake of the Iraq War and misadventures in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Tellingly, the above paragraph undercuts itself:
The resort
But are Greenwald and others merely interested in promoting anti-imperialism while advocating for America’s downtrodden, or are they bad-faith propagandizers for a psychopathic dictator? The evidence is unfavorable to them.
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But are Greenwald and others merely interested in promoting anti-imperialism while advocating for America’s downtrodden, or are they bad-faith propagandizers for a psychopathic dictator? The evidence is unfavorable to them.
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And RFK Jr., in a May interview with UnHerd, called the conflict “a U.S. war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world.”
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Dore’s, Greenwald’s, and Kennedy’s willingness to parrot Kremlin disinformation designed to justify an unprovoked invasion exposes the disingenuousness of their appeals to economic populism.
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The further I read, the more apparent it is, that this essay is about the defamation of Dore, Greenwald, and Kennedy, by way a defence of the myth of the Post War Liberal Order , that was a central belief/faith of those long disappeared ‘Liberals’: who became obsolete with the rise of Neo-Liberalism, and it’s utter collapse. And the simultaneous rise of the Neo-Conservative’s destructive hegemonic ambitions, that shaped American Foreign Policy, and its War on Terror, that produced 37 million refugees. Not to forget that Tomasky and DeArment are part of The Biden Re-Election Campaign!
The constant stream of ‘Trumpology’ that Lowry has produced in how many weeks? has made way for a long and dismal apologetic for the ‘Roberts Court’. If only Lowry possessed a talent for polemic. But the energy with which he imbues his extended comments is surprising- perhaps he was as bored as his readers were? Although there is more ‘life’ here, than his vapid collection of reports on Republican political jousting, such as it was. Let me begin here:
All it has taken to bring the Supreme Court to the brink of destruction, we’re supposed to believe, is a critical mass of justices who try to hew to the U.S. Constitution.
The institution survived Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, but is now hanging by a thread thanks to the ravages of Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.
It is fashionable to say that the Supreme Court has “a crisis of legitimacy.” In this telling, the court has been buffeted by undisclosed luxury vacations paid for by wealthy associates of conservative justices and undermined by “stolen” seats. The court’s polling is terrible and it is now, as Democratic Senate hopeful Adam Schiff put it at a pro-court-packing news conference recently, “a political and partisan court with a reactionary social agenda.”
Of course, many of the people on the left who are lamenting a crisis of legitimacy of the court are hoping to create just such a crisis. It is understandable that they don’t like the composition or drift of the current court after largely having it on their side for decades, but their attacks are meritless.
This Reader wonders where Lowry’s ‘Left’ is/was? Is he speaking of New Democrat and political hysteric Adam Schiff ? My argument would be that the Republicans and New Democrats, indeed the whole of The American Political Class, the Supreme Court included, are not just in a crisis of legitimacy but are bankrupt: this is an unwelcome assertion to the would be Political Technocrat like Lowry. These next paragraphs are instructive about the evolution of the ‘Lowry Party Line’
No one “stole” any Supreme Court seats. The Senate decides whether and when to confirm a president’s nominee. The Senate majority under Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to keep the seat that came open after the death of Antonin Scalia vacant pending the 2016 election. If Hillary Clinton had won that election, the way most people expected, there would have been no “stolen” seat. The same applies if Democrats had won the Senate in 2018 — they would have been able to block former President Donald Trump’s appointment of Barrett after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
There’s a difference between losing and being done dirty. The fact is that there was precedent both for a Senate majority blocking the nominee of a president of the opposite party in an election year and for a Senate majority rapidly confirming the nominee of a president of the same party in an election year; Senate control matters.
How convenient that the National Review article is behind a Pay Wall?
As for ethics, even if you think that Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito were imprudent in accepting free flights and nice trips, even if you think they should have disclosed these trips (they didn’t have to under the rules), it’s preposterous to believe that a lifetime of thought and jurisprudence that has been rigorously consistent for decades has been changed or influenced by a couple of vacations.
Should I resort to the notion that Supreme Court Judges should be above suspicion, as a matter of personal ethics? Here Lowry acts as a defence attorney? As for the question of Paul Singer :
Headline: Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer’s ruthless strategies include bullying CEOs, suing governments and seizing their navy’s ships
Hedge fund managers are rarely the quiet, retiring type, but few are as boldly bare-knuckled as Paul Singer, the founder of Elliott Management.
Singer, who took home $400 million last year, makes his fortune through activist investing. While other investors are content to buy shares or bonds, and wait for them to accumulate value, Elliott Management, which oversees almost $33 billion, specializes in taking stakes in companies or institutions where it can shape the outcome. That can include agitating for changes in leadership, or spending years and million of dollars in court pursuing its interests.
Elliott Management is perhaps most notorious for its 15-year battle with the government of Argentina, whose bonds were owned by the hedge fund. When Argentine president Cristina Kirchner attempted to restructure the debt, Elliott—unlike most of the bonds’ owners—refused to accept a large loss on its investment. It successfully sued in US courts, and in pursuit of Argentine assets, convinced a court in Ghana to detain an Argentine naval training vessel, then docked outside Accra with a crew of 22o. After a change of its government, Argentina eventually settled and Singer’s fund received $2.4 billion, almost four times its initial investment. Kirchner, meanwhile, has been indicted for corruption.
Originalism, too, isn’t flawless. There are different versions of it, and it’s a function of the difficulty of some of the questions that reach the court that originalists can come down in different places. But originalism is an internally consistent, intuitively appealing theory of how the court should work that hasn’t been matched by any alternate theory of interpretation by the other side, which is why even the progressive justices will sound, at times, like originalists.
Is originalism just a smoke screen for a political agenda? No.
For instance, originalist justices have tended to vindicate what used to be core liberal priorities, from trial by jury to free speech.
The example of the late Antonin Scalia, originalism’s most influential apostle, is instructive. Scalia wasn’t always happy with where his jurisprudence took him. He hated flag burning, yet found, along with the liberal William Brennan, that it was protected speech. He was a law-and-order conservative, yet often ruled in favor of the rights of defendants. If it had been his druthers as a policy matter, he might have been happy to search homes for signs of marijuana cultivation with heat detectors, but he ruled against it. It was with an eye to these matters that David M. Dorsen wrote his book, “The Unexpected Scalia: A Conservative Justice’s Liberal Opinions.”
For another see view of Scalia’s practice of jurisprudence see:
For this reason it is all the more important to stress that Scalia’s opposition to the use of legislative history rests on exceedingly shaky theoretical foundations. Scalia readily acknowledges that if the meaning of a text is unclear, “the principal determinant of meaning is context.” In ordinary life the intentions of a speaker are central to the process by which we determine his meaning. If someone casually observes that “Casey has thrown a disc,” I would want to know something about the speaker’s intention in order to understand whether the comment refers to the state of Casey’s back or to the integrity of his CD collection.
Scalia does not dispute this, and he even concedes that there may be extreme cases where legislative history may be consulted in order to determine whether there has been a “‘scrivener’s error,’ where on the very face of the statute it is clear to the reader that a mistake of expression…has been made.” In his commentary, Ronald Dworkin cannily seizes upon this concession and brings out its implications.
Purporting to save Scalia from the inconsistency of allowing “intention to trump literal text,” he reconstructs Scalia’s position as resting on the distinction between what Congress “intended to say in enacting the language [it] used,” which Dworkin calls “semantic intention,” and what Congress hoped to achieve by using that language. Dworkin notes that “any reader of anything must attend to semantic intention, because the same sounds or even words can be used with the intention of saying different things.”
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Unsurprisingly Mr. Lowry underestimates his readership’s knowledge. Like a Neo-Conservative, he drowns The Readers critical faculties in ‘data’, which appears to be a cognate of expertise.
Of course, the court is coming down differently on a range of issues than it did in past decades. If faithfulness to the original meaning of the Constitution and statue is your lodestar, that’s not a bug — or a crisis — but a feature.
Ukrainians watched with glee as Russia flirted with civil war on June 24th. They had hoped that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow would tie up Russian troops and destabilise Vladimir Putin’s regime. Alas, the insurrection proved short-lived. In recent days, Ukraine’s army has made modest advances in the east. But a counter-offensive that began on June 4th shows little sign of breaking through Russian lines in force any time soon, making some Western officials nervous.
Still, Ukraine has made some hay with the disarray next door. Its army made significant progress in the eastern town of Bakhmut, which Mr Prigozhin’s forces had captured only last month after almost a year of fighting. Ukrainian forces now threaten to encircle Russian defenders from the north and south. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, hailed a “happy day” after visiting front lines on June 26th. Russia responded with a dinnertime missile strike on a popular restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27th, 30km from the front line. It killed at least eight people, including three children.
The composed Headline, that reads in part ‘Party like it’s 1917’ the maladroit framing, expresses a dull-witted attempt to shanghai Prince’s 1999 best selling Pop Record? call it at best pathetic. Or an attempt to reach a generation of readers, that used to think that The Economist was the reading of choice of Economics Majors? Or for those Oxbridgers or the Pretenders who were aiming for lucrative employment opportunities? The reader has 1, 052 words of propaganda to ingest, digest or just regurgitate, to demonstrate a pastiche of highfalutin Econo-Speak?
Selective quotation of the remainder of the essay reads like more Front Line descriptions, from those ever-present ‘stringers’ who provide the near graphic costs of War?
The aim of the offensive towards Bakhmut appears less to enter the city than to surround it.
The front-lines shifted elsewhere, too. Ukraine’s capture of territory in the western suburbs of Donetsk city was especially important: troops crossed into territory which Russia had held since 2015, during its first invasion of Ukraine.
Some officials suggest that Ukraine may be able to conduct a more significant crossing of the rapidly desiccating Kakhovka reservoir in the weeks to come.
The question is whether the convulsions in Russia will have longer-lasting effects on the battlefield. One issue is the future of the Wagner Group.
Some fighters have indeed gone back to Ukraine, where Mr Putin says they will be absorbed into the Russian forces. Others, including the 2,500 to 5,000 troops who played a role in the mutiny, may join Mr Prigozhin in Belarus.
The second issue is the impact on morale. A spokesperson for the 56th Motorised Brigade, now fighting on the outskirts of the city, says her colleagues had observed new levels of “confusion” among their Russian counterparts since June 23rd. Their befuddlement is understandable.
In angry remarks on June 24th Mr Putin himself drew an indelicate comparison to 1917, a year in which revolution at home contributed to the mutiny of Russian armies in France. Anthony King, a military sociologist at Warwick University, warns against over-egging the effect of Mr Prigozhin’s subversive messaging.
Mr King says he is sceptical that “political shenanigans” will have much of an effect on platoons and companies at the tactical level.
The impact on Russia’s high command, the third question raised by the insurrection, could be more severe.
Sources : The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Both reports cited American intelligence, Mr. King.
On June 28th the New York Times reported that General Sergei Surovikin, the commander of Russian forces in Ukraine between October and January, had prior knowledge of the rebellion. The same day, the Wall Street Journal said that Mr Prigozhin had intended to kidnap Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, and General Valery Gerasimov, the country’s chief of general staff, during their visit to a region near Ukraine’s border. Both reports cited American intelligence. “Fractures at that command level could have a longer-term effect on the unity of the campaign,” says Mr King.
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“It is still too early to tell how successful the ongoing counteroffensive will be,” acknowledged General Sir Patrick Sanders, Britain’s army chief, on June 26th, adding “Russia has been a country of comebacks.”
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A Ukrainian military-intelligence source complains that the country is moving as fast as it can, given the tools at its disposal. “Let me put this as diplomatically as I can,” he says. “Certain partners are telling us to go forward and fight violently, but they also take their time delivering the hardware and weapons we need.”
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