A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Barack Obama

  • Ethical challenges for the president-elect

    Obama’s global ethical challenges, according to Peter Singer: -close Gitmo and end the practice of detaining people whithout charges -withdraw from Iraq -increase and better target foreign aid -take serious action on global warming Sounds about right. (Incidentally, it’s looking like Obama is going to make climate change a priority.) Read more

  • The new Cold War?

    Robert Scheer worries that the old Cold War hawks advising Obama will lead to a ratcheting up of tensions with Russia. Read more

  • “A clear mandate for clean energy”

    Grist is hopeful about Obama’s energy plan: The key is the long game. Obama worked carefully, diligently, and adeptly to get elected on a clean energy agenda. Despite the many reasons he gave greens to recoil along the way, he got there. There is every reason to believe he will now work carefully, diligently, and Read more

  • Change, hope, and all that good stuff

    Like most of the people in my immediate social circle I’m somewhere between delighted and ecstatic about Obama’s victory, both because of what it means for our immediate future as a country and for overcoming, to some extent, the sins of our past (recent as well as more remote ones). Over the course of the Read more

  • PA represents!

    11 o’clock Eastern time: Well, looks like it’s all over but the crying. No significant election blogging for me, but I just want to give a shout-out to my home state of Pennsylvania. All those people who said that awful Appalachian rednecks would tip the state to McCain will be eating their words tomorrow. I Read more

  • Last word

    For what it’s worth (not much at this point, presumably), my top three reasons for supporting Obama: —A saner foreign policy. Hard core peaceniks and non-interventionists (among whom I count myself) will, I suspect, find much to dislike about an Obama foreign policy, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be far Read more

  • Socialism and stuff

    Great piece by Hendrik Hertzberg on the “socialism” nonsense: The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would Read more

  • Unhappy conservatives

    The American Conservative asked an eclectic group of thinkers on the Right (broadly speaking) to offer their endorsements for the election. Interestingly, by my count there are four Obama voters, two McCain voters, and twelve people who say they will either vote third party, write someone in, or not vote at all. This isn’t too Read more

  • Fear of a liberal planet

    Under some circumstances I might be sympathetic to the argument that handing both Congress and the presidency to the same party is a bad idea. After all, our system of government is based on the principle of checks and balances, and one-party rule can lead to corruption and abuse of power in short order. But Read more

  • Weak tea

    The RNC is now running this ad (at least in our television market): Are voters not supposed to notice that John McCain also lacks executive experience and hasn’t sat in the Oval Office during a crisis? Weak. They’ve also been running that ridiculous “I’m Joe the Plumber” ad about how that commie Obama will raise Read more