End Of The Year Tab Dump - Politics

It's the end of 2012 and my folder full of tabs / bookmarks that I've been meaning to share is over flowing.  The end of a year seems like a good enough reason to get them all out there for your perusal and it doesn't hurt that it will help get me up over the 100 post threshold for 2012 either.

We're gonna do this categorically, sort of at least, some other links ended up on twitter; check the sidebar for those or @hcoppola.

You knew this one would be in here and that it would be a biggie.  At least we're gonna tackle Politics early on so there'll be some fun and light stuff to round your evening out with...

Here's everything I have left over from the election.  Most of these I read at least some of, some of them had good recommendations and I haven't gotten to yet or just never got to...

• Takes on 'post-truth politics' and the lies, dissembling, evasion, and general misleading that took place, for the most part, in the Romney-Ryan camp.  Poynter took a round up approach after Ryan's convention speech and called the new level of rebuttal and fact checking from the media interesting and I'd say welcome.  Writers at The Nation, Grist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, along with Brad DeLong and Ezra Klein, Eugene Robinson, and Charlie Pierce all weighed in as well.
• Alex Koppelman took an in depth and really interesting look at what Obama and Romney think about American innovation / inventions and the role of government.
• Here is the video tribute to Teddy Kennedy from the Dem convention:
• A fun, quick, take on Bubba's convention speech and the way he dances and chats with his audience and the teleprompter.
• Paul Krugman explained the Republican strategy of obstruct and exploit.
• Romney said some stuff about emergency rooms.
• Romney said some stupid stuff about women and families and these two took him apart over it.
• Ezra Klein wondered about Obama's lack of a big vision.
• E.J. Dionne talked up Sherrod Brown.
• The New Republic laid out the scope and strength of President Obama's reelection mandate.
• The New York Review of Books takes a look at Nate Silver's success and the art and science of prediction.

There are plenty of other things bouncing around that I haven't gotten to posting though.

There was a post election flurry of stories about the state and future of the filibuster in the Senate including ones from Ezra Klein who's been looking at this for a while now, Dylan Matthews, and Rik Hertzberg (also a filibuster follower).

Frank Rich, bless his heart, spent a week immersed in right-wing media and lived to tell the tale.

The frequently interesting, often fantastic, and nearly always worth reading Ta-Nehisi Coates went long on America's first Black President.

Matt Taibbi, the heir to the good doctor's desk at Rolling Stone, sunk his teeth into the HSBC drug money laundering settlement.  You shouldn't be surprised that he was less than pleased with how things played out.

Charlie Pierce said what needed to be said about the dearth of a true pro-choice movement in America.

Occupy kept chugging along as they got involved in Sandy relief and launched Rolling Jubilee which has raised more than $500k and retired retired more than $10 million of debt to date.  It's a very interesting idea and project.


Juan Cole and John Cassidy wrote passionate and very important pieces on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America's surrender to a security state and the extent to which that means that the attacks achieved their goal.

Speaking of values, here is a fascinating look inside Halden Prison and the Norwegian prison system in general.  To state the obvious the US is not doing very well when it comes to prisons.

Staying with international stories, this personal reporting from a high ranking Australian soldier on dealing with his issues as he tried to reenter regular society after serving in Afghanistan is something you should read.  We have this problem times a whole bunch for American service men and women who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq and we aren't doing a terribly good job of dealing with it or talking about.  If this is up your alley make sure that you're reading Tom Ricks regularly.

The NYT got Mohamed Morsi to answer questions from its readers.

The NYT also spent time with US military drone pilots.  They fly these things at bases stateside and then go home at night, it's a freaking day job.

Nick Hanauer stirred up a little controversy with his TED Talk on taxes and job creation.  He makes a lot of sense to me...


And can you believe that Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama both had big interesting profiles of them published that had Way in the title?

Stay tuned as we close out 2012 and roll into 2013, I've got a few more of these to go this evening...