Hold Fast

It’s a big day for Democratic Senate primaries, with Arkansas and Pennsylvania going to the polls to challenge the tenure of Blanche Lincoln and Arlen Specter. While I don’t know what the outcome will be of these elections (I’d guess Lincoln gets a plurality but there is still a runoff and Specter barely loses), it’s [...]

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Paul Krugman’s right – it’s not that the Republican Party is more extreme now than in the past sixteen years, it’s that the national press is paying attention to how extreme the GOP has become. I’d take it a step further, though. The Republican Party now has a larger microphone for extremism, as the press [...]

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Funny.

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It feels like this has been a slow week at Hold Fast. While there’s a lot in the news – the BP oil spill, the financial reform bill in the Senate, upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania and Arkansas – there isn’t a whole lot that grabbed me this week to write on. Not sure why that [...]

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The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

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Jack Balkin and Matt Yglesias are both talking about the merits of having a fixed term for a Supreme Court justice. Balkin suggests 18 years, Yglesias 9-12 years. I can see this making sense, as it would remove some of the political pressure of justices to, you know, wait until a like-minded President is in [...]

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Cenky Uygur has a must-read diary up on Daily Kos in which he lays out a very detailed critique of how the Kagan pick is a sign of the failures of the Obama presidency from a progressive perspective. Uygur makes a case that Obama simply isn’t doing enough to counteract the massive strides Bush and [...]

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I’m not a lawyer nor a legal scholar, but I can’t say that I’m excited about Elena Kagan’s pick to replace John Paul Stevens on the US Supreme Court. My biggest concern is that she is being given a lifetime seat – which for someone who is only fifty, could mean thirty years on the [...]

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The International Tibet Support Network has released an incredibly powerful video in support of the release of Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, a Tibetan monk who is sitting in jail for a crime he did not commit. He had previously been sentenced to death, but international outcry and pressure forced the Chinese government to commute it to [...]

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The United Nations could be a great force for human rights in the world. But I find it hard to believe it will reach any meaningful goal if it continues to avoid actually appointing people who have miserable records on human rights to the UN’s high commission on human rights. Ban Ki-Moon has appointed Croatian [...]

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