The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
By Thomas Frank
Metropolitan Books, 384 pages, $25
Call it the Thomas Frank Problem: Since What’s the Matter With Kansas? (2005), the journalist and polemicist has become a figure of irresolvable promise and consternation to the American left. Kansas, of course, put in straight and strident words what liberals Read More
To the Editor:
I read with interest and some astonishment the error-filled and badly misleading review of my book Heist by Chris Lehmann [“The Gaud That Failed: A Tour of New Jack City,” Oct. 2]. To set the record straight on several facts, the following points are worth noting. Mr. Lehmann is wrong that Read More
When future historians of the current Gilded Age in our nation’s capital need to designate its zeitgeist-on-horseback, there’s little doubt that Jack Abramoff will be the man—or, as he was given to spell it in his voluminous collection of frat-boy-voiced e-mails: “da Man.”
Now so universally known in news reports as “disgraced superlobbyist” that Read More
While Mark Green and Andrew Cuomo are still working on their definition of negative campaigning, a similarly constructive dialogue is being carried out between the Democratic candidates in Brooklyn’s 11th Congressional district.
Outside the candidate forum in Park Slope last night, a flier was distributed that said, “Why is David Yassky, a Democrat, taking Read More
Tom DeLay resigned his Congressional seat with all the dignity, discretion and probity that have marked his decades in politics. Leaving office just steps ahead of the law, with prosecutors from the Justice Department’s public-integrity section in hot pursuit, he delivered a farewell speech blaming others for his problems and blithering on at length about Read More
The modern city dweller must suffer rats, cockroaches, the occasional snakefish and lately, it seems, the biting of bed bugs. Vermin of one kind or another is the price of living in Xanadu. In many ways, I mark the day I became a passable New Yorker when, while walking along Madison Square Park, my then-girlfriend Read More
The modern city dweller must suffer rats, cockroaches, the occasional snakefish and lately, it seems, the biting of bed bugs. Vermin of one kind or another is the price of living in Xanadu. In many ways, I mark the day I became a passable New Yorker when, while walking along Madison Square Park, my then-girlfriend Read More
The White House possesses several photographs of George W. Bush with Jack Abramoff, the once-powerful Republican fixer who recently pled guilty to bribery and fraud. The snapshots show nothing more than the typical “grip-and-grin” that the President has politely bestowed on thousands of visitors—or so his flacks assure us. Although the pictures are said to Read More
It’s only January, but get used to a lot more of this.
It’s a campaign spot for Kirsten Gillebrand, who’s running for congress against John Sweeney. Leading with stills of Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and a narrative of the scandal, the ad says: “It’s worth asking — what is our congressman doing to Read More
If we are to believe the latest press releases from Capitol Hill, the leaders of Congress aren’t a bloated, self-serving clique fattened on largesse from lobbyists, but a lean, idealistic and indefatigable band of reformers.
The Speaker of the House and his ambitious colleagues can now think of nothing as important as proposals to restrict Read More
