David Frum on the first debate: Obama, by contrast, rarely looked at Romney. He looked down at his podium, which meant that the audience saw closed eyes and a frowning mouth. Again and again, Obama allowed himself to be dragged into a tangle of facts and figures – failing to realize that confusion is Romney’s friend. The Republican base saddled Romney with a hugely unpopular economic plan. The clearer and more specific the discussion gets, the more danger Romney is... Read more

So the Afghan army is trying something new: a guide to the strange ways of the American soldier. The goal is to convince Afghan troops that when their Western counterparts do something deeply insulting, it’s likely a product of cultural ignorance and not worthy of revenge. The pamphlet is intended to “strengthen our understanding of our [NATO] counterpart,” according to an English translation of the pamphlet that was provided to The Washington Post. But in doing so, it also reveals... Read more

For some reason, though, The Next Generation awakened in me a feeling of terrible and suffocating yearning — that hopeless childish escape wish that’s the wake of a certain kind of fantasy. That feeling that in a different world you’d be happy… . why, then, that yearning? No one lies awake at night longing to be transported to a convincing imaginative representation of early-’90s social themes, or if they do I have yet to find their chat rooms. It’s obviously... Read more

I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll be wrong again, but I may never have been as wrong as I was when I initially predicted that Mitt Romney’s heinous diatribe against 47 percent of America would have little direct impact on the election. It’s an absolutely crushing blow. Obviously it doesn’t guarantee his defeat — if a secret video surfaces depicting Obama promising to impose Sharia law in his second term, Romney will stand a good chance of coming back —... Read more

… we couldn’t even imagine that the authorities would be so dumb that they would actually legitimize our influence by arresting us… . But unlike Putin, we’re not chickenshit—so we didn’t stop performing. The church performance was a perfect opportunity for Putin’s apparatchiks to claim that our motives were religious intolerance and not political protest. This way our persecution could be framed as a righteous burning of blasphemers, as opposed to just stifling free speech. Pussy Riot’s Prison Interview: GQ Read more

How are you going to vilify Romney as a heartless plutocrat unfit for the presidency, and then enthusiastically recommend a guy who held Bradley Manning in solitary and killed a 16-year-old American kid? If you’re a utilitarian who plans to vote for Obama, better to mournfully acknowledge that you regard him as the lesser of two evils, with all that phrase denotes. But I don’t see many Obama supporters feeling as reluctant as the circumstances warrant. The whole liberal conceit... Read more

Among the country’s stupefied elites, the bad news induces the wish to make time stand still, to punish the presumption of a future that presents itself as a bill collector. As self-pitying as Shakespeare’s melancholy king, they sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of money. Without it the future doesn’t bear contemplating, doesn’t include their presence in it and therefore doesn’t exist. How then can the banks be expected to lend money, the government to... Read more

The Republican Party – not just the Romney campaign, but the party as a whole – is running on nothing. They are running on the presumption that the country has already rejected the Democrats, and that therefore it is their turn. They are behaving as if choosing Democratic governance was some kind of “experiment” that didn’t work out, and now the American people will, of course, come back to their natural home. Noah Millman — A Democratic Swing | The... Read more

Galvanized by anger over the killing of the popular American ambassador here last week, thousands of Libyans marched through this city on Friday, demanding the disarming of the militias that helped topple the dictatorship but have troubled the country with their refusal to disband. In a show of mass frustration at the armed groups, protesters seized control of several militia headquarters on Friday night and handed them over to Libya’s national army in what appeared to be a coordinated sweep.... Read more

Yes, there will always be hucksters. And spending all one’s time fighting them is a foolish enterprise. On the right today, they are so numerous, prominent and shameless, their pathologies so ingrained in right-wing media and politics, their wealth so corrupting to young talent, and their pathologies so seldom challenged by those who know better, that Republicans are operating at a persistent information disadvantage. (Too many believe even their own bullshit.) The Bush Administration showed that it’s possible to win... Read more