Photo Credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; Harris and Ewing Collection Forty-seven Democrats turning their backs on principle—and on their president—in Thursday’s House vote on an “Arab Exclusion Act” reminded me of a conversation I had with the late Maury Maverick Jr. Maverick was a San Antonio civil rights lawyer, son of New […]

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photo: Josh Zakary Republican governors and presidential candidates are tripping over each other to pronounce their horror at the prospect of accepting Syrian refugees, lest some terrorist slips through. Which is, of course, insane: what aspiring suicide bomber would submit himself to the 18-month to three-year vetting process it takes to get refugee status when a […]

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  On November 9, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu returns to Washington, this time to the White House at the invitation of Barack Obama. Netanyahu’s previous trip, in early March of this year, was a foreign policy coup for Speaker of the House John Boehner, who invited Netanyahu to address Congress without consulting the White House––and an […]

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  When Lester Maddox was governor of Georgia in the late 1960s, he insisted that the problem with the state’s prisons was “the poor quality of its inmates.” Maddox was a Democrat and an ardent defender of the Apartheid South, not exactly an American statesman. Yet his defense of Georgia’s prison system turns out to […]

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A reporter friend writes me to ask a question about my exposés of grifting and deception as the warp and weft of the conservative movement. He tells me he’s trying to write about that story, instead of the clichéd horse-race one about “GOP IN DISARRAY.” But aren’t they the same story? An institution built on […]

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