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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I sure hope you didn’t bother to watch the absurd Republican debate on CNBC Wednesday night. That’s what you have me for. Here are two takeaways: Ben Carson said “crap.” (Specifically, that “the government picking winners and losers” is “a bunch of crap.”) And, remember that time a few years ago when I wrote that […]

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In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a carbon cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse emissions, delivering on a bi-national agreement he reached with President Obama in November 2014. The United States and China together account for one-third of global greenhouse emissions. In the United States, the process of reducing emissions to the agreed-upon 25-28 percent […]

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  Ben Carson may be a renowned doctor, but even he cannot perform surgery on history. When the soft-spoken Islamophobic surgeon, critic of the modern civil-rights movement and top contender for the Republican presidential nomination, appeared on Fox News Channel’s Media Buzz as he began to climb in the polls, he declared that the GOP […]

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