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The Deadline Presidency

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By John Dickerson - Nov. 20 (Opinion) - As a professor of constitutional law, Barack Obama gave his students eight hours to complete his exam—even though the exam was designed, he wrote in the instructions, "to be completed in three hours." Now that he's president, Obama could use that kind of cushion. Upon taking office, the president promised that the prison at Guantanamo Bay would close in a year. He now says it will not. He demanded that Congress pass a health care bill by August. It still hasn't. The president's promise to sign a health care bill this year has now been pushed into 2010. Obama was also going to announce his new Afghanistan strategy in early November. It may now come as much as a month later. There are also delays—some, of course, beyond his control—in seating judicial nominations and passing climate-change legislation

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The right's nonsensical arguments against trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - Nov. 17 (Opinion) - Opposition to the Obama administration's plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates in a federal court in New York City is hardening into two camps. One is concerned that we may be unwittingly playing into the terrorists' hands. The other is incensed that we already have. What both camps share, besides a kind of unhinged logic and complete disregard for the legal process, is an obsessive fascination with the accused. The result is a broad willingness to sacrifice our commitment to legal principles in favor of the symbolic satisfaction of crushing the hopes and dreams of a motley group of criminals.

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Does Obama need to speak more harshly about Islam?

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Jacob Weisberg - Nov. 14 (Opinion) - Obama's olive-branch strategy may make America safer over the long term. In the short term, there's no empirical evidence that it has done so.

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Fix your terrible, insecure passwords in five minutes. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:22:25 -0800

Slate - Nov. 13 -

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Why were they playing bagpipes at the Fort Hood memorial service? - By Brian Palmer - Slate Magazine

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:51:59 -0800

Slate - Nov. 13 -

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Like a Rat

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Alan E. Kazdin, Carlo Rotella - Nov. 12 (News Analysis) - Psychologists who work with children and families tend to avoid mentioning to parents that the treatments they use are often based on research done on animals.

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If the economy's stagnant, why are stocks up? The answer is disturbing.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By Daniel Gross - Nov. 04 (News Analysis) - Here's a puzzle: The stock markets are doing very well, yet the performance of the underlying economy doesn't seem to justify optimism. The buoyant S&P 500 has risen 53 percent since the March bottom. And while the economy expanded at a 3.5 percent rate in the third quarter, unemployment is high, incomes are stagnant, and consumers are shaky.

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The health insurers stumble into an argument for a public option.

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Timothy Noah - Oct. 14 (News Analysis) - Health reform cleared the Senate finance committee, 14-9, without a public option. Now the trick is figuring out how to put it back in. One powerful argument for doing so comes from an unlikely source: the private health-insurance lobby.

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Should Gen. McChrystal stop speaking publicly about Afghan war strategy? - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:07:50 -0700

Slate - Oct. 07 -

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Why women might make better judges

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Stephen Choi, Mitu Gulati, Mirya Holman, Eric Posner - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - Justice Sonia Sotomayor's elevation to the Supreme Court brought to the surface a long-simmering controversy about the relationship between gender and judging. Are female nominees for judicial positions chosen based on affirmative action? If so, are women on the bench worse judges than men—or do they come with advantages that men lack? This controversy has legs. If Justice Ginsburg is forced to retire this term because of illness, reducing the number of female justices from two to one, there will be a great deal of pressure on President Obama to nominate another female jurist. Or if Justice John Paul Stevens retires, why not three women on the high court?

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The American Way of Dentistry Slate Magazine

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By June Thomas - Oct. 05 (Investigative Report) - Seven-part series looking at the coming dental crisis.

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The American Way of Dentistry: How dentists think.

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By June Thomas - Sep. 30 (Special Report) - Dentists earn their living in a way that's markedly different from the way doctors do. Somewhere between 80 percent and 85 percent of American dentists practice as owner-operators, as compared with only about 20 percent of physicians. Group practices, which are common for doctors, are rare for dentists—about 63 percent work solo, 20 percent practice with one other dentist, and 17 percent are in business with two or more dentists. A dentist's "income" is therefore typically the difference between the fees she receives and the expenditures she lays out, which are considerable. This is usually true even for dental specialists.

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Tehran's worst fear is a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign.

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Anne Applebaum - Sep. 29 (Opinion) - Very few security experts point out that there is another option. What do Iran's rulers truly fear, after all? I'll wager it's not sanctions, and it might not be a bombing raid. An economic boycott can be circumvented, after all, with the help of Venezuela or maybe the Russian mafia, and an attack on Iranian soil might help the regime once again consolidate power. By contrast, a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign must be a truly terrifying prospect. What if we therefore told the Iranian regime that its insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons leaves us with no choice other than to increase funding for dissident exile groups, to smuggle money into the country, to bombard the airwaves with anti-regime television programming, and above all to publicize widely the myriad crimes of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

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There's a lot more to the Afghan strategy than how many troops we send

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - Sep. 23 (Opinion) - The push is on for President Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan, perhaps as many as 40,000 more. Boxing in Obama was almost certainly the aim of whoever gave the Washington Post's Bob Woodward a copy of the 66-page internal memo by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

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The well-deserved success of Mint.com, and what other Web businesses can learn from it.

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Daniel Gross - Sep. 20 (News Analysis) - Mint.com has benefitted from a cultural shift as well as a technological one. During the free-spending housing bubble, a Web site that encouraged people to manage spending, comparison-shop, and save was definitely out of step with the prevailing mood. But once the financial and housing markets tanked and the nation went into recession, the zeitgeist shifted. Shrinking top lines have caused people to focus on the bottom line, and the savings rate has spiked. Third homes and luxury goods are out; coupons and growing your own vegetables are in. Saving is the new borrowing.

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How Foreclosures Breed Mosquitoes

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

thebigmoney.com - By Paul Smalera, Win Rosenfeld - Sep. 11 (Special Report) - Filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn discuss a scene from their new documentary American Casino. The scene shows how a sea of abandoned swimming pools in California has become a mosquito Club Med.

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Malpractice reform is a small price to pay for health care reform

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Timothy Noah - Sep. 10 (News Analysis) - the evidence is weak that there's a malpractice crisis in America. One Harvard study found that doctors injured 4 percent of their patients, and only 4 percent of them bothered to sue. Real average jury awards have remained flat. Malpractice premiums are not the burden doctors claim they are: In inflation-adjusted dollars, they were lower in 2000 than they were in 1986.

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Boston's Hancock Tower and the coming commercial real estate crisis.

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Daniel Gross - Sep. 06 (Special Report) - For most of its 34-year life, the Hancock Tower, which looms above its brick neighbors in Boston's Back Bay, has been the sort of place where money comes to be managed and protected. Its tenants include Ernst & Young and the investment firm Highfields Capital. The I.M. Pei-designed sliver of glass doesn't seem like a place where several hundred million dollars can vanish in a few months.[more ...]

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The cupcake boom is here. The cupcake crash is coming.

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Daniel Gross - Sep. 04 (News Analysis) - In recent years, the response to a popped economic bubble has been to create a new one. The pierced dot-com/telecommunications bubble paved the way for the housing/credit bubble. That punctured bubble may be giving way to an alternative energy bubble. But I've got my eyes on a smaller, but no less revealing, one: the Cupcake Bubble.[more ...]

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Alex S. Jones' Losing the News

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Jack Shafer - Aug. 31 (Review) - Could it be that deep-dish reporting that uncovers governmental malfeasance and waste—the sort of news Jones and I prefer over fluff, sports, bridge columns, and comics—doesn't promote activism or participation? Could it be that such exposés end up souring the public on democracy and other institutions?

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The United States can't win in Afghanistan unless its new president makes major reforms, and quickly.

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Fred Kaplan - Aug. 28 (Opinion) - The ballots haven't all yet been counted in Afghanistan's election, but the interim reports—of intimidation, low turnout, continued violence, and widespread fraud—bode poorly for the country and our war there.

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Is half a torture investigation better than none at all?

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Dahlia Lithwick - Aug. 26 (Opinion) - Holder has fallen prey to the sort of magical legal thinking that seeps through the whole CIA report: the presumption that if there's a legal memo, it must be legal.

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Pundits attacking government health insurance rely on it

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Daniel Gross - Aug. 21 (Opinion) - This is a something of a Churchillian moment. Never before have so many known so little about so much. The meme that my Slate colleague Timothy Noah has been tracking about Medicare not being a government program has two sources: ignorance and mendacity. Some people may really not know that Medicare is taxpayer-funded health care. That's ignorance. Many more people know it—and know the degree to which taxpayers are already funding lots of health care for them and their loved ones—and argue otherwise. That's mendacity.

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Microblogging has become too important for Twitter to rule the field.

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Farhad Manjoo - Aug. 14 (Special Report) - Twitter is run by a single company in a single office building in San Francisco. When you send out a message, it flies about Twitter's servers and then alights in all your Twitter pals' cell phones and Tweetdecks. The system is fast and technologically simple, which helps explain its exponential growth.

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When Did Your County's Jobs Disappear?

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Chris Wilson - Aug. 10 (Special Report) - The economic crisis, which has claimed more than 5 million jobs since the recession began, did not strike the entire country at once. A map of employment gains or losses by county tells the story of how those job losses first struck in the most vulnerable regions and then spread rapidly to the rest of the country. As early as August 2007, for example—several months before the recession officially began—jobs were already on the decline in southwest Florida; Orange County, Calif.; much of New Jersey; and Detroit, while other areas of the country remained on the uptick. Using the Labor Department's local area unemployment statistics, Slate presents the recession as told by unemployment numbers for each county in America. Because the data are not seasonally adjusted for natural employment cycles throughout the year, the numbers you see show the change in the number of people employed compared with the same month in the previous year. Blue dots represent a net increase in jobs, while red dots indicate a decrease. The larger the dot, the greater the number of jobs gained or lost. Click the arrows or calendar at the bottom to see each month of data. Click the green play button to see an animation of the data.

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