The Washington Spectator

#NeverForget to Go Shopping

Photo Credit: hjl   This past week, two 9/11-themed promotions became fodder for the hungry internet outrage machine. In San Antonio, a mattress retailer aired an ad for a 9/11-themed promotion. “What better way than to remember 9/11 than with a Twin Tower sale?” asks an enthusiastic woman in the local television spot. “Right now you can get any sized mattress for a twin price!” At the end of the…

Hillary’s Reckless Off-Ramp Strategy

I published an article here on August 22 arguing against a dangerous strategy apparently being pursued by the Clinton presidential campaign, as revealed in a hacked email discussion between DNC officials last spring. In an effort to expedite the defection of Republicans offended by their party’s nominee, the campaign was building up Speaker Paul Ryan as an exemplar of the GOP’s sensible, “normal”…

Event: Mobilizing to Defeat Climate Change

  Photo Credit: Azeem Azeez   Join the New Republic and three of our nation’s leading environmental activists, Bill McKibben, Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr., and Elizabeth Yeampierre for a critical public conversation on climate change, its social, political, and biological impact and what can be done now to arrest and where possible reverse its deadly progress. Writer and organizer Bill McKibben,…

Diverse and Perverse: the Coalition that Trump Built

Photo Credit: ABC/Fred Watkins   Cleveland The convention began with a prayer for God to bless his chosen political party, from a black preacher who announced it was fitting and proper to do so “because we are electing a man in Donald Trump who believes in the name of Jesus Christ.” And because “our enemy is not other Republicans, but is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.” Rev. Mark Burns…

Rumble in the Alt-Right Thunderdome

  Photo Credit: Official Trump card   With several months of election-related chaos to go, Hillary Clinton took to the stage in Nevada to call out a crackpot movement of Trump supporters that few people have even heard of. On Thursday, the Democratic nominee gave a speech in Reno, Nevada, decrying the so-called alt-right (short for alternative right), a nebulous band of free-wheeling,…

A Dim Attack on Dumb Policy

Photo Credit: Senior Airman Matthew Bruch, U.S. Air Force   There is a scene in Hal Ashby’s classic 1979 adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s novella Being There where the hapless Chauncey “the gardener” Gardiner, played by Peter Sellers, ends up at a meeting with the president of the United States. Complex policy discussions are taking place and the president turns to Chauncey to ask his opinion about…

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore   When your opponent is drowning, the old saying goes, throw him an anvil. Is Hillary Clinton throwing hers a life raft instead? In May, the Democratic National Committee’s communication director Luis Miranda wrote to the DNC’s chief operating officer, Amy Dacey, with a serious complaint. The e-mail, part of the trove released by WikiLeaks, began this way: The Clinton…

Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk   For those of us who think or write about surveillance, the events of May and June 2013 represented a crucial turning point in our sense of what was possible. Edward Snowden’s release of classified documents changed the way many Americans thought about their relationship to national security agencies. It shattered the beliefs of many news consumers that their online or…

After the State Dinner

Lawrence Jackson   While final preparations were under way for the 51st anniversary of Singapore’s independence on August 9, the White House hosted the nation’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at a lavish state dinner—the highest honor the U.S. government can give a visiting dignitary. Singapore is a tiny island country in Southeast Asia, but it has managed to nurture an outsized reputation in…

Building a Better Baby Bottle

Edel Rodríguez   This summer, a small Texas-based company began marketing a plastic baby bottle it claims is the first on the market to be “guaranteed” safe from health risks associated with bottles made from commonly used bisphenol-A (BPA). The rollout is modest; the company is selling the bottle on a website and using crowdsourcing to fund broader distribution of a $19.95 baby bottle aimed at…

GOP’s Last Shot at Iran Deal

Image Credit: European External Action Service   Since he began his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to undo the multi-national agreement that has frozen Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon. “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran,” Trump said recently. In June, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded with his own…

Tim LaHaye died last week. He was 90. He was best known for co-writing the “Left Behind” series of novels about the battle of Armageddon, which fundamentalists believe will follow the Rapture of Christian believers from earth. The books have sold over 63 million copies—the version of the series for kids has sold 11 million copies alone—and the obituaries led with that. He helped found the Moral…

In Search of Enemies

Edel Rodríguez   The stark contrast between the policy positions of the two principal nominees to succeed Barack Obama—Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton—exists across a broad spectrum of political discourse. Their opinions on the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization illustrate their different approaches when it comes to confronting the complex global security…

Photo Credit: Darron Birgenheier   Donald Trump’s presidential campaign draws energy from its rowdy, often racist, internet fans. On Wednesday evening it embraced the unhinged shitposters who make up the candidate’s loudest fan base in all their meme-tastic glory. Trump—who we now know can use a computer (or at least pose with it)—took to Reddit, or more exactly, to the alt-right-loving…

Turkey Turns Back the Clock

Photo Credit: Vikiçizer   The modern news cycle is short, so what happened three weeks ago in Ankara and Istanbul already reads like an old story. Yet it is a story we ignore at our own risk, because the consequences of the coup in Turkey are considerable and will be with us for a long while. The roots of the shocking July 15–16 coup lay in Turkey’s conflict with the Kurds, its involvement in the…

Asian Development Bank Climate change happens slowly. It’s technical and complicated—frankly, it’s boring. That is to say, it’s ideally suited for documentaries. It’s not a coincidence that the event most frequently cited as the beginning of popular climate consciousness was not a riot à la Stonewall, but the 2006 release of An Inconvenient Truth, a film depicting Al Gore giving a PowerPoint…

True Allies Take Action

Photo Credit: Exile on Ontario St   Every member of the LGBTQ community has at least one “bad ally” story. I’ve heard these stories from my former classmates, my close friends, and my colleagues on the board of The Frederick Center, a nonprofit that provides resources, education, and support to the LGBTQ community in central Maryland. The stories usually involve well-meaning straight, cis-gender…