The Post-Partisan Emporium

 Although this essay discusses politics in France, the observations and analyses can be applied to most Western nations. Useful Shadows. Maybe creating the “Extreme Right”was a bad idea. Aurelien I don’t know what ideas Festival of Humanity would conjure up in the mind of the average Anglo-Saxon. Happy-clappy guitars, perhaps, peace and love? Desmond Tutu and Ursula von der Leyen? In fact, it’s all to do with a newspaper. L’Humanité was founded by the great French Socialist Jean Jaurès, and was the Party’s official newspaper until 1920, when after the Congress of Tours, the departing Communist faction took it with them. From then until reality dictated otherwise in 1994, it was the official newspaper of the PCF, and since then, it’s clung on as an all-purpose leftist publication. A tradition for almost a hundred years, is the annual Festival, largely based around music, taking advantage of the fact that popular French musicians have often had leftist sympathies. I haven’t been the...

  Burying Lindsey Graham Won’t Be Easy Karen Kwiatkowski Photo by Simone Pellegrini on Unsplash Long ago, great Senators existed. Resolute and accountable, they represented their governors and state legislatures and asserted those interests in Washington. They aspired to conduct themselves as statesmen; we the people expected statesmanship. We the people also hoped they would be better than we could be, while we agreed with the fundamental truth of Colonel Ludlow in Legends of the Fall . No longer. A regal Senate with a bold populist House of Representatives do not exist. What we call Senate and House do not make federal law, nor do they perform the small number of defined duties described in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. The making of law has become the work of lobbyists and the regulatory bureaucracy, while other Constitutional duties have become entirely too frightening to even consider, much less perform. The hydra-headed executive branch has become the permanen...