Amid all the discussions of Trump's cabinet pick, that circling around his choice of a Treasury Secretary has fascinated me the most. This is, after all, Hamilton's heir. What other cabinet post can you think of that is at the center of a Broadway show? George Washington had only four members in the first cabinet: an Attorney General (Randolph), a Secretary of War (Knox), a Secretary of State (Jefferson) and of the Treasury (Hamilton). Those remain the four most critical of cabinet offices. Okay, Jefferson was also at the center of a Broadway show, 1776 -- but as the title suggests it wasn't about his work as a cabinet secretary. Hamilton , very largely, is. It delights me that Trump has chosen Scott Bessent. I suppose that if the Trumpets meant the crap they've been saying for so long about George Soros, about how evil he is, how he reaches his monstrous tentacles into everything ... if they meant it they would now be venting their fury at Bessent, the o...
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Both George Soros and Charles Koch believe that the foreign policy of the United States has become unhinged from any defensible conception of national interest or human rights, and together they hope to use their vast fortunes to move the US toward diplomacy and peace, away from the endless war to which it now seems committed. Charles Koch is one of the “Koch Brothers,” renowned for having long offered financial assistance to Republican and conservative candidates for public office. Soros is the Hungary-born financier who notoriously said in 2003 that removing President George W. Bush from office would be the “central focus of my life” over the following year, as it was “a matter of life and death.” A headline in the Boston Globe has called it an “astonishing turn” that these two men have teamed up. Astonishing or not: Koch and Soros are combining to endow a new foreign-policy think tank, called the “Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.” The name is in homa...
especially where the would-be stinger is as full of himself in general as is James O'Keefe. For those who may have forgotten his name, O'Keefe acquired a certain degree of notoriety by stinging ACORN in 2009. He arranged and recorded meetings with ACORN staffers in which he represented himself as a pimp, and asked for their help. The (heavily edited) tapes that he later released did seem to indicate that some staffers were willing to assist him, suggesting he describe his presumed underage brothel as a "group home" etc. A fair summary of the complicated controversy that resulted is this: in at least one case, possibly in more, the heavy editing of the tapes amounted to defamation. But in some cases, ACORN staffs did make damning statements which are not mitigated by context. The matter inspired a South Park episode, which is always a good thing to contribute to the world. Anyway: O'Keefe has rather faded from the spotlight since then. There are so many ...