Last month, John Kerry gave an excellent speech to the Center for American Progress which almost word for word ought to have been what the president gave as the State of the Union. In fact, he even used “Sputnik moment” as a theme, which makes me assume that someone at the White House was listening, even if no one …

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Ryan Lizza’s recent New Yorker piece on the aborted climate change legislation of John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsay Graham is dispiritingly illuminating. Like previous long-form pieces we’ve seen of late (George Packer’s New Yorker article on the Senate, Todd Purdham’s morbid look at Washington in Vanity Fair) it is heavily discouraging in its recounting the mangling of a well-intentioned bill, as well as …

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