Joel B. Pollak - Page 318

Amidst the general frenzy about this week’s deep freeze in the Midwest and Northeast, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time the region has been this cold. It happens from time to time. It’s called winter.

It might seem odd, in the midst of the deep freeze and the snowstorms that have gripped the Midwest and the Northeast, but New Jersey and Illinois also charge their residents the highest and second-highest property taxes in the nation,

President Barack Obama has made extending unemployment benefits his #1 policy priority for 2014, in service of his attack on inequality. It is a theme that served him well in his 2012 re-election campaign. Republicans are responding by demanding budget

President Barack Obama’s “birthday present” to his wife–an extended vacation in Hawaii while he returns to Washington–violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. It is, in part, a “gift” from taxpayers to the First Lady, since the

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group that plays a large role in Lebanese politics and is propping up Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, has been moving advanced missiles from Syria into Lebanon, according to U.S. officials interviewed by the Wall Street

After toasting the New Year at a farm in the starkly beautiful wine country near Cape Town, we arrived back in the city to see Table Mountain illuminated (finally!) from below–and a ring of fire on neighboring Devil’s Peak. The

The past two weeks in South Africa have provided an opportunity for me to catch up with local politics. From afar, it has often looked quite petty, as personality conflicts and the peculiar Kremlinology of the ANC capture national attention.

On Friday evening, I visited a cousin whose home was a regular refuge for me during my seven years here in Cape Town. He and his family live in a delightful house that they built themselves in the windy neighborhood

In this morning’s Cape Times, Minister Trevor Manuel–formerly the well-regarded Minister of Finance under Thabo Mbeki, now serving in Jacob Zuma’s cabinet–published an op-ed that fully repudiated the views expressed earlier in the week by the ruling party’s provincial leader,

At a dinner party last night, a black acquaintance ribbed me about my former boss, Tony Leon, who once led the Democratic Alliance (DA) from political obscurity to opposition dominance. Why was Tony involving himself in party affairs, this gentleman

Boxing Day, December 26, is traditionally a day for black and “coloured” (i.e. mixed-race) South Africans to head to the nation’s beaches. That tradition has remained strong, twenty years after apartheid, even though the segregation laws that helped foster the

Cape Town’s summer weather brings hazards in the form of the southeast wind, which spreads fires quickly. In addition to the brush fires–some natural, some human-caused–that tear across the landscape, there are also shack fires that can devastate the city’s

For only the second time in eight days, the infernal southeast breeze that blusters throughout the Cape Town summer has stopped for a few hours, allowing the heat of the early morning to sink in. It is early Christmas Day,

It’s been four years since I spent time in Cape Town, and seven years since I came back to the U.S. The city has come a long way since then. Amidst stories of crisis and decline in the country as

South Africans are up in arms about their national cricket team’s decision, with victory within reach, to accept a draw with the visiting Indian squad rather than risk a loss, which would have put the two-match series out of reach.

One of the top news stories in South Africa this week has been the controversy over new allegations that Nelson Mandela received training from Israel’s Mossad spy agency–albeit inadvertently–when he received military training in Ethiopia in 1962. After the then-banned

In Monday morning’s Cape Times, Songezo Mjongile, the provincial secretary of the African National Congress (ANC), took to the op-ed page to defend the Times‘ firing of editor Alide Dasnois. His article ran alongside that of a “Black Consciousness” professor,

While in South Africa, I’ve been enjoying Anton Harber’s excellent Diepsloot, an exploration of life in a teeming informal settlement north of Johannesburg that did not exist when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison but has since become one of

Press freedom has been a major issue in post-apartheid South Africa, especially since 2000, when President Thabo Mbeki and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) launched a campaign against the media, accusing it of racism. In fact, the media’s main

If the United States is a melting pot, South Africa is a potpie kos–a stew of different ingredients that never quite lose their distinctiveness, even while blending together in the same dish. For a variety of reasons–some good, some bad–South Africans

There are many immediate, practical differences about South Africa that strike an American visitor. Driving on the left is one: the hard part is not so much staying on your side of the road as adjusting to the physical dimensions

When I worked as a speechwriter for the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) in the South African parliament, it emerged that despite controlling just over 12% of the seats, the DA asked something like 70% of the questions in the legislature

As a corollary to my earlier post about crime in South Africa, it is only proper to point out another element of the South African national character that coexists, both tragically and ironically, alongside this society’s more violent tendencies: extraordinary

What is the purpose of an opposition? It is easier to explain, in the context of great ideological battles, why it is best to side with a struggling minority rather than a powerful majority. But it is less clear what

I’m in transit from Los Angeles to Cape Town, and with a long layover in Paris, I’ve managed to push through an old opposition manual–from the far-left: Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, the 2006