Visual Source: Newseum
David Brooks writes 41 sentences of sonorous goop so he can take a lazy poke at Anthony Weiner in the 42nd.
Paul Krugman:
What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense. …
[C]reditor-friendly policies are crippling the economy. This is a negative-sum game, in which the attempt to protect the rentiers from any losses is inflicting much larger losses on everyone else. And the only way to get a real recovery is to stop playing that game.
Eugene Robinson:
Slender threads of hope are nice but do not constitute a plan. Nor do they justify continuing to pour American lives and resources into the bottomless pit of Afghanistan. …
The threat from Afghanistan is gone. Bring the troops home.
Bill Boyarsky:
Just how far to go in this purposeless war is the subject of the current internal debate in Washington, one that is so heavy in muddy language that it is impossible for outsiders to follow. But the truth is, it’s probably already settled. We’re stuck in Afghanistan as long as Obama follows his present policy.
On one side of the charade of a debate, according to The New York Times, are Gates and others in the Pentagon who favor a small beginning to the troop withdrawal that Obama promised to begin next month. On the other side, the Times reported, is Vice President Joe Biden and others who want a faster withdrawal, presumably something substantial that Obama can take to the voters in the 2012 presidential election. …
An increasing number of people want to know how long we’ll be in Afghanistan, not to mention why we are there. Hopefully, their ranks will grow, and Obama, worried about re-election, will listen.
Los Angeles Times Editorial on the Supreme Court's decision not to hear a challenge to California's offering of in-state tuition to students who have attended and graduated from a California high school regardless of their immigration status:
Neither the U.S. Supreme Court decision nor the California Supreme Court decision it is based on in any way resolves the conundrum that greets illegal immigrants once they receive a college degree. The law still does not allow them to take a job in the U.S. that matches their new skills, especially professional and high-skill jobs in which legal status is most likely to be checked. Perhaps when Americans realize how many smart, well-trained people are being forced leave the country to find suitable employment, they will finally press the government to pass coherent immigration reform.
Fareed Zakaria says we need a private infrastructure bank, backed with some federal money.
Leonard Pitts Jr. says it's easy to laugh at Sarah Palin for getting Paul Revere wrong and Michele Bachmann for saying the Founding Fathers ended slavery. But historical illiteracy is endemic:
The alarm bell has been ringing for years. Consider "Losing America's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century," a 2000 study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based advocacy group.
Researchers found that the majority of seniors at the nation's best colleges could not identify the words of the Gettysburg Address or explain the significance of Valley Forge. They did not know, the study concluded, because they had not been taught. History, the study said, was no longer a requirement in the nation's top schools.
And then, there is a 2006 assessment by the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, often called the Nation's Report Card. It found that nearly 40 percent of high school seniors could not identify the purpose of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and only 14 percent could identify and explain a factor leading to U.S. involvement in the Korean War. …
[O]ur history is the master narrative of who we are.
It is a narrative of slaves and soldiers, inventors and investors, demagogues and visionaries, of homicide, fratricide and genocide, of truths held self-evident and of government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Laurie Penny describes with disdain a BBC program that surely will soon have an American counterpart:
Roll up for the youth unemployment show! If being one of almost a million young people out of work weren't humiliating enough, the BBC has now commissioned a programme pitting jobless graduates and school-leavers against one another while viewers watch and snicker. According to the careers website Graduate Fog, Love Productions is advertising for contestants on the show, which will see employers hiring or rejecting young hopefuls live on air.
Mocking the desperate and downtrodden has always made good television, and this new gameshow will not be the first to exploit the unemployed to boost ratings. Consider The Fairy Jobmother, possibly the ghastliest piece of poverty porn ever made, whose second series aired on Channel 4 this week. The programme's eponymous pantomime dame is Hayley Taylor, former manager of a private company contracted by the Government to bully the long-term unemployed into a dwindling selection of minimum-wage jobs.
Shahid Buttar:
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III does not deserve to have his term extended.
Mueller has presided over the resurrection of many long-discredited practices that violate the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans.
Yet the Obama administration has proposed extending Mueller’s term by two years. The Senate should reject the proposal. It sets a bad precedent, it concentrates too much power in the hands of the FBI director and it tacitly approves of Mueller’s wrongheaded moves.
Pat Buchanan says the "days of wine and roses are over" for the United States and the West.
Eric Alterman digs into one reason U.S. leaders are paralyzed in dealing with the most pressing problems of the day:
Aiding and abetting this political negligence is a Washington press corps obsessed with covering meaningless personal dalliances and punitive long-term entitlement cuts. But to really ask ourselves how we got here, to a point where the political debate has shifted so far away from what needs to be done now, there is perhaps no better place to start than to take a brief travelogue through the Washington Post’s supposedly left-leaning op-ed columns.