Visual source: Newseum
Frank Bruni has noticed the peculiar mental derangement that has settled over both Republican candidates and the press: Bush-nesia.
Remember him? Not long ago, he was president. For eight turbulent years. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the Republican candidates who are vying to evict his Democratic successor and reclaim the White House for their party. On the subject of the way the country was governed — and how it fared — when they last ruled that particular roost, they’re almost consistently mum.
...
That presidency is a cautionary tale for successors, who aren’t learning proper caution from it. They’re still adamant about low taxes despite being vague about entitlement reform, which carries the risk of alienating important constituencies. So they simply eliminate 43 from the narrative, a bit of creative editing that helps them pin the mind-boggling level of federal debt overwhelmingly on Obama.
That debt has indeed risen at a terrifying pace over the last three years, but for reasons that have a great deal to do with ... George W. Bush. The perpetuation of his tax cuts, the continuation of his new prescription drug benefit, the management of his wars and the interest payments on debt that he accumulated account for a crucial share of the additional sum Obama has amassed.
Yes, Republicans are pretending that they never broke that America. They just came into the room and found it that way. Now, how will Bruni spin this into a knock against Democrats, because he always...
candidates talk instead about Reagan, Reagan and Reagan, name-checked on Tuesday by three of the six candidates who gave speeches following the Iowa caucuses.
With striking frequency and trademark self-congratulation, Gingrich casts himself as a crucial ally of Reagan in the 1980s. Ron Paul goes back to the 1970s, trumpeting that he was a Reagan supporter long before it was fashionable.
But it’s only because Reagan governed nearly a quarter-century ago, is gone now and has become the stuff of myth as much as reality that these admirers can embrace him so unreservedly.
Um, except not this time. Hey, we just finished a Republican debate. Exactly how many questions about Bush came up in this one? How many have come up in the 11,347 debates so far?
Maureen Dowd says Santorum is running for president as the man who hates more people than any other candidate, which reminds her of someone...
In a campaign where W. is an unmentionable, Santorum is an unexpected revival of Bushian uncompassionate conservatism.
...
16-year-old Jessica Scharf asked Santorum how her handicapped brother could be cared for without help from the federal government. He replied, as The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye reported, that he and his wife “bear the cost” of a handicapped daughter; he said family, friends, neighbors and the church could help, and that caring for someone would knit them closer.
Remember: the family that begs together, stays together. Or starves together. Same thing. Maureen also notes that Santorum's fiscal conservatism is about as authentic as his sweater vests.
He bashes President Obama as a European-style socialist and preaches fiscal conservatism. Yet in the Senate, he made sure dollars from the socialistic Medicare program went to Puerto Rico on behalf of a hometown firm — United Health Services — that later gave him nearly $400,000 in director’s fees and stock options.
He was among the pay-for-play Republicans who tried to strong-arm lobbyists and say that if you wanted to have influence you had to cough up campaign money.
While Karen Santorum was home-schooling their seven children in Virginia, Santorum soaked the Pennsylvania taxpayers to the tune of $100,000 by enrolling the children in a Pennsylvania cyber charter school.
Hey, as long as that money is not going to blah people.
Ross Douthat goes into a froth over attacks on Santorum, including citing a DK diary as "a number of left wing web sites." Which is kind of flattering. But really, it is tragic that someone's personal decisions about reproduction are held up to public ridicule. I'm sure that Santorum would agree that these tough personal issues should remain private. Right?
B. R. Myers waves a red flag over the west's perception of North Korea as a communist state. While our media bumbles into twisted oxymorons like "inherited communist dictatorship," that's not how the North Koreans see themselves.
Unfortunately, the West seems determined to continue paying as little attention to North Korean ideology as possible. In the past few weeks the country’s propaganda has been quoted more for comic relief than anything else. ...
Most of the news media around the world continue viewing North Korea as it does not view itself, namely as a Communist state. The result has been a lot of old-school Kremlinological fuss about the power hierarchy.
Roger Ekirch breaks out the candles, because the age of austerity is the dawn of a new dark age.
Artificial illumination has arguably been the greatest symbol of modern progress. By making nighttime infinitely more inviting, street lighting — gas lamps beginning in the early 1800s followed by electric lights toward the end of the century — drastically expanded the boundaries of everyday life to include hours once shrouded in darkness. Today, any number of metropolitan areas in the United States and abroad, bathed in the glare of neon and mercury vapor, bill themselves as 24-hour cities, open both for business and pleasure.
So it is all the more remarkable that, in what appears to be a spreading trend, dozens of cities and towns across America — from California and Oregon to Maine — are contemplating significantly reducing the number of street lamps to lower their hefty electric bills.
Some towns are looking into solar powered lights that do a better job of illuminating the road and sidewalk while generating much less light pollution and saving money. Wait... does a dark age dawn, or does the age before it just dusk?
The New York Times finally points out something that we should have been screaming for years. Japan's "lost decade"? We should be so lost.
Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”
But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most important measures, it has done a lot better than the United States.
Japan is an example of how the system is supposed to work. When business faltered, the government stepped in to keep the whole nation moving forward. Life expectancy is way up. Income is up. And unemployment is 4.2 percent. What got "lost"? Speculator's dollars and massive gains in the stock market. In other words, Japan bailed out Main Street instead of Wall Street, and as a result their unemployment never passed 5%. But because billionaires failed to make gains against the rest of the population, we're supposed to look on that as failure.
Kathleen Parker says that Rick Santorum's problem is that he's too nice. Really. Really really.
Leonard Pitts points out that opposing South Carolina's new voter ID law is political. But then, so is the law.
As similar voter ID laws are passed in other Republican-controlled states — including those that not covered by the Voting Rights Act — it would be naïve to believe politics does not also enter the GOP’s thinking. Though lawmakers swear their only interest is to combat voting fraud (which is not known to be a rampant problem), it is difficult not to feel their true intent is to suppress the black vote.
Granted, race is nowhere mentioned in the voter ID bills. It was not mentioned in bills imposing grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy tests either. All were officially race-neutral, yet the intention and effect was to bar blacks from voting.
As Richard Nixon once said of his War on Drugs, another “race-neutral” policy that somehow victimizes mostly blacks, the idea is to target African Americans while appearing not to.
When the election season is over, and he's looking for something to do, Rick Santorum might want go fishing.
When it comes to selecting mates, hawkfish keep their options open. The flamboyantly coloured reef dwellers start life as females but can transform into males after maturing. Many marine animals do this, but these fickle fish have a rare trick up their fins: they can change back when the situation suits.
If people could do this, laws would be a lot more equitable.
Mike Daisey's audio piece on This American Life is one of the hardest things I've ever listened to, and one of the most thought provoking. I will never think about the concept of "hand made" the same way again.