Visual source:
Newseum
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson look at why Romney could actually be a very good, unifying candidate for president. Only they're not talking about Mitt Romney.
Is the younger Romney less concerned about economic fairness than was his late father, who helped create Michigan’s first income tax and famously returned a big bonus when he was chief executive of American Motors? Does Mitt’s cautious style reflect the bitter experience of George, whose 1968 presidential run collapsed after he used the term “brainwashing” to explain his early support for the Vietnam War?
Such speculation can certainly be entertaining for political junkies hoping to glimpse the soul of a would-be president. However, the contrast between father and son reveals less about Mitt Romney’s state of mind than it does about America’s. If Mitt has a tin ear for the concerns of the needy, if he goes along with, rather than resists, the rightward turn of his party, he is simply mirroring the disturbing transformations of American business and politics in recent decades. In his public and private careers, the younger Romney has emulated the retreat of corporate elites and the Republican Party from the model of economic partnership and cross-party compromise that the elder Romney exemplified.
At a moment when America needs both business innovation and effective oversight, vigorous growth as well as economic fairness, we would be better off with George, rather than Mitt, in the White House.
Thomas Friedman joins in the growing demand to give the Republicans a do-over.
The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub.
Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions. I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.
Here's a hint on why you're not seeing those positions coming from the Republicans, Tom -- they don't work. Actual conservatism is dead because conservatism was given everything it asked for over a period of decades, and the result was disaster. Yes, there's a worldwide wave of austerity, which is kind of conservatism's dried up husk, but expecting the Republicans to produce new and workable conservative policies is like asking trilobites to crawl out of the rocks. Conservatism is no longer a economic policy or even a governing philosophy. It's just a cult.
You don't get new ideas from cults. You get rituals.
Frank Bruni has an article about, let me check this spelling, Mitt Romney. Which one was he, the pizza guy? Oh, the dog-on-roof guy. Got it.
In 2012, Mitt Romney’s chief problem isn’t his riches, though they’re not always helpful in an era of sharpened concern about the unequal distribution of wealth. His chief problem isn’t the wariness that many conservative purists feel toward him, though that suspicion was both the fuel for Rick Santorum’s victories last week and the fraught context of Romney’s visit to the Conservative Political Action Conference here on Friday, during which he performed the oratorical equivalent of cartwheels to the right.
What impedes his candidacy more than anything else is an excitement deficit. An excitement void, really. It’s hard to find a single Republican, including those most solidly behind him, who demonstrates true passion for him or can do even a persuasive pantomime of it. ...
[Romney] hasn’t built his candidacy on big, concrete policy ideas but, rather, on a technocratic notion: I did well in our economy, and can thus make it do a whole lot better for you.
Ah yes. Romney is running for president on the same theme as those late night infomercials that promise to teach you how to make money by buying foreclosure properties and short selling stocks. Go with Mitt, America. Drop the eagle and adopt the vulture. Do we get a set of ginzu knives with that?
Kathleen Parker thinks that Romney should be grateful to lose a few.
Put another way, it’s hell to be a front-runner.
The imperative to sustain momentum and never stumble isn’t only crazy-making, it’s almost always mistake-guaranteeing. Where can you go but down? Conversely, where can long shots and runners-up go but up? And why not be yourself in the meantime?
...
Romney is dogged by narratives that aren’t really his. His party’s base wants him fighting mad, which is not in his repertoire. Adding to his miseries, he seems to have fallen victim to a phonic tic, saying inappropriate things — telling jobless folks that he’s unemployed or, recently, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” which he doesn’t mean. Everybody is concerned about the very poor! Everybody.
Sure, Kathleen. I mean, you're not really rich unless you're
richer than other people. So of course the poor are necessary.
Ross Douthat looks at the new work of Charles Murray... so you just know it's going to be a rich 2-D portrait of America.
What’s brilliant is Murray’s portrait, rich in data and anecdote, of the steady breakdown of what he calls America’s “founding virtues” — thrift and industriousness, fidelity and parental responsibility, piety and civic engagement — within America’s working class, and the personal and communal wreckage that’s ensued.
See, the problem is that the most productive workers in the world are not industrious enough, that the people who were told that the best thing they could do to help the country was spend aren't thrifty enough, and that people who've been told that unions, social organizations, and all government organizations are evil have mysteriously become unwilling to work as a community. And what can we do to resolve this sticky problem of how the working class has failed the country? The solution to this is that we should all be more libertarian. Which I believe is supposed to remove the problem by removing the workers. Perhaps Mr. Murray could plot his solution on a Bell curve. By contrast, Douthat's suggestions, once he gets past blaming unnamed hypothetical hyper-liberals for wanting too much, look like the kind of solutions that
actual liberals would support, and which actual Republicans would never accept.
Michael Grabell looks at why the stimulus package took so long to start stimulating, and how it could have worked more quickly.
The problem with most of the projects was that the Obama administration and Congress had defined “shovel ready” too broadly. The original plan called for putting “shovels in the ground” within 90 days. But when the rules were written, states ended up with 120 days to have their road projects “approved.” It often took six more months to a year before most of the projects were under construction.
Weatherization, for example, was billed as the low-hanging fruit of the clean-energy movement. But states are still sitting on roughly a billion dollars in unused grant money because of a tortured bureaucracy, in which the federal government paid the states, which paid local nonprofits, which then hired the contractors.
As has almost everyone who's looked at the problem, Grabell concludes that the stimulus would have been more effective if there had been a direct temporary jobs program -- a modern WPA. Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity of Obama's first term.
Sam Roberts wonders what we should say to E.T.should we get in contact with him/her/herm.
The news last week that a concerted scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence by the SETI Institute in California has resumed raises fundamental questions: If we made contact, what would we say? And what answers would we anticipate?
My suggestion: We have this guy named Newt. No, really. Would you take him off our hands?
New Scientist features the first cave art that was created by Neanderthals, not modern humans.
Looking oddly akin to the DNA double helix, the images in fact depict the seals that the locals would have eaten, says José Luis Sanchidrián at the University of Cordoba, Spain. They have "no parallel in Palaeolithic art", he adds. His team say that charcoal remains found beside six of the paintings – preserved in Spain's Nerja caves – have been radiocarbon dated to between 43,500 and 42,300 years old.
That suggests the paintings may be substantially older than the 30,000-year-old Chauvet cave paintings in south-east France, thought to be the earliest example of Palaeolithic cave art.
This suggests that modern humans might have learned about painting from Neanderthals, who were long thought to lack this kind of symbolic thinking. And then we ate them. Or had sex with them. Or maybe both, god help us.