Various internet sites
I'm assuming that everyone at the New York Times and Washington Post has been safely evacuated to the pundit bunker—and I'm hoping all the East Coast Kossacks are in there with them... stealing all their crackers, driving George Will mad madder and using up the batteries of the emergency radio listening to repeats of DK Radio.
In any case, since I'm putting this together on Saturday night, look to other posts for up to date weather info.
Frank Bruni says that this has been one tough summer, and not just because of the heat (but also... the heat)
this summer crystallized a growing sense that our country’s can-do spirit was being replaced by a make-do resignation, and that our best days might well be behind us. I kept finding myself in the same conversation, over and over, and only occasionally was I the one to initiate it. It concerned whether children in America today were likely to enjoy lives as privileged as their parents’.
Nicholas Kristof wonders if we're going for short yards on unemployment just at the time we should be tossing up a Hail Mary.
Unless more people are working, paying taxes and making mortgage payments, it’s difficult to see how we revive the economy or address our long-term debt challenge. While debt is a legitimate long-term problem, the urgent priority should be getting people back to work. America now has more than four unemployed people for each opening. And the longer people are out of work, the less likely it is that they will ever work again.
President Obama is saying the right things lately about creating jobs. But he is saying them far too meekly, and his jobs agenda seems anemic — while the Republican Congress is saying the wrong things altogether.
Economist Cathrine Rampell locates some people who really like Washington—Washingtonians.
Maybe that’s because Washington is richer, on the whole, than any American state: it has a per-capita income of $71,011, compared with the national average of $40,584, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And the geysering income streams that support Washingtonians are reliable in good times and bad.
Maureen Dowd gives a brief review of Dick Cheney's new memoir.
His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune.
Even so, Cheney apparently doesn't pick out enough to cover the fact that by the time the second term was over nobody in DC, including George W. Bush, would listen to his advice. Which may be the first thing I've heard that makes me think better of Bush. In the end, MoDo tags Darth Cheney's book a bore. Apparently, he doesn't even reveal the secret of how to do a Force-choke or shoot that purple lightning from your fingers.
George Will might not yet have encountered Irene, but he's still all wet as he argues for spending public money on private schools. By the way, Jude Wanniski (a conservative author who will feature prominently in my 9AM ET post) used to hand out ratings to pundits each year. Despite their being on the same side in the economic battle, Wanniski scored Will at the bottom of the barrel with only one star. That's gotta hurt.
Kathleen Parker correctly identifies Rick Perry's appeal to the right as one of a true believer evangelical who puts faith ahead of facts and trusts in prayer over science.
That we are yet again debating evolutionary theory and Earth’s origins — and that candidates now have to declare where they stand on established science — should be a signal that we are slip-sliding toward governance by emotion rather than reason. But it’s important to understand what’s undergirding the debate. It has little to do with a given candidate’s policy and everything to do with whether he or she believes in God.
Parker's definition of faith turns out to be every bit as restrictive as Perry's. Buying her argument leaves no room for most Christians—including Catholics—among believers.
Dana Milbank draws some comparisons between President Obama and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. One of these presidents comes off better than the other.
If Obama is to dispel the growing — and debilitating — impression that he is a weak leader, he needs to show people he’s willing to fight for something other than his tee time. “We’re going in the wrong direction,” Trumka said. “There has to be some hope that we’re going to turn it around. That means there have to be some bold solutions and some risk taking.”
...
The president, however, remains unconcerned. Would he call Congress back from recess to address the jobs crisis? He would not. Neither would he cancel his vacation on a $50,000-per-week Martha’s Vineyard compound. When the earthquake struck the East Coast, he was on the golf course. On the day Trumka complained about the need for action, Obama spent nearly five hours on the beach with his family, then went to dinner with friends.
There's cool, then there's don't give a damn. Sometimes it's hard to tell them apart.
Colbert King on the event that was supposed to be dominating the news this weekend.
Change has come, but not voluntarily. Attempts to end slavery were greeted with massive, military resistance. So, too, did massive resistance stand in the way of desegregation. It took legal and nonviolent pressure courageously led by Dr. King, civil rights lawyers and foot soldiers in the movement, along with powers of the federal government, to put an end to segregation.
Who knows where the country would be today had the defiant and the resisters prevailed, not only in the 1860s, but also in the 1960s and beyond.
That is the context in which to see the historic ’63 march and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. That statue represents victory of the quest for equality and human dignity over racial injustice, its practitioners and the cautious and the cowardly who allowed that evil to triumph in America for so long.
I've become a big fan of Kickstarter. So much so that I've spent a couple of hundred bunks on things I didn't really need, just because it seemed like the creators had poured so much time and thought into their would-be products. I'm used to thinking of it as a spot where small start ups test the water, so it was a little surprising to see among the ranks of those looking for some dough, an organization called... NASA.
Play as an aspiring astronaut in Astronaut:Moon, Mars and Beyond™, the official NASA MMO game. Set in the year 2035, you will embark on an adventure into space, Mars, the asteroid belt, and the outer planets.
Do you also get to sigh over appropriation bills that include systems you didn't ask for, while much needed funds are sliced away?
With apologies to Thomas Jefferson and E. O. Wilson, it turns out that all ants may not be created equal.
As with other social insects, it was once thought that workers were essentially equivalent in ant colony hierarchies. But it appears that a few well-informed individuals shape group decisions by leading nestmates to new homes.
Ants who had experience in navigating obstacles not only found their way more quickly a second time, they were successful in passing on their knowledge to other ants. Michele Bachmann has already dodged a challenge from a high school student. You think she might be willing to take on an ant?