Visual source: Newseum
Michael Kazin is the author of How the Left Changed the Nation. Thing is, he doesn't mean the current left.
Except for the demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin this year, unionists and other stern critics of corporate power and government cutbacks have failed to organize a serious movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession.
Instead, the Tea Party rebellion — led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires — has compelled politicians from both parties to slash federal spending and defeat proposals to tax the rich and hold financiers accountable for their misdeeds. Partly as a consequence, Barack Obama’s tenure is starting to look less like the second coming of F.D.R. and more like a re-run of Jimmy Carter.
Kazin shows how the strength of the left in the 1930s went all the way back to the 1880s. It took decades out of office to plant the seeds for progressives to make gains once they had the reins, and to plan for what they would do when the moment came. But in the last few decades, that kind of planning, preparation, and plain old hard work has been sadly lacking on the left. The conservative takeover of the 1920s was a brief blip in the progressive rise, even so the damage done by the radical right at that time was enough to toss the nation into the Great Depression. If the left doesn't have the coherent message, solid program, and firmness of direction to attract the attention of the majority of the nation, how will we prevent this cycle from being worse?
Maureen Dowd seems to be amused at how Republicans are running through frontrunners faster than Kleenex in flu season. She's less amused by Mitt Romney's new sarcasm-centric campaign.
Romney unveiled his own version of Reagan’s “There you go again,” repeatedly blowing off Perry with a smile and a “Nice try.”
Slapping Perry for backtracking from his suggestion in his book “Fed Up!” that Social Security should be left up to states, Romney snidely noted, “There’s a Rick Perry out there that’s saying” that, “so you’d better find that Rick Perry and get him to stop saying that.”
Romney, a champion flip-flopper, has painted Perry as a floppier flipper.
Frank Bruni wonders if there should be limits to what we know, and what we say, about our candidates. No matter which candidate you support, there's a lot to be said for evaluating the ideas, rather than the high school year book of the person delivering them.
Ross Douthat ponders the path of America justice post-Troy Davis.
For many observers, the lesson of this case is simple: We need to abolish the death penalty outright. The argument that capital punishment is inherently immoral has long been a losing one in American politics. But in the age of DNA evidence and endless media excavations, the argument that courts and juries are just too fallible to be trusted with matters of life and death may prove more effective.
I wish we didn't have to make the case against executing the innocent. Executing the guilty should be repulsive enough for anyone.
The New York Times thinks that President Obama's approach to medicare is a good one.
President Obama’s plan to cut $248 billion from Medicare over the next decade as part of his deficit reduction plan has drawn heat from all sides.
Republicans denounced it as too little. Advocates for older Americans denounced it as too harsh on beneficiaries.
George Will starts off with a story of fish-powered-pedicures and their limitation by regulators in Arizona. You remember Arizona? The one where even more restrictive laws are making life hard for women, immigrants, and people who don't think Joe Arpaio hung the moon. That Arizona. Even so, Will blames restrictions on fish on foot action on... New Deal progressivism. Even for a Will column, this hits a high score on both the silliness and incoherence scales. I think this is my last try at abbreviating Will. Either the guy is just phoning in stuff he's typing up from random notes and old fortune cookies, in which case there's no point, or he's serious, in which case it's just sad.
David Ignatius found President Obama's speech at the UN less than impressive, and says the president is playing foreign relations defense, but Ignatius doesn't help his own case by making an argument for "deliberate vagueness." Somehow, it seems a bit off to complain that the president isn't being bold, but arguing that he should be vague.
Diana Nyad didn't exactly have time to write a column this weekend. However, she is aiming to write a line in the record books. At age 62 she's swimming the 103 miles from Cuba to Florida. At 11:30 last night, she was temporarily out of the water to receive treatment for a jellyfish sting to the face (ouch), but as I'm writing she's back in the water and paddling hard after swimming for 31 hours.
Sure, those possibly faster than light neutrinos have hogged the spotlight this week, but science marches on—right to the end.
Imagine one day you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror only to find that something is terribly wrong. You look grainy and indistinct, like a low-quality image blown up so much that the features are barely recognisable. You scream, and the sound that comes out is distorted too, like hearing it over a bad phone line. Then everything goes blank.
Welcome to the big snap, a new and terrifying way for the universe to end that seems logically difficult to avoid.