Visual source: Newseum
Paul Krugman says the only presidential candidates who can meet basic GOP requirements are the clueless or the cynical:
The Washington Post quotes an unnamed Republican adviser who compared what happened to Mr. Cain, when he suddenly found himself leading in the polls, to the proverbial tale of the dog who had better not catch that car he’s chasing. “Something great and awful happened, the dog caught the car. And of course, dogs don’t know how to drive cars. So he had no idea what to do with it.”
The same metaphor, it seems to me, might apply to the G.O.P. pursuit of the White House next year. If the dog actually catches the car — the actual job of running the U.S. government — it will have no idea what to do, because the realities of government in the 21st century bear no resemblance to the mythology all ambitious Republican politicians must pretend to believe. And what will happen then?
What will happen? More of the same wreckage and carnage and brigandage we've already seen so much of.
Bradley Schiller is yet one more "expert" asserting that class warfare was started by people on the bottom instead of people on the top. The Occupy movement gets his attention, but the Koch Brothers, Paul Ryan, the Chicago school of economics, Ronald Reagan and the Heritage Foundation? Nowhere to be found.
Arnold Schwarzenegger steps back into the limelight for a second:
Federal investment is critical to the success of the renewable energy industry. That’s not a new idea. The same was true for coal, which would not have been economically feasible without tax exemptions and incentives. It was also true for offshore oil drilling, which was deemed unprofitable without royalty waivers and favorable packaging of federal leases.
Imagine what the renewables industry would look like if the federal government leveled the playing field and showed the same dedication we have in California. Our green sector is the brightest spot in California’s economy, having grown 10 times faster than any other business sector since 2005. Today, one in every four jobs in the U.S. solar industry is in California. One-third of U.S. clean-tech venture capital flows into our state. Nurturing the green-tech sector was the right thing for me to do as governor, and it is the right thing for the federal government to do.
It's a good thing Kevin Drum didn't have a mouth full of tea when he read National Review's account of Newt Gingrich lamenting the lack of bipartisanship in Washington:
If there's a single person in the country more responsible than Newt for the poisonous state of partisan politics in America today, I don't know who it is.
Briton Laurie Penny writes that a spider bite in New York gave her insight into the devastating impact of the U.S. health-care system:
It's not just the 59 million Americans living without health insurance and unable to access treatment for everyday maladies without crippling expense. It's the millions more who dare not risk a dispute with their boss for fear of losing their medical cover, who expect to remortgage their homes in old age to meet the costs of failing health, or who live in fear of bankruptcy should they develop a chronic condition or have an accident.
The notion of a society that sanctions companies to profit from sickness feels barbaric enough, without then forcing ordinary people to choose between medical treatment and the financial future of their families.
Conservative Mona Charen signs on with the late Milton Friedman and Ron Paul in favor of legalizing drugs:
In 2009, there were 1.7 million drug arrests in the U.S. Half of those were for marijuana. As David Boaz and Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute noted, "Addicts commit crimes to pay for a habit that would be easily affordable if it were legal. Police sources have estimated that as much as half the property crime in some major cities is committed by drug users."
Drug money, such as booze money during Prohibition, has corrupted countless police, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, border patrol agents, prosecutors and judges. Drug crime has blighted many neighborhoods. America's appetite for drugs has encouraged lawlessness and violence in many neighboring countries, most recently in Mexico, where its drug violence is spilling north.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
[Newt Gingrich's] is a brazen brand of glibness, a willingness not merely to shade reality but to ignore it altogether, a verbal dexterity that enables him to alter the direction of the conversation and change the subject before you know he's gone.
He is Richard Nixon intoning, "I am not a crook." He is Bill Clinton insisting, "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is." He is Monty Python's Michael Palin claiming of a dead parrot "He's not dead, he's resting."
Consider a conversation he had with Sean Hannity of Fox News last Wednesday night. Mr. Hannity is an infotainer who is neither equipped nor inclined to challenge Mr. Gingrich's assertions. He allowed Mr. Gingrich, who has made millions in the influence-peddling racket since leaving the House in January 1999, to deny that he'd ever been a lobbyist.
Massachusetts-based columnist Marc Dion doesn't think much of Barney Frank:
As a reporter, what I got from Frank was a significant amount of rudeness, an amusing amount of arrogance, several bad jokes and a number of quotes that teetered between defiance of capitalist principle and simple ignorance of how money really works. ...
I watched Frank get cheated by bank and mortgage sharpies, too. Put a politician, either liberal or conservative, in a room with six bankers, and the pol comes out without his wallet and, more importantly, without your wallet. Bankers do not bank, investors do not invest and speculators do not speculate for the benefit of the masses, and a politician who thinks they do will find his constituents sleeping under cardboard.
Eric Olson wonders why the multi-ethnic X-Men series, after five films, has still not included a single American Indian:
Why is the popular culture inclusion and treatment of an ethnic group that makes up less than 2% of the American population important? It is not simply an esoteric question of representation within a pluralistic, democratic society. It is essential and pragmatic because these are the stories and images that the American people, especially young people, associate with reality.