Visual source: Newseum
The New York Times looks under the national bed and finds the monster that's waiting to swallow Mitt Romney and the other Republicans--America's growing income inequality.
Republicans are indeed in growing trouble as more voters begin to realize how much the party’s policies — dismantling regulations, slashing taxes for the rich, weakening unions — have contributed to inequality and the yawning distance between the middle class and the top end.
The more President Obama talks about narrowing that gap, the more his popularity ratings have risen while those of Congress plummet. Two-thirds of Americans now say there is a strong conflict between the rich and the poor, according to a Pew survey released last week, making it the greatest source of tension in American society.
That makes Mr. Romney and his party vulnerable, as he clearly knows. He said on Wednesday that issues of wealth distribution should be discussed only “in quiet rooms.” And he accused the president of using an “envy-oriented, attack-oriented” approach, “entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”
Republicans, and especially Romney, are still handing out absolute pablum equating run away wealth with hard work and attacks on inequality as equivalent to going after social mobility. However, the paper thin nature of the Republican arguments is becoming more and more evident by the day. The Republican pretense won't hold up to scrutiny... no matter how many times the world's worst rapper recites the words America the Beautiful. Occupy gave the issue visibility, and it's not going to go away.
Frank Bruni welcomes us to a visit with Mitt Romney, regular guy.
Romney, whose net worth is generally estimated to be $200 million, earned his money rather than marrying into it. But the precise way he earned it — through Bain Capital, a corporate-takeover firm — has come under fierce attack in advance of the Jan. 21 primary in South Carolina, where some of Bain’s deals are said to have cost jobs, and unemployment is 9.9 percent.
To make matters more fraught, he’s campaigning during a time of exaggerated income inequality and increasingly loud complaints about it. A survey released by the Pew Research Center last week showed that 66 percent of Americans consider the conflict between the haves and have-nots to be “very strong” or “strong.” In 2009, only 47 percent of respondents said that.
Romney’s adjustment to that is a work in awkward progress. Last June, he told Florida voters that as a candidate, he, too, was essentially unemployed. He was kidding, but still.
He wasn’t kidding last week when he told New Hampshire voters that he had begun his career “at the entry level,” as if the Harvard-educated son of a former governor and corporate chieftain grabs hold of the same first rung that others do. And he assured them that he had known the fear of “a pink slip.” They probably thought he was talking about lingerie.
Bruni being Bruni, he can't pass up reminding you that President Obama had almost 1/200th as much as the Mittster when he ran for president. So see, Obama is also rich. Or something. Still, there is absolutely no doubt that Romney is the candidate of the wealthy for the wealthy. Republicans are still selling the same plan that they've been selling for three decades: give more to the wealthy, and eventually the rest of us will get some. The question for 2012 is whether anyone is still buying that argument.
Sam Tanenhaus looks at the not-so-lengthy history of the Tea Party against similar GOP uprisings in the past.
Even in South Carolina, a seat of conservative activism, the opposition to Mr. Romney appears to be fragmented and diffuse, as Matt Bai reports this weekend in The Times Magazine. Others have put the case more bluntly. “Where’s the Tea Party?” a headline on Politico asked last week.
This is all the more puzzling because the Tea Party movement did not lack for useful precedents or operating models. On the contrary, it is “the latest in a cycle of insurgencies on the Republican right,” as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice writes in his new book, “Rule and Ruin,” a chronicle of half a century of internecine Republican warfare. “Even the name of the movement was a throwback to the ‘T Parties’ of the early ’60s, part of the right-wing, anti-tax crusade of that era.”
On its surface the Tea Party movement snugly fits this pattern. An organized grass-roots revolt, its influence was decisive in the 2010 elections, when an energized base propelled Republicans to enormous gains in the House, helped secure Senate victories for fresh faces like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and captured as many as 700 seats in state legislatures. The movement drove the Republican agenda to the right, making stars of legislators like Senator Jim DeMint and Representative Paul Ryan, and did much to shift the political debate from the jobless recovery to the growing national debt.
But even in those early, heady days there were signs of trouble.
What's making for weak Tea? In this case, the formula seems to contain plenty of uprising, but few core beliefs. The only demand placed on Tea Party candidates is that they be rabidly mad at Democrats, for any number of mostly make-believe reasons. That may be enough to win an election cycle, but as it turns out, it's not enough to sustain a movement. This party's over.
Hendrik Hartog strolls down a not so sunny memory lane to visit America before there was Social Security and Medicare.
News accounts suggest that overstretched and insufficient public services are driving adult children “back” toward caring for dependent parents.
Such accounts often draw on a deeply sentimental view of the past. Once upon a time, the story line goes, family members cared for one another naturally within households, in an organic and unplanned process. But this portrait is too rosy. If we confront what old-age support once looked like — what actually happened when care was almost fully privatized, when the old depended on their families, without the bureaucratic structures and the (under)paid caregivers we take for granted — a different picture emerges.
For the past decade I have been researching cases of family conflict over old-age care in the decades before Social Security. I have found extraordinary testimony about the intimate management of family care: how the old negotiated with the young for what they called retirement, and the exertions of caregiving at a time when support by relatives was the only sustenance available for the old.
In that world, older people could not rely on habit or culture or nature if they wanted their children to support them when they became frail. In an America strongly identified with economic and physical mobility, parents had to offer inducements. Usually, the bait they used was the promise of an inheritance: stay and take care of me and your mother, and someday you will get the house and the farm or the store or the bank account.
You know, I think you could tell this same story to Ron Paul and he really would view it as a golden age. Parents having to bribe their children for care in their old age? Why that's just a free market in familial affection untainted by the dark cloud of government intervention. And end the Fed. Thank you.
Kathleen Parker sends out the word to lay off Michelle Obama.
If the first lady isn’t angry, she certainly has every right to be.
Like every woman I know, black or white, I’ve watched Mrs. Obama with respect, admiration and arm-envy. Every woman. We talk about her unique role in American history, and we are proud and impressed. I’ve interviewed a former first lady’s chief of staff, various Republican operatives, and former staffers for previous presidents, and without exception, they all say the same thing: “I admire her so much.”
Which is a good start. However, Kathleen then determines that she can't actually locate people who have insulted the First Lady and immediately concludes that it must be bloggers causing the problem. So quit being so insulting, Internet people. Be polite. Like Rush. And Sean. And Bill. And...
Patrick Pexton, whose omsbudding has become a weekly feature, this week defends the Washington Post's coverage of the Occupy movement.
Covering the occupiers does present challenges. This is not a typical protest that gathers, rallies and ends. It is open-ended.
It is purposefully leaderless. There isn’t a spokesman. It has an agenda — broadly speaking, economic justice for the 99 percent — but it does not have a point-by-point legislative plan and only sporadically organizes into conventional protest actions such as a march, a rally or a lobbying day on Capitol Hill. Daily events to cover are few.
It is small and even tiny — probably less than 150 people [Note: he's talking here about the DC encampment, not the movement as a whole] — but people around the country, and the world, share the protesters’ concerns and follow the movement closely, judging by the ombudsman’s mailbag.
And Pexton actually fends off charges that the Post is paying too much attention to the Occupiers and argues that they need to provide ongoing coverage. So good on Pexton. Might be nice to drop a fresh note in that mailbag.
New Scientist follows a study that suggests a little new blood can really help out, and they don't mean a fresh face around the office.
A FOUNTAIN of youthful cells reverses the damage found in diseases like multiple sclerosis, a study in mice reveals.
Nerve cells lose their electrically insulating myelin sheath as MS develops. New myelin-generating cells can be produced from stem cells, but the process loses efficiency with age.
Julia Ruckh at the University of Cambridge, and colleagues, have found a way to reverse the age-related efficiency loss. They linked the bloodstreams of young mice to old mice with myelin damage. Exposure to youthful blood reactivated stem cells in the old mice, boosting myelin generation.
Hmm, getting new blood in your system can reverse aging? Let me check... are we sure this study was not sponsored by BVU? Bathory & Vlad University?
Scott Johnson checks out some property with a northern exposure and some very harsh winters. Also very harsh summers.
Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the most intriguing bodies in our solar system. Its dense atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane make it both beautiful and bizarre, as well as a tantalizing target for those seeking extraterrestrial life. ...
In a letter published in Nature, researchers describe a model that successfully simulates some key aspects of Titan’s weather. The model offers possible explanations for some of the moon's quirky features that have long been puzzling.
Previous attempts to understand the pattern of methane lakes and cloud systems have invoked both the familiar and the bizarre, including surface topography, cryovolcanism, seasonal patterns in atmospheric circulation, and even an underground "methane table." Researchers have tried to simulate Titan's climate system with simple models, but major differences with observations have resisted explanation.
Don't forget your swimsuit.