In that there isn't an Abbreviated Pundit Roundup, I had to read for myself. I usually leave the conservative pages to the qualified but since no one is chewing my food for me and regurgitating, I had to read those as well.
E.J. Dionne
Deregulating the financial markets, we were told, would do wonders for growth, as would slashing the income taxes of the wealthy and levies on capital gains and dividends. We were urged to trust the Wall Street wizards creating those innovative financial instruments and to believe that jacking up CEO pay relative to everyone else's would be splendid for corporate performance. Don't worry, we were assured, about rising inequalities.
And it has all come crashing down.
Dionne says that in President Obama's pragmatism, he isn't articulating ideology while the right is thundering America with theirs. He also posits that the President may not be articulating ideology but his actions does and then goes on to cite a Center for American Progress survey that reiterates what we've known for a long time: America is NOT a center right nation.
David Ignatius is oblivious to the last eight years and the CEO president and says that the President is engaged in a "phony war" on economics, that he is stalling and that it is all politics as usual.
One reason this season feels so political is that Obama has stacked his administration with politicians and former government officials. You might think that with the greatest financial crisis of his lifetime, the president would want a few business leaders with experience managing large organizations in crisis. But no.
What an ass.
Nicholas Kristof gives us one more thing for which to worry, that agricultural practices in raising hogs is creating a public health threat.
MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) sometimes arouses terrifying headlines as a “superbug” or “flesh-eating bacteria.” The best-known strain is found in hospitals, where it has been seen regularly since the 1990s, but more recently different strains also have been passed among high school and college athletes. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that by 2005, MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans a year, more than AIDS.
Linda Elder at Christian Science Monitor tells us we are failing to foster critical thinking in our nation's schools:
Some believe that critical thinking was once cultivated in schooling. But it is fair to ask if it has ever really been fostered in a meaningful way in mainstream schooling (and the standardized testing movement is only making it worse). Teachers, like students, live in a nonintellectual culture, one that, for the most part, neither values fair-minded critical thinking nor encourages it.
If we want to effectively deal with the tremendous problems we now face, we must begin teaching students to discipline their own thinking. Teachers must move beyond rote and merely active engagement, and work toward transforming how students reason through complex issues, to look beyond easy answers.
We must teach students that the only way to learn a subject or discipline is to learn to think within the logic of it, to focus on its purposes, questions, information, to think within its concepts and assumptions.
Clarence Page addresses the refer madness in America and asks President Obama to address marijuana policy while he's multitasking.
That's right. Marijuana has been classified as a "schedule I" narcotic, meaning it has no medical value, since 1971. Keep in mind that that's the same category as heroin. And as if that were not goofy enough, that would mean marijuana is more dangerous than crack cocaine, a "schedule II" drug that no one in the sane world describes as less dangerous than pot.