Visual Source: Newseum
Maureen Dowd says that President Obama promised to fight for a revolution, but has become a passive supporter of the status quo.
Why did this man whose contempt for Congress is clear, who ran on the idea that he could transform a broken Washington, surrender to its conventional timetable and bureaucratic language?
...
Is Obama so isolated he can’t see that Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis?
He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself.
Timothy Egan looks at the crisis in our national parks. Not they "the infrastructure is crumbling and needs to be fixed" crisis, the "they don't need to be turned into theme parks" crisis.
So, the conundrum: More than ever, an urban nation plagued by obesity, sloth and a surfeit of digital entertainment should encourage people to experience the wild — but does that mean nature has to be tame and lawyer-vetted?
Frank Bruni isn't quite ready to hand out campaign Oscars. In fact, he thinks this act is getting a little tired.
While investment bankers can unashamedly cop to greed, thespians to vanity and claims adjusters to the validation of a promotion, politicians feel compelled to perform an elaborate pantomime of unalloyed altruism, asserting that self-interest and self-satisfaction are nowhere in the equation of their ambitions.
They’re doing it for us. They’d really rather not. The sacrifice is endurable, only because the cause is so important.
Oh please.
Motoko Rich has noticed a theme running through children's literature, one that's actually been in there for a long time. It's not so much wizards and unicorns, more like supply and demand.
Earlier this year, I picked up The Saturdays, by Elizabeth Enright, to read to my 7-year-old daughter. The novel, originally published in 1941, is about a family of four children being raised by their father and housekeeper.
I was struck by the chapter where Rush, one of the children, stops to watch a large snow-blower at work on a Manhattan street. A crowd gathers, and an old man grumbles that "hundreds of fellas" used to shovel the snow. "Nowadays they do it all by machinery. Ain't no work for nobody."
William Deresiewicz acknowledges that the military uniform and the people who wear them may be the most sacred symbols in America at the moment, but there's a danger that goes with turning human beings into symbols.
Liberals are especially careful to make the right noises: obeisance to the uniform having become the shibboleth of patriotism, as anti-Communism used to be. Across the political spectrum, throughout the media, in private and public life, the pieties and ritual declarations are second nature now: “warriors,” “heroes,” “mission”; “our young men and women in uniform,” “our brave young men and women,” “our finest young people.” So common has this kind of language become, we scarcely notice it anymore.
...
The cult of the uniform also bespeaks a wounded empire’s need to reassert its masculinity in the wake of 9/11. “Dead or alive,” “bring it on,” “either you’re with us or you’re against us”: the tenor of official rhetoric in the ensuing years embodied a kind of desperate machismo. The war in Iraq, that catharsis of violence, expressed the same emotional dynamic. We’d been hit in the head with a rock; like a neighborhood bully, we grabbed the first person we could get our hands on and beat him senseless.
If you're only going to click through to one editorial this week, make it this one, and if you won't do that much, then at least read this.
“America needs heroes,” it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really “need heroes”? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead.
George Will spent last week moaning about how Kennedy lost the Cold War and this week making comparisons between Chris Christie and Woodrow Wilson. Has anyone done a Turing Test on Will's writing lately? I do believe this stuff is being cranked out by tacking together random urls from Wikipedia with a handful of javaScript. This is one step from gibberish -- and not always one step in the right direction.
Kathleen Parker spends her column telling about someone she met who cussed in public. Horrors. Really, people, did the Washington Post forget to take out the sample text used to test the spacing this week? Clouds are less puffy.
Brad Plumer talks about the impending shutdown of some coal plants from a wave of shocking new regulations. You know, the new regulations most of which come from the Clean Air Act. Of 1990.
Industry groups such the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities, and the American Legislative Exchange Council have dubbed the coming rules “EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck.” The regulations, they say, will cost utilities up to $129 billion and force them to retire one-fifth of coal capacity. Given that coal provides 45 percent of the country’s power, that means higher electric bills, more blackouts and fewer jobs.
...
This month, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which conducts policy research for members of Congress, has been circulating a paper that tries to calmly sort through the shouting match. ... the report agrees that the new rules will likely force the closure of many coal plants between now and 2017, although it’s difficult to know precisely how many. For green groups, that’s a feature, not a bug: Many of these will be the oldest and dirtiest plants around. About 110 gigawatts, or one-third of all coal capacity in the United States, came online between 1940 and 1969. Many of these plants were grandfathered in under the Clean Air Act, and about two-thirds of them don’t have scrubbers: CRS notes that many of the plants most affected by the new EPA rules were facing extinction anyway: "Many of these plants are inefficient and are being replaced by more efficient combined cycle natural gas plants, a development likely to be encouraged if the price of competing fuel—natural gas—continues to be low, almost regardless of EPA rules."
So the worst polluting plants, plants that were about to be closed anyway, are closing a little sooner. That's the big disaster. Don't worry. Somewhere there's still a stack of fresh "Cold? Burn an environmentalist!" bumper stickers being printed.
New Scientist reviews competing theories of what actually damaged the reactors at Fukushima badly enough to bring on multiple meltdowns.
Now, if you read that Deresiewicz article about the need for grown-up citizens doing the nation's work, look over to the right hand column and you'll see some. They're the ones mentioned in the diaries tagged with @TarSandsAction. Please support them, and if you can, join them. The more shoulders to the wheel, the better.
