"Call me Rose" - Bruce Cockburn
"My name was Richard Nixon, only now I'm a girl."
A fairly amazing opening line in a tale of reincarnation in which Richard Nixon finds himself as a poor single mother.
- You must read this column by Krugman, which lays out the essence of the political moment with the kind of clarity one seldom sees on the Op-Ed pages, particularly his takedown of the concept of "bipartisanship" and its true ideological meaning. I can't really improve upon it, so just take a moment and read the link if you have not yet seen it.
- And another don't miss piece in the Times from a couple of days ago regarding the all too predictable failure of the British austerity program and how it is likely to prompt a double dip recession. It should serve as a cautionary tale to those who want the U.S. to follow a similar route, but sadly the Republicans are beyond the point where mere empirical evidence will in any way sway them. Fortunately, it appears that with respect to the 2011 budget agreement, the cuts were largely cosmetic.
- And a good piece by Jonathan Bernstein at the Plum Line along the same lines as I was expressing -- incredulity at the prospect of Republicans voting -- symbolically really -- to phase out Medicare.
- I was both saddened and excited to see that David Foster Wallace's final -- and unfinished -- novel has been published. Such a loss. A unique intelligence and sensibility -- and a deeply humane one at that -- was lost when DFW took his own life.
Alright, time to call it a night.
Ah, but one more thing. I could not believe either the Weekly Standard's column that claims that Obama is not very good at politics nor Mickey Kaus's endorsement of same, in which he claims that Obama's alleged deficiencies in this category are due to him having been an affirmative action candidate. Kaus's incredibly racist meme here is in keeping with his generally repulsive character. First, it's pretty difficult to get elected president without being politically skilled -- much more so if you're a biracial first term U.S. Senator with the name Barack Hussein Obama. Second, it dramatically understates the magnitude of Obama's 2008 victory, in which he won the largest victory of any Democratic candidate since 1964 and became only the fourth Democrat since the Civil War to win a majority of the electorate - FDR did it four times, LBJ once, and Carter managed the feat by the barest of margins, garnering 50.1% of all votes cast in 1976. In the process, Obama beat Hillary Clinton and John McCain, two people who have been on the national political radar screen for decades -- again, no small accomplishment. (I would also take issue with Kaus's claim that George Bush 43 was politically inept -- I think Bush was pretty effective in a political sense -- it was just from a policy and administrative perspective that he was a disaster.)
What's on your minds this Monday?
