Glenn Beck? He’d have to be more histrionic. Rush Limbaugh? More the buffoon. What about Ron Paul, then, who came in first in last week’s CPAC Presidential Straw Poll, with 30%. Here, in 1974, is Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, which once was synonymous with right wing extremism and rejected by respectable […]
TNR Takes on The Debt Commission and Con Dogma
The other day, I wrote, What polling on the issues – particularly economic safety-net and quality of life issues, but many others now, too – tends to support is that the U.S. is actually somewhat center-left. This is not pre-Depression America and no one but the hard core right and libertarians wishes it were. What […]
The People Our Parents Warned Us Against
Image via Wikipedia The Obama campaign refrain, “We are the people we have been waiting for” was meant to be a revelation of responsibility – not to wait for others to shape the world the hopeful want, but to do it themselves. Obama’s political enemies (let’s be straight: they’re not critics – they’re enemies) represented […]
Elections Are Short, Wrong Is Long
Analysts have regularly been anticipating the results of yesterday’s election with comparisons to 1994 and 1982, the midterm elections of Clinton’s and Reagan’s first terms. Here is another comparison. Elections to the United States House of Representatives were held in 1862, mostly in November, in the middle of President Abraham Lincoln’s first term. His Republicans […]
What’s Coming to Us
Are you an optimist? Then what are you reading me for? Seriously. (No, I’m just joking.) Optimism and pessimism are about reading signs. They are tilts of the head as we read. P goes this way, O that. Sometimes, it seems to me, O is tilting so far he’s practically looking up from below, spying […]