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 September 12, 2011
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 September 5, 2011
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 August 29, 2011
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 August 15 - August 22, 2011
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 August 8, 2011
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 August 1, 2011
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 July 25, 2011
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 July 18, 2011
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 July 4 - July 11, 2011
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 June 27, 2011
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 June 20, 2011
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 June 13, 2011
This issue: September 19, 2011 (Vol. 17, No. 01)
BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. The economy is suffering from low growth and high unemployment. Families are struggling with debt. Many are living in homes whose mortgages cost more than the property is worth. All over the world, governments are reeling from the economic and political consequences of excessive sovereign debt.
The president of the United States, Barack Obama, appears before Congress to offer his solution. America, he says, is experiencing a collapse in what economists call aggregate demand. Consumers aren’t spending enough to fill the “output gap”—the theoretical difference between what the economy is producing now and what it might produce at full capacity. Government, he says, needs to cover the difference.
How? Through temporary tax cuts, aid to state and local governments, and federal spending on highways and high-speed rail. We can ...
BY WILLIAM KRISTOL
Historians will little note nor long remember what President Obama said in his jobs speech to Congress last Thursday night. For one thing, it was painfully obvious that the main job Obama was concerned to save was his own. But some may, after Obama ...
BY MAX BOOT
President Obama did a good job of feinting to the right on national security issues during his first two years in office. Lacking much standing on military policy, he often acceded to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary ...
He picked the right fight.
BY ANDREW FERGUSON
If you want a glimpse of the way Rick Perry operates as an executive and a politician, consider the issue of higher education reform in Texas, which no one in Texas knew was an issue until Perry decided to make it one.
In his 30-year public career, Perry—how to put this delicately?—has shown no sign of being tortured by a gnawing intellectual curiosity. “He’s not the sort of person you’ll find reading The Wealth of Nations for the seventh time,” said Brooke Rollins, formerly Perry’s policy director and now president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-market research group closely allied with Perry. At Texas A&M he majored in animal science and escaped with a grade point average a bit over 2.0. (Perry’s A&M transcript was leaked last month to the left-wing blog Huffington Post by “a source in Texas,” presumably not his mom. How his GPA compares with Barack Obama’s is ...
Should New Hampshire be pro-choice when it comes to unions?
BY FRED BARNES
Nashua, New Hampshire
Republicans won a smashing victory in New Hampshire in the 2010 elections, capturing the state senate and house by staggering margins. Yet they’ve been unable to enact one of ...
Rick Perry versus the Bush machine.
BY MARK HEMINGWAY
At last week’s Republican debate at the Reagan Library, a long-simmering Texas political feud made its grand entrance onto the national stage. Politico’s John Harris asked GOP presidential frontrunner and Texas governor Rick Perry about his ...
Political scientists and democracy.
BY JAMES W. CEASER
While most Americans spend their Labor Day weekend savoring the last moments of summer vacation, political scientists are normally hard at work at their annual association meeting, held this year in Seattle. This event is usually a rather sedate affair, with scholars ...
Here’s an issue governments can get fat on.
BY WESLEY J. SMITH
Obesity is the new global warming, and the battle plan for the crusade against it was published in the August issue of the journal Lancet. Funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and ...
The 9/11 decade.
BY PAUL WOLFOWITZ
This tenth anniversary of that grim September day when so many innocent people died in the most horrible fashion is a time to mourn their loss, as well as the thousands who have been lost in the past 10 years of the war against global terrorists, and ...
And it’s not 1948 any more.
BY JAY COST
A year from now, the presidential election campaign will be in full swing. Obama and the Republican nominee will be touring the country at a feverish pace, trying hard to convince swing voters to go their way. Obviously, we’re still too far out from November 2012 to know what will happen, but we’re close enough to get a sense of the shape of the race.
President Obama’s chances next year don’t look good. As of this writing, the InTrade prediction market gives the president about a 50-50 chance, and even Democratic insiders are starting to doubt the top of their ticket. According to National Journal, they’re privately giving the president just a 63 percent chance of victory, which is not a great score considering the partisan source. These relatively gloomy odds are not surprising, as the president faces some historic challenges in his reelection quest.
Are France’s more centrist politics better than ours (and not just for the sex)?
BY SAM SCHULMAN
As Maine is New England’s Texas, France is Europe’s U.S.A. It’s big. It’s ornery. Like us, the French are notably more inward-looking than Europe’s other populous, geographically big, and prosperous states. Despite France’s co-leadership of the ...
Hidden lives, fatal passion, in genteel England.
BY SARA LODGE
Biography is a form of love affair, the more intense because it can never be consummated. Like lovers, biographers rifle through their subjects’ letters and diaries for evidence of the absent one’s activities and affections. They guard their subject’s reputation and become jealous of rivals. They profess to interpret, to comprehend, to promote, but they requite the years that they devote to their chosen figure of fascination by exercising the power of life or death over them, the right to immortalize or to dissect.
Michael Holroyd’s latest book is about a series of forgotten love affairs. It traces the stories of several women—Luie Tracy Lee, José Cornelia Brink, Eve Fairfax, Violet Trefusis, and Catherine Till—who are connected by their relationships to the Beckett family, the Barons Grimthorpe of Yorkshire. Luie was the wife of Ernest Beckett (1856-1917), a restless banker, MP, traveler, and playboy. Eve and José were ...
The love (?) story of Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler.
BY SUSANNE KLINGENSTEIN
Eons ago, in 1989, when Germany was in the midst of its most intense phase of coming to grips with the murder of the European Jews by largely ordinary Germans, Times Books was planning a collection of essays subtitled “Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal.” ...
The portrait of a founding father of business philanthropy.
BY CLAUDE R. MARX
Business leaders often feel obliged to keep a strong public persona and make conspicuous displays of philanthropy to persuade the public to like, or at least respect, them. They aren’t content to let their good works or business prowess speak for themselves—as if ...
Pleasure, not duty, should bring us to books.
BY MICAH MATTIX
Americans have always prided themselves on being a practical, self-made people, suspicious of newfangled theories in foreign books. Early cultural heroes were worldly-wise figures like Daniel Boone and David Crockett, and bookishness was nearly the end of ...
Will the leatherbound volume go the way of the eight-track tape?
BY PHILIP TERZIAN
One of the features of a life in journalism is the casual assumption, expressed by nonjournalists at cocktail parties, that journalists “know” things: have the inside dope, heard the real version, predict the future. I have always defended ...
Or, who Hollywood enriches when it makes movies.
BY JOHN PODHORETZ
I haven’t seen The Help; I keep meaning to, but I also keep meaning to get my shoes shined and my receipts filed according to month, and I haven’t done those either. The Help strikes me, a male entering my sixth decade, as a movie to ...
Joseph Bottum, impatient perfectionist
BY JOSEPH BOTTUM
Way down in what passes for my soul, I’ve always felt an impatience—a kind of ungenerous demand for efficiency, immediacy, and speed. Add to that the small tremor I’ve always had in my hands, and I may be the worst painter in the world today.
Room and house painter, that is. My lack of talent at more artistic painting leaps beyond the petty confines of individual ability to reach historic levels: I’m cosmically bad at putting paint on canvas. Unless, that is, you care for portraits of blobs and messes. Imagine a Jackson Pollock drip composition, except that the colors have all merged to form a monochrome brown tinged with sick green—by an artist who was trying to paint a realistic landscape.
At the more mundane kinds of painting, however, I’m merely bad. When I try to paint a room, there are dribbles on the floor. Corners skipped. Bald patches. Goopy, overpainted sections. ...
The president, you may remember, gave a speech this past January in the wake of the shooting of Rep. -Gabrielle Giffords on how “only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation.” Some consider the speech to be the finest of his presidency, though history is likely to be less kind to it now that we know the president was completely insincere.
Early last week, just before President Barack Obama took the stage, Teamsters president James P. Hoffa told an assembled union crowd, “We’ve got a bunch of people there that don’t want the president to succeed, and they are called the Tea Party. . . . Let’s take these son of a bitches out, and give America back to America where we belong.”
Hoffa, of course, owes his current position as a powerful union leader to a family legacy of crime and corruption. It may not have been a literal ...
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