The $8 Billion Cover-Up
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on April 24th, 2012 11:08 pm by HL
The Anti-Mormon Temptation
Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast
With just over six months before Election Day, the 2012 presidential campaign looks dull but astonishing. It’s dull because Barack Obama no longer elicits the kind of passion he did in 2008, and Mitt Romney has never elicited much passion at all. But it’s astonishing because it features an African-American and a Mormon, two of the most discriminated-against groups in American history. In the year of Romney’s birth (1947) or Obama’s (1961), the idea that a presidential election would one day pit an American of Romney’s religion versus an…
Bulletin: American Culture Has Evolved
Russ Smith, Splice Today
The following sentence is a lament about American culture and character: “I’ve long thought that public dissatisfaction is about more than the economy, that it’s also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.” The writer goes on to list deplorable incidents in the United States: a tourist in a big city is beaten up and no one helps the victim; juvenile delinquents loot retail stores at will; government employees are caught in embarrassing scandals; and a group of teachers in New York City, who…
2012 Election Could Turn on X Factors
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
WASHINGTON — It may not be the economy, stupid.Then again, James Carville's famous maxim about the 1992 presidential campaign might well be valid in 2012. But it's quite possible that on Election Day, voters' most urgent concerns — economic or not — will be driven by overseas events that neither President Obama nor his Republican opponent can predict or control.
