AP – Hoping to win the hearts of Southern conservatives, Newt Gingrich leaned into his argument that President Barack Obama is a “food stamp president” and that poor people should want paychecks, not handouts — a pitch that earned him a standing ovation in South Carolina during a presidential debate on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
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GOP campaign rhetoric raising racial concerns
(AP)
Big Think
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Penn Jillette Presents: ‘An Atheist’s Guide to the 2012 Election’
The Washington Examiner ’s Phil Klein lays out his argument that the GOP field is an “incredibly weak” one, an assessment I share, although I’m not sure the field is “incredibly weak.” I think it’s just that every candidate has some considerable strength but some considerable, glaring flaw. We need Mitt Romney’s business expertise and raw analytical intelligence, without Romneycare and his history of reversing positions. Keep reading this post . . .
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What We Need in a GOP Candidate
Here’s how you know your argument may be flawed: When the opposition party starts putting the spotlight on it, as the RNC is doing with Joe Biden’s “rape and murder will rise unless we pass Obama’s jobs bill” argument: Keep reading this post . . .
An excellent set of letters to the editor yesterday, at Los Angeles Times , ” On health insurers rationing care… .” And the last one: Please. Everyone who hasn’t lived under a rock all their lives knows the bad stories about national health coverage. We have a friend who lived in Britain for many years. It took her two years to get a hysterectomy that would have taken her two weeks at an HMO here — two days if her condition were life-threatening. The numbers don’t coincide with your version of reality. This death is a sad thing. But his extra year and a half of life was won by a successful struggle that he and his family could not have waged against the bureaucracy of, say, Britain’s healthcare system. Your argument is driven by political hope, not reality. Joan Moon Burbank And the initial article to which readers were responding: ” Putting a price on prolonging a doomed life .”
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Bob Iritano and the Politics of Health Care
A great essay : On a lazy summer’s day in 2002, it came home to me. I was mink-hunting (then a legal activity) by a river on the Kent/Sussex border, and a cockney foundry worker called Vince was there with his terrier. We chatted, and eventually it came out that his sister had been killed in the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. She had been helping to organise a conference there, Vince said. More British people were killed on September 11, 2001 than in any other terrorist incident ever, including 7/7 and the Lockerbie bombing. Sixty-seven out of the 2,996 people who died in the attacks on the United States that day were British citizens. The figure is relevant as the 10th anniversary approaches because it is a reminder that the argument that “it was nothing to do with us” was never, from the very first moment, true. We were in it from the start. The death toll of Americans was 40 times higher. The sheer “lethality” of the event, as well as its spectacular, filmic quality, proved that terrorism works: it achieves the “propaganda of the deed” which it seeks. More at that top link.
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Charles Moore at Telegraph UK: ’9/11: what have we learnt?’
David Frum characterizes the argument in the post below (and today’s Jolt) as, “If Rick Perry is dumb, why is he rich?” (Not exactly what I wrote, but I’ll put that aside.) He points to a Fort Worth Star Telegram’s tracking of Perry’s net worth , and the number of times the governor has made real estate deals with developers who had business with state government, and the number of times those real estate deals have paid off quite well for Perry. The insinuation, of course, is that Rick Perry is corrupt, that those with business dealings with the state government have used the real estate deals as a backdoor way of bribes. Keep reading this post . . .
