Monday, February 18, 2008

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BillionairesForBush: "Status quo is Latin for scandal, recession, Bush, McCain, global warming, children without healthcare, young men and women dying in Iraq for 100 years, and tax cuts for the super-rich while we rack up trillion dollar deficits. If you prefer more of the same, please stick with the Grand Ol' Party. If you want hope and change, there's that other guy running for president..." TheNation: "Remember the 'ownership society', fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? 'We're creating... an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property,' Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered 'long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah'. Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker. The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots - nearly twice the number of 1988. Only 45 percent see themselves as part of the haves. In other words, we are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. The free-market ideologues have lost an extremely potent psychological tool - and progressives have gained one. Now that John Edwards is out of the presidential race, the question is, will anyone dare to use it?" NYTimes: "Ms. Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture. But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that 'too much learning can be a dangerous thing') and anti-rationalism ('the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion') have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don't think it matters. Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism's antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution." 1:44:51 PM

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