Opinions: Washington Post Opinion, Editorial, Op Ed, Politics Editorials - The Washington Post

Where have all the candidates gone?

Dana Milbank — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:59:00 EST

The nascent third-party movement called Americans Elect assembled a dream team of prospective presidential nominees:

Mike Bloomberg!

Colin Powell!

Chris Christie!

Mitch Daniels!

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Tue, 15 May 2012 18:59:00 EST

Obama’s popularity contest

Kathleen Parker — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:00:15 EST

Apresidential race recently focused on high school has come to resemble a popularity contest of the same vintage.

Hence, we read that women like Barack best (except when they don’t). This week, a New York Times/CBS News poll shows women tilting toward Mitt and voters overall favoring him by 46 percent to 43 percent. But you know how girls are. A month ago, according to a CNN/ORC poll, women loved Obama 55 percent to 39 percent. Next week, check your Magic 8-Ball.

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Is John Edwards a criminal?

Ruth Marcus — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:00:37 EST

The prosecution has rested in a case that should never have been brought: the ghastly soap opera better known as the criminal trial of John Edwards. The testimony has been salacious, mesmerizing and revolting. Edwards has been proved to be what everyone already knew beyond a reasonable doubt: an egocentric cad. How big a cad? His daughter is set to testify about his love for her late mother.

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Robert J. Samuelson: The real lesson from JPMorgan

Robert J. Samuelson — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:58:00 EST

It’s a teachable moment, but what’s the right lesson? Already, the $2 billion-plus trading debacle at JPMorgan Chase has inspired a powerful storyline. Nothing has changed since the financial crisis, it’s said. Big banks remain out of control, gambling recklessly. If Jamie Dimon’s bank, reputed to be one of the best-managed, can get into trouble, what can we expect of the others? Government regulations and regulators need to be tougher to counteract bankers’ greed and incompetence.

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Is the ‘fiscal cliff’ just a myth?

Charles Lane — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:21:00 EST

When Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Pimco chief executive Mohamed el-Erian and the Economist all say we should worry about something, we usually should.

Right now, they’re warning about the “fiscal cliff” — spending cuts and higher tax rates that will take effect on Jan. 1, unless Congress acts.

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Barack Obama, the first female president

Dana Milbank — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:23:00 EST

The current issue of Newsweek has a photo of President Obama with a rainbow-colored halo superimposed over his head and the title “The First Gay President.”

Nonsense. Obama is not the first gay president. He is the first female president.

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Mon, 14 May 2012 18:23:00 EST

It’s time to break up the big banks

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Tue, 15 May 2012 06:38:00 EST

Consider $2 billion lost on a bad bet, plus billions more as investors dumped the stock, a providential warning. When Jamie Dimon, the imperious head of JPMorgan Chase, revealed that the bank had lost so muchon a derivatives trade gone bad, it was clear warning that, four years after blowing up the economy, the big banks are still playing with bombs.

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Romney is no economic savior

Eugene Robinson — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:21:44 EST

Republicans say they’re eager for the presidential campaign to turn away from “distractions” and focus instead on the economy. Someone should warn them that if they’re not careful, they might get their wish.

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A marriage battle that states can’t win

Ruth Marcus — Tue, 15 May 2012 06:15:00 EST

President Obama is walking a tightrope on same-sex marriage, teetering between his stated view that marriage is the province of the states and his legal position that refusal to recognize same-sex marriage can violate the Constitution.

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Romney at Liberty: The case for conservatism

Michael Gerson — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:14:38 EST

Mitt Romney did not rise on the power of his rhetoric. At the Detroit Economic Club in February, his speech was swallowed by its stadium venue, overshadowed by a gaffe (his wife’s “couple of Cadillacs”) and weighed down by leaden language. Early in the primaries, Romney’s attempts to wax poetic on the virtues of America — often by quoting patriotic hymns — were waxen.

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Mon, 14 May 2012 13:14:38 EST

The invasive police strategy that pacified New York City

Richard Cohen — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:22:43 EST

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a new kind of crime statistic. It is not the astoundingly low number of murders committed in his fair city — 471 in 2009 vs. about 2,000 per year in the 1980s — but murders not committed in the last decade: 5,600. Those people are alive today by the grace of God and the policing policies of the Bloomberg administration, particularly what is known as stop-and-frisk. New York City is heaven on earth possibly because it is a certain kind of hell for young black and Hispanic men.

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Mr. President, please don’t kill this terrorist

Marc A. Thiessen — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:50:41 EST

The United States is on the hunt for Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, the al-Qaeda master bombmaker behind the just-thwarted plot to bring down a U.S.-bound jetliner. If previous patterns hold, at some point in the coming weeks or months a drone launched from a secret CIA base will take al-Asiri out — and we will celebrate another “success” in what was once called the war on terror.

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I’m not quitting the church

E.J. Dionne Jr. — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:04:00 EST

Recently, a group called the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) ran a full-page ad in The Washington Post cast as an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics.” Its headline commanded: “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church.”

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Obama’s misguided wooing of an uninterested Putin

Jackson Diehl — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:06:00 EST

It’s becoming clear that President Obama regards Vladimir Putin as a prime partner for a second-term foreign policy. The problem is that Putin is refusing to play his part.

The White House’s bland announcementWednesday that the Kremlin chief would not attend a Group of 8 summit at Camp David this week covered a rude rebuff. Obama had tailored the conclave to Putin, moving it from Chicago so that it would be clearly separate from a NATO summit. Earlier this month, Obama dispatched national security adviser Tom Donilon to Moscow to hand Putin what a Russian official described as “a multi-page, detailed document, whose main message is that Obama is ready to cooperate with Putin.”

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The boom on the farm

Robert J. Samuelson — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:01:00 EST

MARION, Iowa

Sitting in the cab of a $350,000 John Deere tractor pulling a $150,000 Deere corn planter, Greg Carson embodies modern American agriculture. It’s capital-intensive, high-tech, efficient — and now immensely profitable. Looking for a bright spot in the U.S. economy? The farm belt is it.

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A compelling plan for Iranian talks

David Ignatius — Fri, 11 May 2012 18:26:11 EST

Let’s assume the signals from the White House and Tehran are reliable, and that Iran is serious about an agreement to remove its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium from the country and stop producing more. What happens then?

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Greg Sargent: GOP Senator pressures House Republicans on Violence Against Women Act

Greg Sargent — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:51:00 EST

It’s been widely reported that house Republicans are in a difficult spot over the Violence Against Women Act, at a time when the battle over the female vote has intensified between the parties.

Now, with a high stakes vote on a version of the measure set for later today, things could get a bit harder: A female Republican Senator is joining with Democrats to call on House Republicans to drop their opposition to the Democratic version of the bill, which extends protections to same sex couples.

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Jennifer Rubin: Walker on track to survive recall

Jennifer Rubin — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:55:37 EST

As I wrote this morning, Democrats and Big Labor have reason to worry about Gov. Scott Walker’s recall election. Two developments today confirm this.

First, the Walker camp is touting this latest poll: “A new Marquette Law School Poll shows that with three weeks to go until the recall election Governor Scott Walker has taken a six-percentage point lead over Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, 50-44 percent, among likely voters. Just three percent say they are undecided. In the previous poll, taken April 26-29, Walker held a one-percentage point lead among likely voters, 48-47.” You can understand why the DNC might not want to dump money into this race.

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American Crossroads ad is predictable yet effective

Carter Eskew — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:51:23 EST

The ad wars in the presidential campaign are upon us with the release today of an ad from American Crossroads — Karl Rove’s super PAC that supports Mitt Romney and Republicans. The PAC says it will spend $25 million behind the buy in target states, which matches the size of the Obama campaign buy, also in target states, that went up recently.

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Alexandra Petri: What will we do without Ron Paul?

Alexandra Petri — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:13:49 EST

He disappeared in the dead of May:

The screens were frozen, the forums almost deserted,

A hush fell over the YouTube comments;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the caucus crew.

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ESPN says lawsuit over Bernie Fine reporting meritless

Erik Wemple — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:19:25 EST

The Syracuse Post-Standard reported this morning that Laurie Fine was ready to sue ESPN for libel over its airing last year of sexual molestation allegations against her husband, former Syracuse University assistant men’s basketball coach Bernie Fine.

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May, be

Tom Toles — Wed, 16 May 2012 06:15:00 EST

What you learn in life doesn’t so much accumulate as move around like a sandbar. You want it to all start making sense the way a movie (Hollywood movie) does, but it won’t. You keep coming up against the fact that the world is swarming with people with the natural human tendency to go for the goodies when they think they can get them and others be damned. Luckily, this is a fuel that runs the engines of capitalism and it puts a lot of nice things on the shelves, but also has a tendency to encourage people to double-cross enemies and friends alike. But today let us think about May.

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Joel Achenbach: Electoral map 2012: Beware reductionism

Joel Achenbach — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:33:44 EST

Reductionism has its charms. You can eliminate a lot of clutter and complexity by believing that the future will hinge entirely upon one discernible and measurable factor, element or thingamajig. It’s like knowing a code word, or a secret handshake.

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Five myths about gay marriage

Jonathan Rauch — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:12:00 EST

1. Letting gay couples get married redefines marriage.

Opponents of same-sex marriage argue that, with few exceptions, marriage has always been about uniting the two sexes and linking mother and father to children. Change that, and marriage ceases to be marriage.

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Editorial Board: Bigotry blocks a gay Virginian from the bench

Editorial Board — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:59:10 EST

IF ANYTHING, Tracy Thorne-Begland, a top state prosecutor in Richmond with a decade of courtroom experience, is overqualified for a judgeship on the General District Court. Mr. Thorne-Begland, who has prosecuted dozens of homicides and other major felonies, runs one of the biggest commonwealth’s attorney’s offices in Virginia. The caseload of the court to which he was nominated consists mainly of traffic violations, minor crimes and run-of-the-mill civil disputes over contracts and late rent payments.

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Editorial Board: The American Community Survey is a count worth keeping

Editorial Board — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:58:38 EST

ACCORDING TO Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), it is “intrusive,” “an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars,” “unconstitutional,” and “the very picture of what’s wrong in D.C.”

What manner of predatory government prompted Mr. Webster — supported by nearly all House Republicans — to issue such categorical condemnation? That intolerable federal boondoggle known as . . . the American Community Survey (ACS).

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Editorial Board: Europe needs Germany to lighten up

Editorial Board — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:58:17 EST

IT MAY ALREADY be too late to prevent Greece from defaulting on its debts and leaving the euro, Europe’s common currency. But there still may be time to prevent Greece’s woes from dragging down the rest of Europe, and the world. For that to happen, though, Europe’s leaders must think clearly about the issues before them, especially the great “austerity vs. growth” debate.

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Putting stress on ice during a Caps game

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:07:09 EST

George Solomon put the puck between the pipes in his May 12 op-ed, “A Caps game high in stakes — and stress.” My friend Chuck and I had to resort to coping mechanisms to get through the Washington Capitals playoff games. For Game 5 in the series with Boston, Chuck moved his chair into a bedroom away from the TV; he couldn’t see the screen and could only faintly hear the announcers.

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A Dream worth supporting

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:07:09 EST

In his May 11 letter about the Maryland Dream Act, Clifford E. Snyder Jr. complained that “Maryland’s elected government plays me for a sucker.” He wrote that he is being asked to subsidize the lives of undocumented students. Many of these students were brought to the United States by their parents as young children; they had no say in the decision to immigrate.

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Tue, 15 May 2012 17:07:08 EST

I applaud the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s decision to stand behind the Frank Gehry design, which, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, initially met with outrage. Mr. Gehry’s design will no doubt come to be viewed similarly to the way the Vietnam memorial is: as beautiful, timeless, ahead of its time and appropriate.

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The stakes in same-sex marriage

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:07:08 EST

Regarding the May 13 front-page article “Amid the rhetoric, living the reality”:

What a beautiful story about a same-sex married couple. I think it showed quite well that there is no such thing as “gay marriage.” There is only marriage, and the love between and day-to-day commitment to one another, in matters large and small, that come with it. Linda and Gloria Bailey-Davies are an inspiration.

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Who’s in, who’s out of the political mainstream

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:07:08 EST

Regarding Ezra Klein’s May 12 column, “GOP elephant in the room: Themselves”:

Using the writings of prestigious authorities to back him up, Mr. Klein said that the GOP has moved so far to the right as to be out of the mainstream while the Democratic Party has remained inclusive.

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How the ‘war on women’ quashed feminist stereotypes

Rebecca Traister — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:46:00 EST

When Phyllis Schlafly is forced to concede that not all feminists are ugly, it’s clear that something has gone awry on the right. Sure enough, in April, Schlafly, a conservative crusader who has been peddling stereotypes of women’s activists as physically and socially unappealing for decades, thought she should warn cadets at the Citadel not to fall for one. “Some of them are pretty,” she said. “They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.”

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Obama’s case for gay marriage shows that invoking faith isn’t just for conservatives anymore

Amy Sullivan — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:12:00 EST

You don’t have to be Christian to know the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you. In fact, scholars note that it is the one precept common to all major faith traditions. But in his interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts on Wednesday, President Obama cited the Golden Rule as found in Matthew 7:12 when describing the role his Christian faith played in leading him to support same-sex marriage.

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Fri, 11 May 2012 16:12:00 EST

To stop the war on South Sudan, the U.S. should send weapons

Andrew S. Natsios — Fri, 11 May 2012 15:32:00 EST

North and South Sudan are at war. The reasons for the conflict are complex, but the solution is not: To stop the killing, the international community must arm South Sudan. Unlike interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States need not fire any shots. Just as we have provided weapons to support Israel but never put our own troops at risk, we can help bring peace to this region. We need only make sure that, for the North, attacking the South is a little bit harder than shooting fish in a barrel.

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Who had the worst week in Washington? Sen. Dick Lugar.

Chris Cillizza — Thu, 10 May 2012 18:07:00 EST

Dick Lugar, phone home.

The Republican senator from Indiana lost his bid for a seventh term on Tuesday. So badly that he got 39 percent of the vote in the GOP primary. So badly that the guy he lost to — state Treasurer Richard Mourdock — had run unsuccessfully for office five times before.

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Obama’s ‘Julia’ ad and the new Hubby State

Jessica Gavora — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:15:00 EST

“The Life of Julia,” the Obama campaign’s new interactive Web ad, follows a cartoon everywoman, Julia, through the milestones of a middle-class American life: education, work, motherhood, retirement. One milestone is pointedly missing: marriage.

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Is Mitt Romney’s love for America a Mormon thing?

Michelle Boorstein — Fri, 11 May 2012 15:41:00 EST

When it comes to American exceptionalism, Mitt Romney is going all in.

His book “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness” is a love song to the idea that this country merits “the protection of Providence” and has a singular “calling” to be a beacon for freedom. A major theme for him on the campaign trail is the nation’s divine destiny, a heritage Romney said has made him “stand a little taller, a little straighter” when overseas.

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Review of Steve Coll’s ‘Private Empire’: How ExxonMobil bent Washington to its will

Moisés Naím — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:22:38 EST

“Private Empire” is a big book about big oil, big money and big government. It chronicles how ExxonMobil — the energy behemoth that recently displaced Wal-Mart atop the Fortune 500 list, with more than $450 billion in revenue — operates in failed states, keeping the oil flowing when no one else can, and how it handles hapless bureaucrats charged with regulating it, scientists challenging it, rival companies trying to outsmart it and activists bent on changing it.

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What readers think the candidates should say

Outlook editors — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:52:00 EST

Last week, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler (aka the Fact Checker) issued a challenge to Mitt Romney and President Obama: Give a 15-minute speech on a policy issue that does not contain a single factual error or misstatement. And we asked readers to write short, hypothetical speeches that fit that factual criteria. Here are a few of the best snippets from the submissions we received, drawn from a Romney-heavy pool.

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Three books on illegal, or not, drugs

James Norton — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:46:23 EST

The American discourse on narcotics has always been more complex than “Just say no,” but in recent years it has reached new depths of murkiness. Support for medical marijuana (which is legally grown and sold in many states, depending on what day of the week it is) runs headlong into old fears about addiction, violence and social unrest. Into these muddy waters plunge three new books.

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Marilynne Robinson’s ‘When I Was a Child I Read Books’: Essays on faith, reading

Roxana Robinson — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:26:00 EST

If there is any fear that the fast-moving world of the Internet and the iPhone has destroyed our powers of concentration, or our ability to think lucidly and beautifully, or to create surprising and powerful designs from philosophical concerns, that fear will be put to rest by Marilynne Robinson’s new book of elegant essays.

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‘Worlds of Dissent’ by Jonathan Bolton: Unrest in 1970s Czechoslovakia

Fri, 11 May 2012 17:40:36 EST

The Arab Spring saw more than 300,000 protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square bring down Hosni Mubarak. But did these protesters represent the average Egyptians who stayed home? Writing about another equinox — the 1968 Prague Spring that introduced liberal reforms to communist Czechoslovakia and provoked a Soviet crackdown — Jonathan Bolton examines in “Worlds of Dissent” how revolutionaries speak for a nation.

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“Net Smart: How to Thrive Online” by Howard Rheingold and “Talking Back to Facebook: The Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age” by James P. Steyer

Mike Musgrove — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:28:06 EST

Nagging worries about whether the latest bit of cutting-edge technology will have the unforeseen side effect of dulling our minds have been around ever since the dawn of recorded history. Long before Wikipedia or Google, Plato wrote of a king who feared that the invention of letters and reading would give its users the ability to cite facts that they had not properly earned or mastered. Such an invention will lead to forgetfulness among users, the ancient king predicted, and provide them with a false sense of wisdom.

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“The Playground” by Terrence M. McCoy

Steven Levingston — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:34:37 EST

Kindle Singles is a 15-month-old e-book venture from Amazon that strives to publish original fiction and nonfiction works at Goldilocks length: not too long, not too short but just right. Its Web site lays out the ambition: “Compelling Ideas Expressed at Their Natural Length.” The books, as short as David Baldacci’s 15-page story “No Time Left” or as long as Dean Koontz’s 102-page “The Moonlit Mind,” are vetted, accepted (or rejected) and edited by David Blum and put on sale at the very modern price of 99 cents to $4.99.

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“Prague Winter : A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948” by Madeleine Albright

Philip Kerr — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:28:04 EST

On the first page of her new memoir, Madeleine Albright writes, “I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who ‘my people’ were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enough that I did not feel a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew. Only I didn’t.”

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Book World: ‘American Showman’ by Ross Melnick

Mindy Aloff — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:15:20 EST

Trivia question: Name this forgotten man, the subject of Ross Melnick’s eye-poppingly informative new book, “American Showman”:

He was the most creative and most popular independent exhibitor of silent films at a series of movie palaces (seating up to 6,000 people) in New York during the 1920s.

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‘Leonardo’s Lost Princess: One Man’s Quest to Authenticate an Unknown Portrait by Leonardo da Vinci’ by Peter Silverman with Catherine Whitney

T. Rees Shapiro — Fri, 4 May 2012 17:13:34 EST

In her portrait, she is young, with cherry blossom skin, glimmery long hair and eyes the color of Anjou pears. When Peter Silverman first saw the drawing (in chalk, pen and ink on vellum), he was entranced by the sitter’s beauty. But something seemed off. The Christie’s auction house catalogue described the 9 inch-by-13-inch work as that of a German artist from the early 19th century. Impossible, Silverman thought. Owing to its exquisite detail, the portrait appeared to be the work of a genuine master, perhaps even the master of them all, Leonard da Vinci.

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‘A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman’ by Alice Kessler-Harris

Jonathan Yardley — Fri, 4 May 2012 16:44:18 EST

In this friendly if far from uncritical biography, Alice Kessler-Harris focuses on Lillian Hellman as a woman both of her time and ahead of her time. She was “a woman among men” who “became the economically successful playwright and celebrity she was by blurring gender boundaries.” Born in 1905 in New Orleans, she “reached beyond southern tradition and turned into a misfit, becoming in the eyes of all around her a difficult woman.” Her life tells us “how complicated it must have been for a woman in the deepest part of the twentieth century to stay true to her desires even as she juggled the pressures of the world around her.” Nearly seven decades after her birth, participating in a panel discussion about the “condition of woman today,” she “could not fully identify with the modern version of women’s liberation” but insisted on going her own way:

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“This Is How: Help for the Self,” by Augusten Burroughs

Michael Sims — Fri, 4 May 2012 16:29:29 EST

Reading Augusten Burroughs’s new self-help book, “This Is How,” felt like running on a treadmill. Often I was racing along without going anywhere, and there wasn’t even a rerun of “Seinfeld” to watch. I wound up sweaty and grumpy. The most tiring aspect of this book is the parade of one-sentence — occasionally even one-word — paragraphs that are designed to keep the pages turning. Often these paragraphs are sentence fragments.

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Fri, 4 May 2012 16:29:29 EST

“City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago” by Gary Krist and “Detroit: A Biography” by Scott Martelle

Mark Caro — Fri, 4 May 2012 16:13:44 EST

Choosing the right time frame is a key decision for any storyteller. Can you reveal more about a subject by covering exhaustive chronological ground or homing in on a tightly compressed period? Do you pull back for a wide shot and let events rush by as if in a montage, or do you push in for the close-up and have developments unfold in something closer to real time?

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‘Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad,’ by Peter L. Bergen

Dina Temple-Raston — Fri, 4 May 2012 11:11:00 EST

In 2005, a CIA analyst named Rebecca (a pseudonym) wrote a memo laying out a new strategy for the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Given the absence of any real leads, she asked, how could you plausibly find him? She sketched out what she saw as four pillars on which the search needed to be built. Her solution turned out to be prophetic.

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‘The First Crusade: The Call From the East,’ by Peter Frankopan

Michael Dirda — Wed, 2 May 2012 20:42:59 EST

“Deus vult!” — God wills it! — was the battle cry of the First Crusade, in which armies of Europe, at the very end of the 11th century, marched off to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem and conquer the infidel Turks, who were then sweeping all before them in Asia Minor.

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Polly Horvath’s ‘Mr. and Mrs. Bunny: Detectives Extraordinaire!’: Fun mystery

— Abby McGanney Nolan, Abby McGanney Nolan — Tue, 1 May 2012 23:52:00 EST

MR. AND MRS. BUNNY

Detectives Extraordinaire!

Translated from the Rabbit by Polly Horvath

Illustrated by Sophie Blackall

Schwartz & Wade. $16.99. Ages 9–11

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Marc Aronson: ‘Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies’

— Abby McGanney Nolan, Abby McGanney Nolan — Tue, 1 May 2012 23:52:00 EST

MASTER OF DECEIT

J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies

By Marc Aronson

Candlewick. $25.99. Age 14 and up

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Robert A. Caro’s ‘The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ book review

David Greenberg — Tue, 1 May 2012 18:32:00 EST

When Robert A. Caro published “Master of the Senate” (2002), the third volume of his voluminous multi-part life of Lyndon B. Johnson, he said he would finish his labors with just one more installment. But clearly he wasn’t being realistic.

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Greg Sargent: How Mitt Romney gets away with his lying

Greg Sargent — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:59:00 EST

Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a big speech in which he accused Obama of lighting a “prairie fire of debt.” It’s a good line, and it has received widespread media coverage.

Romney’s speech has already been dissected by Jonathan Chait and Steve Benen. They note that it’s entirely at odds with conventional understanding of how deficits work, and utterly disconnected from context, rendering it almost unquantifiably misleading.

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Jonathan Bernstein: The four reasons the Nebraska Senate race matters — a lot

Jonathan Bernstein — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:39:00 EST

You wouldn’t know it from watching the cable networks, but what happened yesterday in Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary, where no-name State Senator Deb Fischer defeated state Attorney General Jon Bruning, is a major story, with several nationally important implications. Here are four of the most critical.

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Jennifer Rubin: Obama plays to Romney’s strength

Jennifer Rubin — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:09:13 EST

Gallup reports: “Obama’s approval rating is below 50 percent, Americans’ satisfaction with the direction of the country is barely above 20 percent, and the economy remains a dominant concern.” Moreover:

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Jennifer Rubin: China’s retaliates for Chen’s escape

Jennifer Rubin — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:21:00 EST

The Associated Press reports:

A blind Chinese activist who sparked a diplomatic crisis by fleeing into the U.S. Embassy last month filled out a Chinese passport application and posed for a photo Wednesday, moving forward in his bid to study in the United States.

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