In examining the fruits of the New Deal, The Conscience of a Liberal does far more than simply provide a nostalgia-seeped account of post-war prosperity. Instead, the book, written by Paul Krugman, provides a consistent and cogent argument for the New Deal’s expansion. Krugman, a New York Times columnist and respected professor of economics at Princeton University, supports a government that promotes decency, not in the narrow, moralistic sense in which that’s usually meant, but rather in working to ensure comfort and care for all of its citizens.
Billy Hits The Ether
There are several web sites that I read every day, but the Comics Curmudgeon is one of my favorites. Put together by Josh Fruhlinger, the site uses the daily comics page as a springboard to freely mock the solipsism and often-insane plot twists of legacy comic strips ranging from Mary Worth to the Family Circus.
The humor generally favors insiders, as a familiarity with characters and recent plots is usually necessary to get the jokes, but there are some great standalone gags as well. The most recent is a particularly Aryan Family Circus whose punchline includes a talking snowman that could have been pulled from a Hunter S. Thompson acid trip.
Of course, as FLYMF readers know, there have been whispers that all isn’t right in the Keane household for some time now.
What Did He Know, and When Did He Know It?
While Bush may claim that this week was the the first time he was informed about the National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran hasn’t had a functional nuclear weapons programs since 2003, Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post points out that a clear shift in the President’s rhetoric on Iran’s nuclear program took place in early August.
Better Living Through Chemicals
Harper’s has an interesting article by Mark Schapiro on the efforts of the European Union to quantify the health impact of tens of thousands of chemicals found in clothing, toys, cookware, cosmetics and increasingly, our blood. Naturally, the United States is opposed to it.
In the late 1990s, citizens of several European countries learned from newspaper reports that their infants were constantly being exposed to a host of toxic chemicals. Babies were sleeping in pajamas treated with cancer-causing flame retardants; they were sucking on bottles laced with plastic additives believed to alter hormones; their diapers were glued together with nerve-damaging toxins normally used to kill algae on the hulls of ships. When European health officials tried to look into the matter, they were confounded by how little they actually knew about these and other potentially hazardous chemicals. Regulators discovered that they had no way of assessing the dangers of long-term exposure to everyday products. Some manufacturers of baby goods did not even know what was in their own products, since chemical producers were under no obligation to tell them. Such data, if it existed at all, was secreted away in the vaults of chemical companies and had never been submitted to any government authority.
The War On Us
If we accept the pithy definition of insanity as doing the same thing twice and expecting a completely different result, then the U.S. “War on Drugs” has been insane for nearly two decades. Even worse, everyone associated with the effort knows it’s insane. American drug policy is hugely expensive and unfairly punitive, but we keep returning to the same failed practices again and again, long after we should have known better.