Leaders digest.

Atul Gawande on letting go: What should medicine do when it can't save your life? (New Yorker)

The human costs of the animal rights movement. (New Republic) In which, finally, PETA is called out.

The case against summer vacation. (Time) Cover story argues persuasively that U.S. kids spend too little time in school.

ECONOMY

Stimulus surprise: Companies retrench when pork-barreling pols deliver. (Harvard Business Review)

 

Even Obama believed, beginning last fall, that he now "owns" the economy and can no longer blame Bush's legacy. But as the chart shows, the current, atrocious deficit is Bush's handiwork.

America's looming fiscal doom. (AndrewSullivan.com)

ProPublica's list of all U.S. financial-industry recipients of Uncle Sam rescue funds is a long read - there are 57 entries under "P" alone. A useful antidote to the Board of Trade and Tea Party hymns to the superiority of failsafe capitalism over hapless government.

Robert Dudley tours animal-rescue center on the spill-stricken Gulf coast. (AP)

Why U.S. native Bob Dudley, replacing cashiered Tony Hayward to become first non-Brit CEO of BP, is well-suited to the huge remedial task ahead. (Christian Science Monitor)

MEXICO

The horrific costs of Mexico's drug wars. (New Republic)

Climate change will boost Mexican immigration to the U.S., study says (Christian Science Monitor)

THE PRESS

Shirley Sherrod (AP)

Charles Kaiser on shame of the fourth estate in falling for the Shirley Sherrod "scandal" (The Nation)

Post biographer David Kindred on the struggles of the Washington Post. (TIme) Q&A

WaPo distinguishes itself with rare, genuine investigative report on immense national-security complex created since 9/11. (New Yorker)

LIT CRIT

On Woodrow Wilson, meddlesome do-gooder. (New Republic)

Walt Whitman

On Walt Whitman, arguably the first American to break with British verse. (New Republic)

On Frank Luntz, odious GOP pollster. (New Republic) Move over, Rove.

HISTORY 301

Lesser-known French atrocities in colonial Africa. (New Republic)

Origins of the anti-Enlightenment tradition. (New Republic) Locate the wellspring for Rush and Beck in 18th century.

An early proposal for the Washington Monument. 

The curious, furious, transformation of D.C.'s memorials. (New Republic)

ESOTERICA

Detroit clings to civic pride in, of all things, hairdresser contests. (Time) These are the true salonistas. Where the attitude is so thick you can trim it short, back and sides.

Comments

[Wascally Wabbit]

Great Harvard Business Review article on the earmarks and their unexpected consequences David.
Love the chart also - pointing the finger at Dubya for the mess that the US is in even now.
Thank you!

[Rob Graham]

I just read the review of 'The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition'.

Where did people get the idea that Edmund Burke was a 'conservative' similar to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck? He did not oppose The French Revolution. He opposed the extreme and unethical actions it was taking. As he should. The judicial and extra-judicial murders it perpetrated were called The Terror for a good reason.

I suspect it's as John Ralston Saul says. Burke's status is the result of a long standing co-operation between the intellectuals of Right and the Left. Burke's words and actions kept interfering with their attempts to place everything on a nice, clean grid of right and wrong. So finally they just locked him up as a 'conservative' anti-revolutionary.

It's too bad. I place Burke on the same level as Jefferson. He is not anti-Enlightenment. He is one of its finest examples. Burke wasn't a man who worried about Truth. He worried about what was good.

[dolive]

Hi WW: Yes, turns out that "bringing home the bacon" has limited political benefits for office-holders. If the NRA decides to turn its guns on you - pun intended - in a vicious ad campaign to evict you from your congressional district, all the bridges and hospitals you helped make possible don't matter. And on Obamonomics, the starting point in assessing it has to be the dire circumstances he inherited, which were so preventable, and that's the nature of this tragedy. The Bush tax cuts skewed to the rich at a time of war (unprecedented), the $1-trillion cost of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush-era laxity of financial markets whose self-interested delirium triggered the worst recession since the Depression.
Mr. Graham, I really appreciate your contribution. For my money you have it exactly right. "Reflections on the Revolution in France" is one of the most misunderstood tracts in Western history, along with "Wealth of Nations." Each has been willfully misused - but then, so are the Scriptures.
Yes, Burke did sympathize with the Enlightenment principles - quite an intellectual feat, for a thinker steeped in British parochialism to find merit in ideas on the Continent. (Churchill was a rare kindred spirit in this respect.) But of course he was also horrified by the justly named "Terror" unleashed by the forces of unchecked populism. Just as Smith was, in fact, a moral philosopher troubled by the consequences of unfettered capitalism (made more clear in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments" than his "Weath of Nations"), Burke was similarly nuanced in trying to parse the virtue from the dangers in the Paris upheaval of the late 18th century.
Fear of "mob rule" informed the U.S. Founders, even as they were borrowing liberally from the Enlightenment innovations of Montesquieu and Rousseau and incorporating their ideas into the founding documents of the American Republic.
Our problem as a Western society, then and now, is an aversion to nuance. We are not patient with the complexities of life, we crave the black and white. This comfort in simplistic "solutions" might just be the most common source of the trouble we get ourselves into, from the spark that triggered the First World War to the preparedness of many to believe there is such a thing as "death panels" in the recent U.S. healthcare debate. As you note of Burke, there are very, very few Truths - for me, the Golden Rule comes closest. Even that has occasionally to be set aside to do what is good.