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Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Paging Dr. Gupta! Dr. Sanjay Gupta!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Your presence is apparently requested in Washington.
The Washington Post is reporting that Gupta, CNN’s medical/health correspondent and a neurosurgeon at Emory on the side, has been tapped as the new U.S. surgeon general.
I met Gupta years ago — very smart, very likable. At the time he had just come from a stint as a speechwriter in Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. I remember thinking: “Brain surgeon, journalist AND political wonk?”
Now he’ll apparently have still another item to add to his resume.
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‘Banksters’ … rhymes with ‘gangsters’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I like it!
I wasn’t familiar with the term until this morning, when I saw it in a NYT piece by Ron Chernow. Apparently that’s what they called the corrupt, thieving bankers who ran Wall Street back in the crash of 1929.
It’s an informative piece, casting an interesting light on our own all-too-similar times.
Your challenge, class, is to use our new word “banksters” in a sentence.
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A helluva way to run a democracy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So Roland Burris, appointed by Gov. Rodney Blagojevich as the junior senator from Illinois, is turned away by the Senate. What a mess. Blagojevich is certainly not one to go away quietly, now is he?
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a deal reached in which Burris is kept out of the Senate until after Blagojevich is removed, then have the new Illinois governor reappoint him. One possible sticking point might be whether Burris agrees not to seek election in two years. That’s pure speculation on my part, but it’s one way out of the morass that would satisfy both sides.
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., also awaits official entry to the world’s most exclusive club after his election was unanimously certified by the state’s bipartisan Canvassing Board. And in New York, there’s still no decision by Gov. David Patterson on his selection to replace Hillary Clinton.
The political weirdness just never seems to stop.
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GOP haunted by Reagan’s ghost
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I was watching the debate between the six candidates for GOP chairman and like others I was struck by how often the candidates invoked the holy name of Ronald Reagan as the answer to their party’s woes. By Dana Milbank’s count, Reagan was mentioned 16 times in the 90-minute debate.
Folks, Reagan is dead. He was first elected president almost 30 years ago, and the world in which he governed is long gone and ancient history.
In fact, when some presidents take office, it marks a new political era; for others, their election marks an era’s culmination. Reagan clearly falls into the second category. By the time he became president, he had been running for the office for 15 years, honing his language and politics specifically for that time and place. That time and place is over.
But the GOP can’t bring itself to accept that. The Republican Party is like an ancient rock band, still reprising its golden oldie hits from the ’80s long after its famous lead singer left the band. They’re Huey Lewis and the News without Huey Lewis, and they’re still telling themselves that all their troubles would be over if they could just find themselves another Huey.
And even Huey wasn’t Huey, so to speak. The real Reagan signed three major tax increases into law. He oversaw massive budget deficits. When he put troops into Lebanon and they got attacked, he turned tail and pulled them out as quickly as possible. He seriously tried to abolish all nuclear weapons. The mythological Reagan would do none of those things.
At one point in yesterday’s debate, the would-be party chairmen were asked by a college Republican what they can do to turn around the GOP’s dismal showing among young people. Getting past its fixation with Reagan and proposing modern solutions to modern problems is a very big part of the answer.
But of course, no one said that.
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