Political reporter: Is ‘Party of No’ Enough To Win?
Even establishment Democrats are now uniting around the simple message “Resist,” notes Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. Thus the senators who suddenly who walked out of confirmation hearings for President Trump’s nominees, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s threats to filibuster to keep Neil Gorsuch off the Supreme Court. Strategists think “there’s no political downside to being obstructionist,” but McManus warns, “it’s only the beginning of a strategy to revive the Democrats’ fortunes. It’s not enough to win the real prize, which is to regain a majority in the House or the Senate two years from now.” In all, “one challenge still bedevils the Democrats: coming up with a single, clear message about what their priorities are — beyond rejecting Trump.”
Anti-Trumper: Not Every ‘Trump Outrage’ Is Outrageous
Tom Nichols, a Naval War College professor and no fan of the president, suggests that, “Trump’s opponents — especially in the media — seem determined to overreact on even ordinary matters.” Yet this “eventually will exhaust the public and increase the already staggering amount of cynicism paralyzing our national political life.” For example, declaring his inauguration a “Day of Patriotic Devotion” wasn’t much different from when “Obama declared his own inauguration an equally creepy-sounding ‘Day of Renewal and Reconciliation.’ ” Every new president replaces all politically-appointed ambassadors; Trump’s immigration order “is not actually a Muslim ban” — and Trump’s “takeover” of the Voice of America was also dictated by law.
Interview: How Wage Laws Killed a Master Chef’s Eatery
Chatting with Sierra Tishgart of Grub Street, chef Anita Lo explains how rising real-estate taxes and New York’s sudden, rapid increase of minimum restaurant wages helped prompt her to close Annisa. Says Lo, “The day-to-day gets wearing when you don’t have a lot of cushion. And the cushion keeps getting taken away — the government keeps taking more and more and more — and it’s just not worth it anymore.” More: “I just think the government is out of touch. . . . To change [the minimum wage] this fast is just ridiculous. Like, I can’t.” Indeed, “Once we did the numbers, it became pretty clear that it was time” to close. She’s worried about the future of the local dining scene: “Is it just going to be corporations? . . . Is everything going to be fast-casual?”
Scientist: How a Green ‘Saint’ Cost Millions of Lives
Environmentalist Rachel Carson, the subject of a recent two-hour PBS tribute, “was an American hero,” Dr. Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, notes at the Daily Beast. But “in her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring, Carson had made one critical mistake — and it cost millions of people their lives.” Her warnings on DDT led to a virtual global ban — and the return of malaria. In India along, “between 1952 and 1962, DDT caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use DDT, the number of cases increased to 6 million.” And while DDT was indeed overused, “studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed.”
Culture critic: There’s Nothing New About Fake News
Reviewing W. Joseph Campbell’s “Getting It Wrong” in The Washington Free Beacon, Joseph Bottum points out that false stories have long prospered. For example, “Orson Welles didn’t create a nationwide panic in 1938 by broadcasting his radio play version of H.G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds’.” Ironically, “The only reason anyone ever told the story of that radio broadcast is that it seems archetypal and iconic: an image for our sense that people are gullible, easily persuaded to believe in the reality of what they hear.” Then again, “The fact that people are gullible is proved by their willingness to believe the false story that Orson Welles’ radio show proved how gullible people are.”
Compiled by Mark Cunningham
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