The New Republic

David Brooks has been impressed by a stream of studies purporting to illustrate his ongoing thesis about community breakdown in America. These studies chart changes in word use by English writers over centuries, and their theme is, just as we are what we eat, we are what we say. READ MORE >>

“There is a statue outside the Department of Labor,” David Brooks writes today in his New York Times column, "of a powerful, rambunctious horse being reined in by an extremely muscular man. This used to be a metaphor for liberalism. The horse was capitalism. The man was government, which was needed sometimes to restrain capitalism’s excesses." READ MORE >>

David Brooks is nothing if not gracious. On Friday, the bespectacled and occasionally besieged New York Times columnist had a tantrum, or what qualifies for a tantrum by his mild-mannered standards. He did so by criticizing President Obama for failing to provide leadership in the debate over the sequester and fiscal priorities. READ MORE >>

I have a big scoop, straight from an extremely reliable White House source: The Obama Administration has endorsed means-testing of Medicare. READ MORE >>

The campaign is down to its last twenty-four hours. And if you’re reading this blog item, you’ve probably made up your mind about whether you support President Obama or Mitt Romney. But you might not feel good about that choice. And you might be wondering whether the hassle of voting is worth it. If so, I can give you one reason why you should. This could be the most important election of your lifetime. READ MORE >>

“Re: Nate Silver, most amusing thing about this election is watching political pundits make sports fans look like PhD mathematicians,” tweeted ESPN basketball writer John Hollinger earlier this week. READ MORE >>

The best argument for electing Mitt Romney president has always been the following: The only factor that can possibly trump congressional Republicans' ideological extremism is the extremity of their partisanship. Allow me to explain. READ MORE >>

Mitt Romney has been running for president as the Republican nominee, de facto or de jure, for eight months now, and the grand historical joke of it has not yet worn off. A party that has set itself to frantically, fanatically expunge its moderates, quasi-moderates, suspected moderates, and fellow travelers of moderates chose as its standard bearer the lineal heir, biographically and genealogically, to its moderate tradition. It entrusted its holy crusade to repeal Barack Obama’s hated health-care law to the man who had inspired it and run, four years before, promising to do the same for the rest of America. The man and his historical moment could not be more incongruous. It was as if the Mongol tribes of the thirteenth century, setting out to pillage their way across the Asian steppe, had somehow chosen Mahatma Gandhi as their supreme khan.Romney’s capture of the nomination required an incredible confluence of good fortune. Any one of several Republicans—Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan—could have outflanked Romney in both grassroots enthusiasm and establishment support but chose not to run. The one candidate with the standing and financial reach to challenge him who did grasp for the prize, Rick Perry, performed his duties with such comic, stammering ineptitude that his final oops-de-grace by that point was not even startling. What remained to challenge Romney was a gaggle of third-raters lacking the money or the rudimentary organization even to get their name on the ballot everywhere. Still, running even against the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum (which is to say, running essentially unopposed), Romney still trudged laboriously to victory after endless weeks.But there is another way to make at least some sense of the Romney nomination. READ MORE >>

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Why won’t some principled conservative commentator like David Brooks or Michael Gerson denounce the Republican party’s voter-suppression efforts? I find this genuinely puzzling. READ MORE >>