The New Republic

When Hank Paulson, a successful investment banker turned Republican treasury secretary, caps his career by nationalizing two financial institutions so large that even Norman Thomas in his socialist heyday would have paused before taking them onto the government's balance sheet, and a conservative central banker agrees to bail out an insurance company to the tune of $85 billion, you know that a fundamental change is underway. The day when that engine of capitalism, the financial market, was allowed to operate more or less unimpeded by government has passed. READ MORE >>

On February 27, 2001, George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. When the president had last ventured to the Capitol for his inauguration 37 days earlier, he had delivered a homily urging the nation to move past the sting of the Florida recount. This time, he dispensed with the magnanimity and unveiled his agenda, delivering a speech filled with promises to cut taxes, pay down the national debt, study Social Security privatization, and deploy national missile defense.  READ MORE >>

ACADEMIC QUESTION PETER JENNINGS HAS LONG HAD A grating tendency to demonstrate his intellectualism, often using his anchor's desk as a platform to showcase his supposed erudition. And at no time during the presidential primaries has that pompous proclivity been on clearer display than during Jennings's questioning of the candidates at the January 22 New Hampshire debate. READ MORE >>

Midway through last Thursday’s Democratic debate in New Hampshire, co-moderator Peter Jennings decided to have a little fun with Al Sharpton. The reverend wants to be treated as a serious presidential candidate—even though he has never held elective office, has visited New Hampshire only four times (twice for debates), and has offered no real policy proposals. So Jennings decided to play along. If “you have the opportunity to nominate someone to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, what kind of person would you consider for the job?” the ABC News anchor asked. ”You can name someone in READ MORE >>

Midway through last Thursday's Democratic debate in New Hampshire, co-moderator Peter Jennings decided to have a little fun with Al Sharpton. The reverend wants to be treated as a serious presidential candidate—even though he has never held elective office, has visited New Hampshire only four times (twice for debates), and has offered no real policy proposals. So Jennings decided to play along. If “you have the opportunity to nominate someone to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, what kind of person would you consider for the job?” the ABC News anchor asked. READ MORE >>

NOT SO LONG ago, intellectuals seemed to be the most picked-on weaklings in the school yard of American politics. When George Wallace ran for president in 1972, he blamed "pointy-headed intellectuals" for everything from rising crime and changing sexual mores to busing and the stalemate in Vietnam. Vice President Spiro Agnew had exploited the same theme in 1970 when he attacked the country's "effete corps of impudent snobs," those "nattering nabobs of negativism" who opposed the Nixon administration. Two decades earlier the vocabulary was different but the mood was similar. READ MORE >>

NOT SO LONG ago, intellectuals seemed to be the most picked-on weaklings in the school yard of American politics. When George Wallace ran for president in 1972, he blamed "pointy-headed intellectuals" for everything from rising crime and changing sexual mores to busing and the stalemate in Vietnam. Vice President Spiro Agnew had exploited the same theme in 1970 when he attacked the country's "effete corps of impudent snobs," those "nattering nabobs of negativism" who opposed the Nixon administration. Two decades earlier the vocabulary was different but the mood was similar. READ MORE >>

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War profits—after deduction of war taxes—have been the greatest in history. The government virtually guaranteed contractors against loss by paying for their investments in war equipment. Now business is guaranteed against loss in resuming civilian production. By congressional enactment, the Treasury must pay back excess-profits taxes to businesses which in 1946 suffer certain reduction to income. READ MORE >>

Omens these: In Paterson, the silk city, little third and fourth class shops are flooded with fine silks to be sold at any price; there has been a panic in silk. A year ago a butcher got $1.35 a pound for his raw calf hides and today he is lucky to get 25 cents; the bottom has fallen out of the leather market. The sign of the night rider appears in the South. The farming industry in convention at Washington demands unlimited federal credit to enable the South to sit on its cotton until the price is 40 cents again, and the West to hold its wheat for $3.00 a bushel; else all are ruined. READ MORE >>