FOX "News" and the Repeal of the 20th Century

I found this at AmericaBlog, and had to pass it on. I'm frankly a little surprised to see Teddy Roosevelt slammed by FOX "News." One of my conservative friends hails TR as a personal hero. I wonder what he thinks about this?

Is the Tea Party Really a New Phenomenon?

Image from source, Mother Jones

Wednesday on The Randi Rhodes Show, the host mentioned a group that was opposed to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. It had a vague resonance with me, probably from a decades-ago American History class. The American Liberty League was a group of rabble-rousers who did everything they could to halt the progress of a liberal agenda, which was attempting to pull us out of an economic disaster. Sound familiar?  As Randi says, there is nothing new under the sun.

[Excerpt]

Tea Party: Old Whine in New Bottles

IN A WIDELY READ essay about the tea party movement published earlier this year in the New York Review of Books, historian Mark Lilla provided a now-familiar explanation about what motivates the tea partiers. They are, he reckoned, angry about the recession; angry about health care reform; angry about President Obama; and angry about educated elites forever telling them what to do. "A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes," he said, and he described the movement this way. . .

Read more at: Mother Jones

Paul Krugman on the Politics of Fear

Photo from Wikipedia

Paul Krugman of the New York Times has an excellent editorial up on the politics of fear, and the Republicans' embrace of it. As this is a topic I've written about before, I thought it would be a good fit for this blog. See if you agree.

[Excerpt]

Fearing Fear Itself

By PAUL KRUGMAN

In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then.

Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president — including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination — have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns. . .

Read the piece at: New York Times