Paul Krugman On What’s Ailing Europe

The Article: What Ails Europe by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

The Text: LISBON- Things are terrible here, as unemployment soars past 13 percent. Things are even worse in Greece, Ireland, and arguably in Spain, and Europe as a whole appears to be sliding back into recession.

Why has Europe become the sick man of the world economy? Everyone knows the answer. Unfortunately, most of what people know isn’t true — and false stories about European woes are warping our economic discourse.

Read an opinion piece about Europe — or, all too often, a supposedly factual news report — and you’ll probably encounter one of two stories, which I think of as the Republican narrative and the German narrative. Neither story fits the facts.

The Republican story — it’s one of the central themes of Mitt Romney’s campaign — is that Europe is in trouble because it has done too much to help the poor and unlucky, that we’re watching the death throes of the welfare state. This story is, by the way, a perennial right-wing favorite: back in 1991, when Sweden was suffering from a banking crisis brought on by deregulation (sound familiar?), the Cato Institute published a triumphant report on how this proved the failure of the whole welfare state model.

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Rick Santorum: A Real Asshole With A Policy To Match

Three cheers for social conservatism.

Why The Military Loves Ron Paul

The Article: Why Does the Military Love Ron Paul? by Adam Weinstein in Mother Jones.

The Text: Conventional wisdom on politics in the military can feel almost as age-old as the Constitution itself: Conservative Republicans are strong on defense, and the military skews conservative and Republican. Foreign wars? Bring ’em on! Unwavering ally of Israel? You betcha. More dollars for defense? If not, you must be with the terrorists.

The 2012 presidential race tells a different story: The lion’s share of political contributions by servicemembers and defense industry workers is going to anti-war, “soft on Israel,” also-ran candidate Ron Paul. In fact, the battle for their dollars isn’t even close: Paul has raised at least $282,868 from individual active-duty servicemembers and Pentagon employees—more than four times what the other three Republican presidential candidates have raised, combined. (President Obama has fared slightly better, drawing $123,644 from that group, but still less than half of Paul’s total. For more, jump to the charts below with the numbers by candidate and branch of the armed services.)

“Clearly there’s something about Paul that appeals to some members of the military,” says Viveca Novak of the Center for Responsive Politics [1], which provided Mother Jones with the most recent tally of military contributions. “Whether it’s that he speaks his mind, wants to end foreign engagements, has a libertarian’s view of the world—we can’t say.”

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Romney Loves America: His Wife Drives A Couple Cadillacs

Well if that’s not plutocratic patriotism I don’t know what is!

What’s Missing From Children’s Books? Nature

The Article: Nature Goes Missing from Kids’ Picture Books by Sarah Laskow in GOOD News.

The Text: The film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax comes out on Friday, and conservative pundits fear the movie will inculcate America’s children with a passion for the environment. But even if Lorax-loving children do get their hands on a copy of the original Seuss book, whose environmental is stronger than the movie, it’s likely to stand out from the rest of their picture books just by depicting nature at all.

Children’s books with an explicit environmental message have always been rare, but a new study shows that, over the past few decades, fewer children’s books have included any images of nature. A team of sociologists examined Caldecott Award-winning books from 1938 to 2008 and found that, starting in the 1960s, built environments—a house, a store, anything constructed by humans—became much more common settings than the natural world. “Natural environments have all but disappeared,” the authors write.

“The environmental movement got into full swing around the 1960s and 1970s. I was really hoping that what we’d see was an increase” in natural environments, says Allen Williams, the paper’s lead author. “But what we were seeing was no, it’s not increasing.”

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