Новости за 10.01.2017

Back in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the GOP’s presidential nominee, Republicans were very clear about what his victory would mean for the fate of the Affordable Care Act. That June, when the Supreme Court affirmed the law’s constitutionality, Romney’s eventual running mate Paul Ryan concluded, “We have a law that we have one more chance to repeal, and that’s this November election. That’s basically what the Supreme Court did; they raised the stakes of this election.”

Senator Bernie Sanders made all the obligatory statements on Monday night about taking on President-elect Donald Trump. In a CNN town hall with Chris Cuomo, he called the incoming White House occupant “a pathological liar.” He vowed to oppose Trump’s plans for immigrant deportations. He said Democrats in Congress would stand strong for the Affordable Care Act, whose repeal is the first priority for Republicans.

At least since Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, American political discourse has fostered a special genre: the speech of movie actors imitating statesmen and vice versa. Hollywood stars have been lampooning and glorifying and memorializing politicians ever since. At the same time, populist entertainment throughout the 20th century, including radio, defined and redefined the “voice” with which government speaks to its public. Cinema helped develop political rhetoric, its prosody, its timbre, and its vocabulary. Читать дальше...

Almost two years ago, on a chilly February afternoon in Washington, D.C., Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma took to the floor of the United States Senate, skeptically muttered a few things about rising global temperatures, then threw a snowball. His point, if you can call it that, was that since frozen water vapor still exists in nature (in winter no less), climate change must not really be happening. Or something.

At the dawning of the Cold War, a worried Arthur Schlesinger Jr. looked out on a bleak horizon. The Soviet Union was a threat, but Schlesinger concluded that the roots of the crisis ran much deeper. “Our lives are empty of belief,” he wrote in his 1949 book, The Vital Center. “They are lives of quiet desperation.” Figures he looked to for guidance—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus—would become staples in the rhetoric of student protesters a generation later. So too would the concerns he dwelled upon... Читать дальше...