Новости за 22.04.2022

“The market is rational and government is dumb,” Dick Armey, one of the leaders of the 1994 Republican Revolution, liked to say. That used to be a cornerstone of conservatism. Today, it’s increasingly the reverse. While they still mouth free-market platitudes, Republicans fulminate against corporate America for taking political positions that they oppose—without any apparent awareness, or a refusal to recognize, that such decisions reveal the free market in action: Conservatives’ culture-war positions... Читать дальше...

Once the government dissolves into a cult of personality, the successful party apparatchik must exercise at all times the discipline necessary to suppress independent thought. But what happens when that personality dies? Armando Iannucci’s brilliant 2017 farce, The Death of Stalin, explores that question on a literal plane, with Stalin’s deputies frantically maneuvering for position while Stalin, not yet entirely dead, lies insensible and unattended on the floor. A New York Times story drawn from... Читать дальше...

Meredith Shiner’s son was born into the pandemic. Now at 19 months old, he’s too young to get vaccinated or wear a mask. As precautions began lifting in her city and across the country, she knew it was only a matter of time—but it didn’t take long. One Thursday night at the end of March, Shiner, a communications consultant in Chicago, received the dreaded daycare email: A toddler in her son’s class had just tested positive. The next day, her son developed symptoms and tested positive as well. By that afternoon... Читать дальше...

News that a federal judge had blocked the mask mandate on public transportation and airplanes this week was met with fanfare by many. But for others, such as immunocompromised Americans and parents with children too young to be vaccinated, there was little solace to be felt from the increasingly widespread sentiment that the burden of protecting oneself and others from the coronavirus is being increasingly shifted onto individuals.

During his nine months in the United States, in 1831 and 1832, the 26-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville encountered an almost cinematic cross-section of the country. He dined twice with the patrician former president and then congressman John Quincy Adams, once in Boston and once in Washington. He met with Adams’s nemesis, the populist oligarch Andrew Jackson, then in the White House, although he got little from Jackson besides chitchat and a glass of Madeira. He saw the Choctaw being driven west... Читать дальше...

Fortunately, my flight from Mexico City to Washington, D.C., had just landed and we were taxiing to the gate by the time my iPhone flashed a news alert that Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a Trump-appointed district court judge in Florida, overturned the Biden administration’s mask mandate for airlines and other public transportation. That spared me the victorious whoop from the cockpit that I’m told was heard on other flights that day.

Here’s what happened this week

If there was any doubt the upcoming book by New York Times journalists Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns would break some news about the last year in American politics, those doubts were put to rest on Thursday when the Times on Thursday released an excerpt of This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.

It contains a few juicy nuggets:

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy... Читать дальше...