The Box
What We're Reading
Jane Mayer: Attack Dog: The ads are the political equivalent of a supermarket tabloid, emphasizing the personal and the sensational. But when they hit their mark they are dazzlingly effective.
Ronald Brownstein: Rocky Terrain: Obama's Electoral Map Grows Steeper - The Gallup state-by-state average approval numbers for 2011 released this week don't necessarily predict where President Obama will finish on Election Day, but they do measure the hill he must climb to win re-election.
Mark Mellman: The 50 percent problem - The presidents one notch more popular than George W. Bush were Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, at 58 percent. If all you knew about H2O was that it was water at 55 degrees and ice at 28, you’d be hard-pressed to say what would happen to it at 33 degrees.
Charlie Cooke: Improving Fortunes - The Gallup Poll’s weekly-approval averages had been 43 percent or less since late July. It has been 45 percent or higher for five of the last six weeks. They are unimpressive numbers and not indicative of an incumbent who is likely to win. Yet the pattern is different from what we saw during the last half of 2011 and worth watching. At the same time, we’ve seen some movement toward Democrats in the generic congressional ballot test.
The Box
| Life, Health, Etc. | American and International Politics | American and Global Economy |
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             5 Ways To Feel Better About Life Modern Life Blogs: Every day is a gift, but some sure don’t seem like it, do they? Now in order to achieve that, you’ll have to get personal. My waking up in a good mood will be different from yours. What if you made that your filter for all your decisions today “Wake Up In A Good Mood Tomorrow”.Maybe these tips can help. How To Turn Your Life Around And Embrace A New You Modern Life Blogs: Life is a flow essentially filled with harmony and balance. While it may not always appear that way, it truly is. When disharmony is felt then it is our duty to seek balance again. The challenge rises when we get stuck in a funk and we tend to spiral down with a life that our eyes perceive. Thank goodness for a greater way to perceive the circumstances! Dead-end invites the mind to bring relativity to the facts, reconsider the situation and create new possibilities. Understanding The Science Of Gratitude Zoelle and Michelle Levey: The practice of gratitude antidotes two root sufferings that pervade the human experience. The first can be characterized as a feeling of “insufficiency” — not having enough or not being enough. This fundamental sense of dissatisfaction opens the way to the second kind of suffering — being incessantly busy trying to get more or be more in order to somehow fill this inner feeling of discontentment and lack. Living with an inner attitude of scarcity and poverty-consciousness also makes us prey to being manipulated by external forces that tell us that we will find happiness and satisfaction — finally — if we only acquire or consume this product or that, or once we go to this place or take some other action “out there.” 8 Of The World’s Healthiest Spices And Herbs You Should Be Eating Eating Well Magazine/Vitality: Modern science is beginning to uncover the ultimate power of spices and herbs, as weapons against illnesses from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. “We’re now starting to see a scientific basis for why people have been using spices medicinally for thousands of years,” says Bharat Aggarwal, Ph.D., professor at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and author of Healing Spices (Sterling, 2011).
The Art Of Mindful Living: Beginning Anew Plum Village/Thich Nhat Hanh - To begin anew is to look deeply and honestly at ourselves, our past actions, speech and thoughts and to create a fresh beginning within ourselves and in our relationships with others. At the practice center we practice Beginning Anew as a community every two weeks and individually as often as we like. Meditation Prescribed More Often As An Alternative To Conventional Medicine, Study Finds Lara Salahi and Catherine Cole/ABC News - More than 6 million Americans are advised meditation and other mind-body therapies by conventional health care providers, according to a report released Monday by Harvard Medical School. How To Save a Trillion Dollars Mark Bittman/NYTimes - For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones. Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP. But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more. How Meditation May Change the Brain Sindya N. Bhandoo/NYTimes – M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes. |
How The Virginia GOP Could Tank Bob McDonnell’s Political Fortunes The Atlantic: For years, a slim Democratic margin in the Virginia Senate and a hold on the governorship kept extreme legislation from becoming law. But since Republicans took over both chambers and the governor’s mansion, each bill has been more hard-edged than the last. With PAP, the Virginia GOP seem to finally have crossed a line — and it may well doom McDonnell’s national ambitions. How GOP Overreach Put Arizona Back In Play Rolling Stone: Arizona just looks like a hyper-conservative stronghold. Beneath the surface, Democrats believe, the state’s political tectonics are shifting in favor of moderates. And though Barack Obama faces a steep climb here this fall, Democrats are energized as never before and think they have a real shot at turning Arizona blue. Santorum; States Should Have The Right To Outlaw Birth Control Think Progress: “The state has a right to do that, I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.” Santorum’s Revisionist History Of Bailouts National Journal: Santorum’s remarks misrepresented or ignored so much of the actual history of the financial catastrophe of 2008 and the auto industry crisis that they raise questions about how well he understands that history. Not to mention economics. Not to mention the job of president.Santorum criticized the Bush administration’s “bailout” of Bear Stearns, but actually what occurred was nothing like that. A Rustbelt Revival For President Obama? National Journal: …the most underplayed development are signs that the president’s approval rating is ticking upwards with the group most resistant to him, non-college educated, working-class whites. GOP’s Plan To Run On The Economy Is Getting Complicated National Journal: What will happen to the GOP narrative about the miserable “Obama economy” if things continue to improve throughout 2012? Polls Show President’s Message On Tax Fairness Popular, But Jobs Still Key Talking Points Memo: It’s a powerful general election message — after all, the rich are very few, and everyone else gets to vote too. But the Buffett Rule by itself isn’t going to get President Obama re-elected — polls show it must be tethered to a message about jobs. Why Cancelling CLASS Should Make Us More Confident About Health Care Reform Ezra Klein: The Obama administration did the right thing here, and did it at high political cost. Killing the CLASS Act was always going to open up a flood of criticism. They could have fudged the numbers. They could have tried to delay the inevitable. They didn’t. Instead, they proved themselves committed to a financially sound health-reform plan. Can We Have A Democratic Election? NY Review of Books: In all of the excitement over the Republicans’ sweep of the 2010 elections—their recapture of the House of Representatives, the decrease in the Democrats’ margin in the Senate, and the emergence of the Tea Party as a national force—most of us missed the significance of their victories in the states. The Republicans took control of both the governorship and the legislature in twelve states; ten states were already under Republican control. The Republican-controlled states undertook quite similar efforts to tilt the outcome of the presidential election in their party’s favor by denying the right to vote to groups that traditionally voted Democratic—minorities, the elderly, and students.
Focus Group Suggests That State Of The Union Speech Was Well Received Los Angeles Times: “The most surprising” aspect of the reaction was “the lack of polarization” among the voters, he added. The speech has provoked a highly partisan reaction in Washington, but among the swing voters in the study, “the Democratic, Republican and independent lines” from the dial meters “tracked through most of the speech,” Greenberg said. “He captured people broadly.” |
You know the deficit hawks. Now meet the deficit owls. Ezra Klein: if the theory is correct, there is no reason the amount of money the government takes in needs to match up with the amount it spends. Indeed, its followers call for massive tax cuts and deficit spending during recessions.
Obama: Make the Economy Work For Everybody Jonathan Cohn: Obama offered a few new and intriguing policy ideas on Tuesday – among them, a proposal to get more taxes from companies with operations overseas and an initiative to develop partnerships between community colleges and local businesses. He also called for some political reforms, most important among them an end to filibusters of judicial appointees. Mostly, though, he stuck to the proposals and themes he’s put out in the last six months, most memorably in his September address on jobs and his December speech on fairness. Matthew Yglesias: But framing the entire economic message of the speech was a strikingly retrograde, self-contradictory, and confused agenda of reviving American prosperity through mercantilism. If You Build It: Obama’s Plan To Fix the Economy GOOD: It’s safe to say that these ideas are largely positioning for a reelection campaign; generally laudable and fairly safe. Or, in the case of his gradually tougher position on the largest banks and their scandalous behavior toward mortgage borrowers, just radical enough to guarantee obstruction. They tell a story of a president who is increasingly working to create the most economically beneficial playing field for workers, entrepreneurs and companies, but not yet imagining changes in the contest’s rules—or the creation of a different game altogether. Keystone Pipeline-How Many Jobs Would It Really Create? CNN: Meanwhile, one study from Cornell University said the pipeline could actually lead to a decline in jobs in the long run. One reason is that the pipeline would lead to higher fuel prices in the Midwest, the study said, and that would slow consumer spending and cost jobs.
Jim Tankersly: This is the worst-case scenario from Europe, and it just might come true: Italy defaults on its debts. Every major Italian bank collapses. Recession grips the eurozone. Sovereign defaults and bank failures ripple across the Continent. Saddled with bad loans to nations and lenders in Europe, American banks hemorrhage cash. Credit freezes in the United States. Multinational companies, unable to raise money, curb U.S. investment and hiring. Wall Street demands, but fails to get, new bailouts. The entire developed world plummets into recession and, quite possibly, depression. This, in contrast, is the placid warning that President Obama gave Americans about the threat: “If Europe is contracting,” he said on Monday, “then it’s much more difficult for us to create good jobs here at home.”
Nicholas D. Kristof: The Federal Reserve action isn’t a scandal, and arguablyit’s a triumph. The Fed did everything imaginable to avert a financial catastrophe — and succeeded. The money was repaid. Yet what is scandalous is the basic unfairness of what has transpired. The federal government rescued highly paid bankers from their reckless decisions. It protected bank shareholders and creditors. But it mostly turned a cold shoulder to some of the most vulnerable and least sophisticated people in America. Last year alone, banks seized more than one million homes.
Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin/The Hill: Any complete solution, therefore, requires that Democrats agree to structural reform of Medicare to slow its cost growth and Republicans agree to increase revenue to pay for the retirement of the baby boomers.
Protests Illustrate Dire Economic Anxiety, Bloomberg Says New York Times: At the panel on Thursday morning, he repeated his contention that it would be more productive for the protesters to work to improve the economy, rather than demonstrating, and he criticized those, including politicians, who vilify banks. But he seemed to take the protesters’ anger more seriously than he had before, and to express more concern about possible consequences of the unrest.
Partisanship Hurts Deficit Work Roll Call: The Republicans had offered $401 billion in new revenues and $876 billion in spending reductions, including $275 billion in health entitlement savings — figures Democrats said Wednesday they were prepared to agree on. But Democrats proposed four major changes: no increase in Medicare retirement age, no change in the way the consumer price index is calculated, no permanent extension of Bush-era tax cuts and consideration of some of President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals. |
