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Tim Rutten |
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The U.S. is no stranger to financial panics. The destructive convulsion through which we now are passing is the ninth since 1819, but it may be the first in which the public's loss of faith in banking and finance was exacerbated by a simultaneous collapse of confidence in both government and the news media.
Thursday's vice presidential debate and the legislative stutter that forced the House of Representatives into a needless -- and incalculably expensive -- second vote Friday on the financial rescue plan have something in common: Both were influenced in important ways by a Main Street versus Wall Street dichotomy that no longer is relevant to America's economic life.
We Americans are accustomed to regarding political rhetoric much as Dr. Johnson did epitaphs. "They are not," he wrote, "given under oath."
Every act of civil disobedience is, by its very nature, a provocation. The trick is to distinguish between those acts that genuinely express the unjustly ignored conscience of the provocateur and those that merely are provocative.
If you practice journalism long enough, you begin to develop a mental list of characters you hope never again to type in a particular sequence.
Metrolink, Southern California's beleaguered commuter rail service, likes to bill itself as one of America's fastest-growing public transit agencies. These days, its charter might just as well be called the tort lawyers' full employment act.
If you want to gauge just how integral Sarah Palin has become to John McCain's hopes of winning the presidency, consider this: On Tuesday, when the Republican nominee went before the cameras to address what, at that moment, looked like financial Armageddon, he repeatedly referred to how much better off people would be under "a McCain-Palin administration."
Friday, The Times' Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes reported that the United States has escalated its war against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies by "deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq."
Connoisseurs of campaign tactics tend to be a pretty cynical bunch, so they'll doubtless find much to admire in the adroit way Sen. John McCain's camp has handled Sarah Palin since she came aboard the ticket. Voters, who tend to nourish an inconvenient hunger for information, may be less impressed. One suspects that sooner rather than later, some will begin to wonder why the GOP is insisting that Palin is entitled to be treated according to a double standard.
The McCain-Palin ticket's decision to renew hostilities in the culture wars seems likely to increase the already considerable national profile of a hotly contested California proposition dealing with same-sex marriage.