- "So now we have a country absolutely teeming with irregular passions and artful misrepresentations, whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web. And instead of a calm club of like-minded wise men (and women) in Washington compromising and legislating, we have a Republican Establishment almost entirely unwilling to defy or at least gracefully ignore its angriest, most intemperate and frenzied faction—the way Reagan did with his right wing in the eighties and the way Obama is doing with his unhappy left wing now. Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and their compatriots are ideologues who default to uncivil, unbudging, sky-is-falling recalcitrance, as Keith Olbermann does on the left. Fine; in free-speech America, that’s the way we roll. But the tea-party citizens are under the misapprehension that democratic governing is supposed to be the same as democratic discourse, that elected officials are virtuous to the extent that they too default to unbudging, sky-is-falling recalcitrance and refusal. And the elected officials, as never before, are indulging that populist fantasy."
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"A more nimble state is a decentralized one; letting people have their own local government gives them faith in the overall nation state."
- Junaid Kamal Ahmad, World Bank sector manager for urban and water issues in its South Asia operations (Citiwire.net » The World Bank and Cities: Dawn of A New Era?)
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- "When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then."
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Housing Industry Looks to More Tax Credits - NYTimes.com →
Now the sponsor of the original Senate bill, Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia, is back with a new bill that would give a maximum $15,000 credit to any buyer who stays in a home for at least two years.
“The problem now is not first-time buyers, it’s the move-up market — the guy transferred from Chicago to Atlanta who can’t sell his house,” said Mr. Isakson, a former real estate agent.
Without a new and more generous credit, he warned, there would be a downward spiral of home sales and more foreclosures, provoking a second recession.
- "Speech in a democratic society isn’t free when only the rich are heard."
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Google Economist Sees Positive Signs in Search Term Trends - washingtonpost.com →
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