By Paul Krugman (NY Times) It’s important to understand the roots of this stuff. It began as a deliberate appeal to racism, with explicit condemnation of Those People as welfare moochers. Then it became more coded; Rick Perlstein posts the original, famous Lee Atwater interview containing the memorable passage,
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
What Mitt Romney is now complaining about is the horrifying reality that many people who aren’t black see themselves as victims of those “economic things” — and as a result anti-government rhetoric is turning into a way to lose elections rather than win them.
Ken Burns’ ‘Dust Bowl’ shows how irresponsible innovation almost destroyed the country
Watch The Dust Bowl Preview on PBS. See more from The Dust Bowl.
By Justin Rubiogen (TheVerge) Ken Burns has teamed up with PBS to deliver Dust Bowl, a documentary showcasing the events that took place during the dreadful era, while also providing an example of what can happen if we aren’t smart about how we pull precious resources from our planet. Take a look at the trailer for Dust Bowl below and catch the two-part miniseries when it airs on November 18th.
By Brian Stelter (NY Times) MSNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, has a long way to go to overtake the Fox News Channel, a unit of News Corporation: on most nights this year, Fox had two million more viewers than MSNBC.
But the two channels, which skew toward an audience that is 55 or older, are on average separated by fewer than 300,000 viewers in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers desire. On three nights in a row after the election last week, MSNBC — whose hosts reveled in Mr. Obama’s victory — had more viewers than Fox in that demographic.
via MSNBC, Its Ratings Rising, Gains Ground on Fox News – NYTimes.com.