In Small Towns, Bored Teenagers Turn Their

In The Last James Bond Movie, The Villain Was A Culture Captain, A Tycoon Of Culture, A Murdoch Figure. It's Not As If People Don't Know What Is Going On.

This Aesthetic Quality, Then, Is What Politics Is All About. It's Authenticity That Separates Winners From Losers, Good Politics From Bad, And He-man Leader-types From Consultant-directed Puppet-boys.

We Have Become A Society That Can't Self-correct, That Can't Address Its Obvious Problems, That Can't Pull Out Of Its Nosedive. And So To Our List Of Disasters Let Us Add This Fourth Entry: We Have Entered An Age Of Folly That - For All Our Facebooking And The Twittling Tweedle-dee-tweets Of The Twitterati - We Can't Wake Up From.

The Pursuit Of The Vibrant Seems To Be The Universal Job Description Of The Nation's City Planners Nowadays. It Is Also Part Of The Obama Administration's Economic Recovery Strategy For The Nation.

Maybe That First, Gigantic Deficit The Reaganites Piled Up Was An Accident, Just A Combination Of Deluded 'supply Side' Tax Cuts And A Huge Bag Of Good Stuff For The Pentagon. But Pretty Quickly Conservatives Discovered That Deficits, When Done Correctly, Did Something Really Cool: Deficits Defunded The Left.