Wednesday morning line

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Sam Smith If you want the recent history of our politics in just one graph, this one works pretty well. It's a Google Ngram chart of the frequency of the term "anti-trust" as found in American books since 1800. It peaked in 1981, precisely when the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama era began.

Reader Ramsey Ludlow rightly SNAPPed our TANF for confusing the acronym for the food stamp program (SNAP) with that for other temporary welfare aid (TANF). As she notes, TANF is "block grant funding for a slew of benefits- including job training- and has been essential, in my experience, as the boot strap the Republicans keep wanting folks to use to pull themselves up. Way more than food stamps."
Nonetheless, I'm not going to apologize because I think the terms were deliberately put there by politicians to make it difficult for anyone to know what the hell is going on. For example, why can't we say "bailout" instead of TARP and why not the ancient and immediately understandable "public works" instead of "stimulus," which I thought was a sexual term you used in polite company? Perhaps we should forget about immigrant language problems until our politicians and media start speaking English again.



Wouldn’t it be nice to havea cable news channel exactly halfway between the soporific PBS News Hour and the shoutingMSNBC? In the meantime, I would love to line up the staff of the News Hour,tickle them and see if any of them could be made to laugh.I doubt it.