Magazine February 20, 2012, Issue

To Newtly Go

By James Lileks

February 2, 2012 4:00 AM

(NASA)

Count me with Newt if the issue’s the moon. We should have had a base up there by 2001, just like the one in the movie. Of course, if we had built it back then, it would look old and dated now, with ’70s shag rugs or ’80s-style Miami Vice color schemes, and all the computers would be running Windows 95 on chunky monitors. The Internet would be horribly slow; no one would want to work there, because it would take six days to download that YouTube video of the talking dog. The New York Times would run a series: …

In This Issue

Articles

Politics & Policy

A Tax Floor, with No Ceiling

By James Pethokoukis

It’s one of the great mysteries of Barack Obama’s presidency: Why did he stiff-arm the recommendations of the Bowles-Simpson commission — the bipartisan debt-reduction panel that the president himself created ...

Politics & Policy

Two Decades Too Late

By Henry Olsen

For months, former senator Rick Santorum has been talking about working-class woes and promoting a working-class-friendly economic agenda, and in late January President Obama’s State of the Union speech placed ...

Politics & Policy

Strategy and Principle

By Mario Loyola

The success of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy was predicated on three qualities: He tried hard to be morally consistent; he had an innate sense of strategy; and he was a ...

Politics & Policy

The Peril of Paul

By Jamie M. Fly & Robert Zarate

It has become a routine occurrence in the 2012 Republican presidential debates for the contenders to say that “anyone on this stage would be better than Barack Obama.” But is ...

Politics & Policy

Ad Astra per Lunam

By Jonah Goldberg

Newt Gingrich blundered recently by promising to build a base on the moon. Adding improbability to implausibility, he vowed that this would happen by the end of his second term. ...

Features

Politics & Policy

The Truth about Fracking

By Kevin D. Williamson

In the middle-of-frackin’-nowhere Pennsylvania, Boy Genius is showing off his giant robot: It’s about 150 feet tall, God and the almighty engineers alone know how many hundreds of tons of ...

Politics & Policy

Getting to Know Susana

By Jay Nordlinger

Santa Fe, N.M. — In her spacious office on the top floor of the “Roundhouse,” as the state capitol is called, Governor Susana Martinez greets a group of schoolchildren. Excitedly, ...

Politics & Policy

Money Bawl

By Ramesh Ponnuru

When the Federal Reserve decided to loosen monetary policy in September 2007, not many people criticized it. The vote was unanimous. Few congressmen said anything about the move. Three years ...

Politics & Policy

Obama in the Bunker

By Michael Knox Beran

Speaking to business leaders in the White House in mid-January, President Obama delivered his remarks in a fatigued monotone. He claimed to be “incredibly optimistic about our prospects.” But he ...

Books, Arts & Manners

Politics & Policy

Disaster in the Making

By Mackubin Thomas Owens

When General William Westmoreland died in July 2005, I wrote on National Review Online that he had been “an honorable man and a noble soldier,” but unfortunately “not a great ...

Politics & Policy

A Vanished Continent

By David Pryce-Jones

In the volatile Germany of the 1920s, Joseph Roth was a successful writer of journalism and fiction. “I paint the portrait of the age,” he told his editor at the ...

Politics & Policy

Waiting for Übermensch

By Daniel Foster

A vast majority of Americans who read any economists at all read exactly one economist, and the vast majority of Americans who read exactly one economist read Paul Krugman in ...

Politics & Policy

The Joys of Action

By Ross Douthat

My favorite moment in Contraband, a palate-cleansing little thriller that’s perfect for moviegoers sated by December’s buffet of prestige movies, comes just after Mark Wahlberg’s New Orleans super-smuggler, Chris Farraday, ...

City Desk

The Origin

By Richard Brookhiser

Washington Crossing the Delaware, the city’s most popular painting, belongs to its largest museum. But for a while, in the last century, we didn’t quite know what to do with ...

Sections

Politics & Policy

Letters

By NR Staff

The Shame of FDR While the basic argument of Daniel Foster’s “For Shame” (January 23) — that the stigma associated with receiving public assistance has eroded, to our detriment — is ...

Politics & Policy

The Week

By NR Staff

‐ We have to admit that President Obama’s line about not being consumed by personal ambition was pretty good. He should save it for volume three of his memoirs. ‐ To ...

Welcome New Residents!

By Rob Long

Callista and I are thrilled to have you join us on the Toffler V Experimental Moon Base Unit! Please take a moment to settle into your Pod, and when you ...

Athwart

To Newtly Go

By James Lileks

Count me with Newt if the issue’s the moon. We should have had a base up there by 2001, just like the one in the movie. Of course, if we ...

Politics & Policy

Poetry

By William W. Runyeon

‘HORSEMAN, PASS BY’ Over time, the bravado fades; the long quiet of death helps a silence, encouraged, to take on a weight its first appearance failed to suggest; but not as an albatross, or death prefigured, or ...

The Catholic State

By Mark Steyn

So the Health Commissar, Kathleen Sebelius, has decided that, under Obamacare, religious institutions, like any other employer, will be required to offer their workers free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients. Well, ...

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