They're already calling him the next James Dean. They said the same about River Phoenix, when he collapsed from a drug overdose in 1993, even though Dean died in a car race.

The cumulative glamour of beauty and self-destruction was overpowering and transformative. It turned them into tragic heroes.

Almost as soon as the first reports of Heath Ledger's untimely death emerged on Tuesday night, that process was under way, a collective outpouring of grief for another golden boy, talented, handsome - and gone.

The lure of cliche is intense, partly because we develop formulas and rituals precisely so that they can do our thinking for us in moments of shock or grief.   more »

When discussing the causes of the middle-class wage slowdown, she tends to focus not on market-based changes, like technology and trade, but on institutions, like unions and the government.

Her first priority, she said, would be changing the tax code. She has proposed tax credits for college tuition, retirement savings, health care and alternative energy use, most of which would go to lower- and middle-income families.

She would also raise the top marginal rate to 39.6 percent, its level for much of her husband’s administration. Increasing high-end tax rates would bring in $52 billion a year, her campaign says, and help pay for some of her other proposals.

“It’s shocking that there is such a continuing political pressure to lower tax rates on the wealthy, when so much of what we look back on now with nostalgia and pride.”   more »

With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you'd think that the economy is a giant clitoris. Ben Bernanke may not employ this imagery, but the immediate challenge - and the issue bound to replace Iraq and immigration in the presidential race - is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.

It would be irresponsible to say much about Bush's stimulus plan, the mere mention of which could be enough to send the Nikkei, the DAX, and the curiously named FTSE and Sensex tumbling into the crash zone again.

In a typically regressive gesture, Bush proposed to hand out cash tax rebates-except to families earning less than $40,000 a year.

This may qualify as an example of what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism," in which any misfortune can be re-jiggered to the advantage of the affluent.   more »

It’s been said that Mr. Clinton’s recent feistiness has revealed a side of him previously unknown to most Americans.

But this is incorrect: he is rather a master of what one might call “strategic emotion,” the use of tears or anger to comfort voters or intimidate the press.

During his presidency Clinton lashed out at, among others, then-ABC White House correspondent Brit Hume in 1993; reporters who continued to raise questions about his involvement with Monica Lewinsky in 1998; and the Senate Republicans who rejected the 1999 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

These days the former president’s “outbursts” serve a dual purpose: they lend the impression that Senator Clinton is the insurgent running against the media-supported Obama, while also creating the illusion that it is the former president, not his wife, who is actually the candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Far from hurting Senator Clinton — who also understands how to deploy strategic emotion, as we saw before the New Hampshire Democratic primary — former President Clinton effectively has rallied a coalition of Democrats to her cause.   more »

Democrats Pounce on Economy in Peril

With markets in freefall worldwide, economic perils consumed White House contenders Tuesday as Democrats vied to wrest the political initiative by clamoring for relief for voters.

"This is a global economic crisis," Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton warned shortly after the Federal Reserve sprung a surprise rate cut that failed to calm market jitters sparked by fears of a US recession.

She argued the US economy could "very well thrust us into a deep, long recession," and repeated her calls for action on a US mortgage crisis that has rippled worldwide.   more »