The Hiroshima anniversary is probably a much bigger deal to those of us who remember the moments when a global thermonuclear war seemed all too plausible. To this day, I have Cuban Missile Crisis nightmares, invariably culminating in the fiery explosions I feared as a ten-year-old who had participated in “fallout drills” registering how quickly I could get home from school to die with my family (we lived 75 miles from Atlanta, whose newspapers proudly identified it as a top target for Soviet missiles in Cuba). Very bad memories.
In any event, here are some less alarming mid-day news/views items for your consumption:
* Bill Clinton says “we are a hundred miles from that [New York mayoral] race.” Actually, it’s a bit more than that, since he spoke from Kigali, Rwanda.
* Sarah Mimms of National Journal writes interesting article on struggle of GOP to deal with “women’s outreach,” marred somewhat by excessive quotations from Kellyanne Conway, whose “advice” may be part of the problem.
* At TAP, Robert Kuttner reminds us that newspapers-as-baubles-for-billionaires problem is hardly new.
* Yglesias not real keen on Christine Quinn’s proposal for government subsidized loans to families to pay for pre-school.
* Discussion of Jim Messina’s Tory gig takes new turn with TPM piece on anti-immigrant stance of Jim’s new overlords.
And in non-political news:
* Elmore Leonard, working on his 46th novel, suffers stroke. Get well, Elmore, or we’ll all have to find new vacation reading.
Back in 1970, the Groundhogs offered a very different take from Dylan’s (or my own) on the advent of nuclear weapons:
Back before long.
