The real United States

To hear the Republican candidates tell it, the United States under President Obama has become a failed state, like Sudan, the Central African Republic, or Syria. 

E.J. Dionne in today's Chronicle:

If there is a common element in the rhetoric of all the Republican candidates, it is that Obama’s presidency is an utter disaster, and he is trying to turn us, as Rubio keeps saying, into “a different kind of country.” You’d imagine from hearing the Republicans speak (Kasich is a partial exception) that we were in the midst of a new Great Depression, had just been defeated in a war, had lost our moral compass entirely, had no religious liberty and were on the verge of a dictatorship established by a slew of illegal executive orders.

The Atlantic's James Fallows and his wife have been traveling around the country for the last two years. They saw a different country:

What Americans have heard and read about the country since Deb and I started our travels is the familiar chronicle of stagnation and strain. The kinds of things we have seen make us believe that the real news includes a process of revival and reinvention that has largely if understandably been overlooked in the political and media concentration on the strains of this Second Gilded Age...

The White House

Synthetic turf in Golden Gate Park

Photo, Michael Macor

Letter to the editor in today's Chronicle:

Synthetic turf caution

Thank you for “Concerns over synthetic turf fields not enough to keep players off them” (Feb. 16). The cancer-causing ingredients which make up this turf have been found to destroy lives. Google the subject and you will want to hug your child immediately. And to the parent who says, “I’m going to trust the system?” How’s that working out for those in Flint, Mich.? Wake up! How will you feel when, in 15 years, your 10-year old develops cancer and you knew you could have stopped it?

Curtis Lofgren

Richmond

Leaving Islam can be dangerous

See Vice.com on Leaving Islam.

Thanks to Friendly Atheist.