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guardian.co.uk — A picture of the man who has come to embody the inequities of Greece's financial crisis has begun to emerge, with friends and neighbors shedding light on the life of the elderly pensioner who killed himself in Athens on Wednesday. Named as Dimitris Christoulas by the Greek media, the retired pharmacist was described as decent, law-abiding, meticulous and dignified. The 77-year-old had written in his one-page, three-paragraph suicide note that it would be better to have a "decent end" than be forced to scavenge in the "rubbish to feed myself". "With his suicide he wanted to send a political message," Antonis Skarmoutsos, a friend and neighbor was quoted as saying in the mass-selling Ta Nea newspaper. "He was deeply politicized but also enraged."

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robertreich.org — The returns aren’t all in yet on today’s Republican primaries but President Obama didn’t wait. He kicked off his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney with a hard-hitting speech centered on the House Republicans’ budget plan – which Romney has enthusiastically endorsed. Here’s what the President had to say about it: "Disguised as a deficit reduction… it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism." We are likely to hear a lot more about social Darwinism in the months ahead.

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prospect.org — If there was a question President Obama tried to answer with his speech this afternoon to the Associated Press, it was this—“what happened to the Republican Party?” And to that end, he marshaled evidence from a century of political history to show that today’s Grand Old Party is dangerously unmoored from the American consensus, with a budget proposal that amounts to “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” To a large degree, Obama’s speech was filled with the frustration of liberals who see the extent to which the Republican Party has rejected the notion of a government that works positively within the economy. Obama’s challenge is to convince the public that Republicans would continue on that path if elected to office. At the risk of sounding too certain, I think he can do it.

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newdeal20.org — The way to talk about the purpose and value of government and be persuasive is simply to tell the truth. This has been in short supply over the last generation. To the contrary, government has been demonized in much discourse. It has at least, to coin a new verb, been “skepticized.” Trust in government now is very low. But trust in government has been falling on balance since the late 1960s and took an especially large hit in the 1970s. The nation hasn’t truly regained its confidence in it ever since. In fact, the nation has been vulnerable to mythology and misinformation that has seriously damaged America’s future. There are many such myths, but the primary one is that any social program or any increase in government spending dampens economic growth. It is simply not true.

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