Friday's comment from the papers in...

Today in Times Comment

• Gerard Baker: Pretty bad – but not Jimmy Carter bad. It’s an old truth that things are never as good or as bad as they seem and so it is now
• Ben Macintyre: We once boasted an urban forest canopy; now we have city shrubberies, overpruned and understated
• Peter Riddell: 'Reconnecting' with core Labour members and voters in the party’s heartlands in the Midlands and the North is not enough
• Mary Ann Sieghart: The values of peace, love and sexual freedom are no longer alternative but mainstream
• Jane Shilling: The glories of Chelsea rest on the deep connection human beings have with the soil on which they live
• Magnus Linklater: The SNP’s energy policy shows it has not yet made the transition to a party of responsible government
• Mick Hume: Many a crowd-pleaser has risked scorched school trousers by holding a match to his ululating behind
• Ann Treneman: Patricia Hewitt is living proof that singing I Will Survive very hour on the hour can work

And from the rest of the papers…

• Polly Toynbee: (The Guardian) - Tough inspection to enforce the minimum wage would help to end workforce abuse and illegal immigration
• Simon Jenkins: (The Guardian) - Take away wind, sea and speed, and Cutty Sark is a landlocked museum. But that force of nature can again be brought to life.
• Mark Lawson: (The Guardian) - Anyone stupid enough to do a computer's bidding is not losing civil liberties so much as their marbles
• Dominic Lawson: (The Independent) - There is something sinister in the way that the Auditor General is now being vilified
• Joan Bakewell: (The Independent) - Don't live in fear - set the people free
• Matthew Norman: (The Independent) - Demise of our latter-day Kissinger
• Zac Goldsmith: (The Daily Telegraph) - I hope that communities around the country will find the inspiration to take on over-mighty corporations and unelected bureaucrats over planning law
• Denis MacShane: (The Daily Telegraph) - The incoming Prime Minister is not living up to the Conservatives' expectation that he would be an easy skittle to knock over
• WF Deedes: (The Daily Telegraph) - While the presentation may have been badly thought-out, I’m in little doubt that David Cameron is right when it comes to grammar schools

And from around the world…

• Peggy Noonan: (The Wall Street Journal) - Open borders? Mass deportations? How about some common sense instead?
• Tawfik Hamid: (The Wall Street Journal) - The latest survey of American Muslims won't reassure their fellow citizens
• Paul Muldoon: (New York Times) - The routing of a busy road slap bang through the Tara-Skryne Valley north of Dublin represents an act of vandalism with not only national, but international, ramifications
• Stephane Marchand: (Le Figaro - France) - Juppe and the environmental revolution
• H. D. S. Greenway: (International Herald Tribune) - It would be a mistake to describe the Turkish secularists as uniformly democratic, some are anti-Europe, and would be happy to see the army step in and sweep Islam out of Parliament

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Gerard Baker is right that Americans have the ability to reinvent themselves. The wish to make it new is strongly ingrained in the country, in many areas and particularly in economic and technological matters.
I do remember the 15% inflation of the 1970s, the highest in the last four decades. It took a bruising rise in the interest rate, brought about by the Federal Reserve, to reverse it.
Jimmy Carter and the senior George Bush have been the only one-term Presidents in the last 30 years. Reagan and Clinton had a second term, as does George W.Bush.