Food for thought from today's NY Times: No More Hummer Nation

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By MAUREEN DOWD
Op-ed Columnist
Published: March 31, 2009

Read the full column here: No More Hummer Nation

You know you’re in trouble when Old Europe chastises you for being too socialist. But, hey, nobody’s perfect — except maybe Michelle Obama, who landed in London with a huge Obama entourage, wearing a daffodil yellow dress and looking like a confident ray of U.S.A. sunshine.

As President Obama renegotiates the terms of American leadership this week in Europe, those of us left at home struggle to get over our affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”

The president is obviously worried about leaving us alone and under the economic weather; that must be why his Department of Health and Human Services put up some advice Tuesday on its Web site about “Getting Through Tough Economic Times.”