The Public Servant

That Anniversary Again

2011-11-22T12:35:00.003-05:00

This was originally published here in 2009:

It means only one thing to those of us of a certain age. It was the day of days, the event of our national lives. That it no longer is the focus of every succeeding November 22 tells us that one day even September 11 will pass without substantial notice. Yet whether cable television devotes every moment to reliving a national nightmare, its importance remains the same and, as Mad Men showed so well a few weeks back, any recollection of that day can trigger many floods, even among those who, unlike some of us, were very, very young that day.

Yes, I was called up short when Mad men's creator, Matt Weiner, mentioned that not everyone knows that Oswald was murdered only a few days after the President was killed, since there is no American who was over five years old at the time who doesn't remember that and the sense, at that very minute, that we had spun completely out of control exactly as Mad Men reminded us.

And, yes, Mad Men was also right in the sense that the world just ended that day and began again, with different values, different history, and different rules. The guilt and sadness over the death of our young President resulted, it is true, in the seminal legislation of our time, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, respectively, and medicaid and medicare also in 1965. But the spirit of the era was gone and gone, it seemed, forever.

Ask not what your country can do for you: ask what you can do for your country.

That sense of obligation to our fellow citizens, the articulation of the underpinning of Roosevelt's New Deal but now in the hands of

a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world

President Kennedy's death marked the end of an era, not the beginning he had promised us and his hopeful ideals for the country were replaced, first, by the war in Vietnam, followed by the war on the Great Society and then of the New Deal itself. The election of President Obama is the first thing that has happened since then which provides even a hint that we can get back on the path President Kennedy set for us.

But as much as Matt Weiner offered a reminder of how many people have no recollection of November 22, 1963, a diary on Daily Kos the other day shows that the path to darkness remains before us as well. We live in a time when a person with a Jewish sounding last name who blogs about the limits of Sarah Palin's appeal receives an email about "Why People Like to Stuff People Like You into Ovens." This is the combustible atmosphere that existed in 1963. Deny that at your own peril.

The diarist advised that we not fear the people who are out there---the "crazies" as Regina Spektor calls them---and that advice is worth trying to heed, but it will not be easy.

Over and over the reminders take over this space.

We are living in a time when a doctor providing abortions is murdered and people cheer or try to justify it.

We are living in a time when elected officials can appear on Meet the Press and justify threats of violence and even the overthrow of our government and are not hooted into an apology or oblivion.

We live in a time when a man proudly brags about the gun he brought to a rally where the President of the United States was speaking and yet this incident gets less coverage than whether some guy tried to hoodwink cable tv (big woop) by claiming his boy was in a balloon.

We live in a time when people are "praying" for the President of the United States hoping for his death.

We live among hate.

Hate cost us a president and almost two generations of progress. It is countenanced today by people who should know better and there appear to be nobody or very few in the Republican Party willing to speak out against it, the way the otherwise racist William F. Buckley did against the John Birch Society

or even Sen Prescott Bush spoke out against, tepidly, the "methods" used by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his anti-Communist crusades.

Part of this day, as every November 22 since 1963, will be spent mourning our late President, but the day should also be dedicated to never allowing this hatred to change our world again.

From Occupying Parks to Changing the World

2011-11-19T10:49:00.001-05:00

Keith Olbermann was, for once, apoplectic. They were doing it again!!! The reactionary forces of the staus quo were at it again, sending the police after The People, intolerant of their cries of anguish and of their mission. It was the Edmond Pettus Bridge again, Haymarket, the Moratorium Against the War, all wrapped into one. And now, nobody would sleep on the slab of concrete off Liberty Street, between Church and Broadway a place laughingly called Zuccotti Park.

To Others, watching the mish mash of political activists, people with nothing much else to do, tourists, Ron Paul libertarians, anarchists, artists, self described journalists as assorted passersby, and wondering what it all means, it was time to move on, so to speak. The Village Voice, which has seen a protest or two in its time, front paged an article just before the onslaught which described

A recent Wednesday night in Zuccotti Park: A woman was hit in the face, an EMT broke his leg trying to break up a fight, and a drunk guy with facial tattoos tried to burn an American flag. People blasted tracks from Watch the Throne, the unofficial One Percent Album of the Year, while four or five brawls broke out over the course of two hours. Everyone was doing everything at once: fighting, eating, dancing, sleeping, smoking.
Everything except demonstrating against our country's financial status quo, which is the occupation's raison d'être.

It has been heartening, of course to see the sleeping giant start to stir. It was a bit scary when people were galvanized to break up meetings discussing whether there might be a better way to insure our citizens against financial catastrophes brought on by illness, was met by indifference or lengthy mourning for a pop star who died under circumstances that some saw as mysterious. It was awfully disheartening when all the people who demanded change in 2008, decided that if their dreams could not be realized in two years, voting was no longer worthwhile and stayed home, with disastrous consequences.

We wondered where these people were when the money that rules Congress demanded no further talk of a "public option," much less a Medicaid/Medicare for all single payer health care system. We asked why, with all the support for change, the new administration was unable to muster support for a second New Deal, but only a tepid program of "stimulus."

But better late than never. Here they are. They are sick of this. We are the 99, they tell us. But some of them also say things like this:

"The point is, we're holding Wall Street accountable because voting for politicians doesn't work"

we cannot win from within the political system. So we have no choice but to go outside it

It's revolution or nothing. Music to those for whom the political system is nothing more than a vehcile to do for those who contribute to their political campaigns. Why read newspapers? They are the tool of machine. Our wisdom, which we obtain by blogging to one another and, seeing the consensus that emerges, assume that these views are the correct ones and the ones than anyone would hold if they only thought about it.

Yet, one look at page one of today's New York Times and something more important, more useful than setting up permanent tents under an imposing black building, and something that would mean something to the "1%" seems obvious:

toward the bottom of the page:

Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census

and smack in the middle of the page:

Vilifying Rival, Wall St. Rallies for Senate Ally

Don't think these stories are related? Think again. Why does "Wall Street" fear Elizabeth Warren? Who are these "New Poor" and who is speaking for them? Senator Brown? OWS?

There a plenty of places in Massachusetts to pitch a tent. Maybe Walden Pond? And while you are there the town you will be in is called Concord. An OWS of sorts started there, too. The shots fired there started something, though, and was not an end to itself.

Listen: electing President Obama was a baby step. Nothing more. The Senate was not controlled by people trying to do what needs to be done: it has people who said they were Democrats, but who voted as if they were Republicans, and, in any event, the rules of the body were perverted to prevent anything from happening unless 60% of the body agreed. We need to do better; not for those who want change to make noise, sleep in public parks and believe that chanting one another's words to each other will alter the world in which we live.

It, too, was a baby step. A very important one. Electing Elizabeth Warren would be a bigger one. Go forth, please, and make the world a better one.

11s across the board

2011-11-11T11:20:00.002-05:00

It was, of course, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month that the war to end all wars ended in a stalemate that somehow also radically transformed the world. Since that turned out so well, we used to celebrate a day we called Armistice Day and now call Veteran's Day:http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb3xh5_paul-simon-armistice-day_music

Paul Simon - Armistice Day by johnnyfnc

It is also a day to thank those who have served our country

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

and, well, Regina's 11:11 is an excellent record, http://www.amazon.com/11-eleven/dp/B000QQYJQY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321021284&sr=8-1, and can be heard almost entirely, here

Still No Time to Post

2011-10-30T10:03:00.002-05:00

but these links may give someone who has time to blog, an idea for writing something which this public servant cannot

Wednesday Times, up top, column 1

same front page, just below the second lead

Thomas Friedman, October 30, 2011

A post from the past

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Things to Think About

2011-10-16T09:11:00.003-05:00

No time to blog so, instead, just a few reminders of comments past and references to things you might find interesting:

Such as this:

1. Occupation Wall Street. It's about time but you have to wonder where these people were in November, 2010. If you decide that voting is not worth the effort, your complaints about politicians truly fall on deaf ears. (If, by the way, you think Ron Paul makes sense, or that substituting a flat (or 9-9-9) tax for the progressive income tax is a good idea, you are just a dupe of the people against whom you are supposedly protesting.)

We have, on these pages wondered where you were and discussed how the recipe for change is clear but not something that can fit on a banner (see below for the closest facsimile thereof), but two years after it was first posted here there is now evidence that big trouble could be ahead:

Nothing less than our very system of government is at stake. We are watching the spectacle of a Congress beholden to the contributors who make possible their continued hold on office unable to respond to the call of a vast majority to reform health care, to protect our posterity from the doomsday path on which we have placed our nation and to regulate wizards of finance whose obsession with their self-interest have put the financial security and well being of the rest of us in permanent jeopardy. This is a recipe for disaster all by itself and placed side by side with the fact that we are no longer able to have civilized discourse over opposing views, the future looks bleak indeed....

This is playing with fire, folks. An unresponsive government acting on behalf of its benefactors instead of the people who vote cannot last long. It can last while people are sleeping---which they are---or while they are obsessed by cable driven foolishness about a helium balloon)---which they are, but then something happens and people wake up, though sometimes not for very long. This is playing with fire, folks. An unresponsive government acting on behalf of its benefactors instead of the people who vote cannot last long. It can last while people are sleeping---which they are---or while they are obsessed by cable driven foolishness about a helium balloon)---which they are, but then something happens and people wake up, though sometimes not for very long.

2. Rigged Elections. After a similar period of radio silence, your faithful blogger returned in August 2009 with a rant about how the electoral system is so broken by the way campaigns are financed that nothing is more important, and seems unlikely to be fixed. Lawrence Lessig's plan, as discussed on Rachel Maddow and in a book he has written presents a lovely pipe dream, but since members of a constitutional convention would be elected in the same way that we have destroyed Congress, it seems unlikely this presents the answer.

His other idea, though, to give voters enough money to compete with special interests might have merit. Something has to give folks or we are sunk: Watch this from Rachel and see what they have in store for the rest of us.

3. Values. Maybe they are right after all. This while thing is a struggle for whose values should shape the country. When you look at it that way, and you know your own values and cannot understand theirs, the impossibility of reconciling these two views becomes very clear.

It was hard for a Jew to not have some of those thoughts while listening to the rituals of our High Holy Days (and observing that the "Values Voters summit" was held in Washington on Yom Kippur, effectively excluding Jews whose "values" might be different.

Still, it is hard to hear the traditional prayers of the season without seeing the disconnect between the two sides of political thought as almost a religious war. Some of us are New Dealers at heart; others see themselves as rugged individualists, in need of no government in their quest for fortune.

And then, we say this:

We pray that all creation will take up Your promise of justice and tolerance....

We shall not hate others; we shall love our neighbors as ourselves. We shall consider the strangers among us as our own...

Teach us more and more to respond to the pain of others, to heed Your call for justice...

In the days to come, we will turn outward and take care of the world around us. We will turn toward each other and foster peace within the human family. We will turn inward and seek wholeness within our souls...

If this is a clash of religious philosophies, hearing an opposing view will be very interesting. It is hard to imagine that people who claim to represent religious thought, believe that a mission to impose one's sense of morality trumps any sense of connection with the rest of humanity.

But prayer works best as a reminder of higher callings. ;It cannot be an end to itself. "No one's laughing at God when they're starving or freezing or so very poor" as Regina Spektor puts it, but prayer alone feeds nobody or makes them warm.

Neither does marching.

But both can help to focus the mind.

Fall, we hardly knew ye

2011-09-29T08:18:00.001-05:00

Winter commenced with a bang this year. Not quite the bang of 1978 or 2003 when somebody deposited a ball outside the confines of a playing field to bring on the new season of despair and snow, but these are distinctions of little significance. The 1978 one came as some of us celebrated the new year on a different calendar than the one we usually use. Same today.

But, as the last actual Commissioner of Baseball has explained to us, there is no use in mourning its inevitable arrival. He was speaking of another lost season, but it could have been this one, too:

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Quick Hits

2011-09-24T08:09:00.005-05:00

This weekend and next are not going to present enough time to thumbsuck through the many issues which should be discussed here, so, with a tip of the hat to the late, great Jimmy Cannon, herewith a few paragraphs to enrage a few and, perhaps, interest a few others:

1. Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee even though his party despises him, and rest of us can not listen to him for five minutes without wanting to scream. He will not be elected president either. When the President is re-elected, therefore, seven million pontificators will kwell about his great comeback, and what it all means. But he will still be a Democrat and loathed by his opponents for that reason and because his father was black. If he can get over those things (as ridiculous they are as a reason to oppose his ideas), he will have, indeed, mounted a comeback. That seems quite unlikely.

2. They went home, read a few polls, and saw that nobody gives a rat's behind about the supposed "evils" of government spending and regulation or the deficit, and seem more absorbed with our sinking economy and the need to fix bridges, highways and schools. Nonetheless, Congress comes back and decides to have the same fight about the same stupid things and this time think that punishing people who depend on government assistance is necessary if the government is going to also assist people fix what was broken during the last serious hurricane to hit us. The phrase "out of touch" does not even begin to describe how asinine and, ultimately, destructive this is.

3. If Elizabeth Warren becomes a United States Senator in January, 2013, will she still say the things she says now? We certainly need for her to do so, since, despite her professorial background she speaks in direct and clear sentences that even the ignoramuses with whom we share this country should be able to understand: as in "nobody in this country got rich on their own."

4. By the way, on the subject of proudly stupid, your blogger is honored to see things posted here, then ridiculed, finally show up in regular columns written by people who get paid to do this.

5. If you are trying to convince people against the death penalty (something your blogger does not favor, while recognizing the right of a sovereign state to disagree unless the Supreme Court holds it to be a "cruel and unusual" punishment), don't try to convince people that Troy Davis was "innocent" unless you can show he had nothing at all to do with the death of Officer MacPhail. With minimal study of it, the issue appears to be whether Davis actually pulled the trigger when the officer was shot, and that, perhaps, the identity of the specific shooter is relevant under Georgia law at least for the imposition of the death penalty. There appears to be no question, though, that he was with others, with whom he acted "in concert" (as the law likes to say) and that Officer MacPhail was killed while preventing Davis and others from doing whatever they were doing to a homeless man. That governments should not be in the business of killing people is one thing; to say that Davis was "innocent" is quite another.

6. On another issue which might enrage a few people, the Jewish person writing this stuff continues to be amazed at how Israel is portrayed in reference to people who have never once accepted the idea of a "Jewish state" to exist within the sliver of land allocated to it now referred to as "1967 borders with mutually agreed to land swaps." It is hard to see how declarations of statehood are going to bring peace when President Abbas describes the "Holy Land" as the birthplace of "Christianity and Islam" pointedly omitting the reference to one other religion. The current administration of the Israeli government, and their cozying up to reactionary forces in our country deserves much of the criticism it receives, but if having a less than ideal government warranted all that people seem to want to drop on Israel, fairness suggests that the United States should have been dismembered at least during the Bush Administration.

7. John Lackey is flat out terrible, and worse yet, does not seem to notice that. Carl Crawford has been a grievous disappointment though there is reason hope that a second season in Boston might be better. With a now very poor rotation, Youkilis injured and the bullpen overworked, the prospects for a good postseason, assuming hte Red Sox get that far (they will) are not very good. On the other hand, the 2004 team was down, as we always note, 0-3 in the ALCS, and the 2007 team down 1-3 in the ALCS that year, and were far less than perfect teams which won a world championship. Anything is possible. What is certain is that Terry Francona is an excellent manager, the best the Red Sox have had in the 54 years they have occupied much of the concerns of at least one guy. To try to pin this nightmarish September on him is beyond absurd.

8. It is absurd in the same way as people who saw nothing wrong in Vice President Cheney's company making money off a war commenced by bait and switch tactics and fearmongering, who now want to take the President to task because the government tried to help a company that went bankrupt, render inadequate the word chutzpah (pronounced anyway you want it). Similarly, the people who say that it is time to stop blaming the Bush Administration for our national and international economic crisis either know better and just say this stuff for political advantage, or are way too idiotic to take seriously.

That's all for now. Happy New Year to those who celebrate it.

My John Raitt story

2011-09-19T19:22:00.000-05:00

(If Facebook allowed it, a friend would have posted this on a page devoted to John Raitt, and asking people to post memories of him.)

All right. Here's mine, though, slightly embarrassing. In 1971 or 1972, shortly after that first beautiful record came out, I went to see Bonnie play at what used to be called "Cafe Au Go Go" on Bleecker Street. (It wasn't called that anymore, but I don't remember its name at the time. She played on a bill with a band called Goosecreek Symphony. The things you remember....). Bonnie was hardly known outside of Cambridge at the time. I heard the record actually on the late great WCAS in Cambridge, and played it incessantly on the college radio station at the school I was in then.

So, I sat down in this dingy place, next to a distinguished looking man, much older than most people there. (When I go to see, say, Regina Spektor or Jenny Owen Youngs, these days, I am that older guy, so it seems less notable today than it did then.) I spoke to the man, who could not have been nicer, and he was, one could tell, a huge fan of Bonnie Raitt.

I either realized who he was or was told who he was about ten minutes before I left but was way too out of my league at that point to say anything to him. I wish I did. (I also wish someone would post him and Bonnie singing Anything You can Do, which is the best version of that I have ever heard.)

Tikkun Olam

2011-09-17T12:42:00.002-05:00

The past few weeks said much about who we are, what kind of people we are and how we see our country and our mission. It included, of course, the need to have our attention brought back to the day when we were attacked as a people and as a nation, and all of that caused many to both weep for what we lost that day, and for the mistakes and waste that followed.

These weeks also have encompassed, maybe illustrated better than ever, the vastly different views that many of us hold, from those of a large number of our fellow citizens. In short order we have seen audiences applaud one presidential candidate for the large number of executions his state has undertaken since he became its Governor, and another suggest that a person without medical insurance who suddenly is in a coma, be allowed to die as a consequence.

We are told that liberals want a "mommy state" and that the government that does the least is the best government there can be. We are all on our own. Regulations should be curtailed. If you want to eat food, you just have to be careful and take your chances. If it is true that this view can elect a president and a Congress, then we are no longer the United States of America. We are just random individuals sharing space.

It is hard to believe we have sunk so low.

Last weekend, for instance, was very difficult for many people. Many of those people suffering lost nobody from their family or a specific loved one, but still it hurt.

For others, it must have seemed to be a bit much.: It's been ten years after all. Maybe for those in the northeast, from Boston from where the planes left, to Virginia, where the Pentagon was attacked, and other buildings (and people) likely spared by the heroism of the passengers on one of the flights, it hurts more than in other places. It was overwhelming, though, in a way that, say, the tenth year after President Kennedy's murder, which fell right in the middle of the Watergate crisis, was not.

If music helps one through moments such as this sad one, there was quite a bit around that did the trick. Most notable, beyond question, was Paul Simon's so heartbreaking version of the Simon & Garfunkel song of our youth, The Sounds of Silence, sung by Paul alone, in a baseball cap and near tears throughout, at the Trade Center itself. It is one of those songs forever changed by this new context. It will never be the same again

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

There was, of course, so much more in the air. One was John Platt's Sunday Breakfast on the radio station owned by Fordham University in the Bronx, WFUV. The link posted here will only last about a week for reasons that are outrageously absurd but will have to be the subject of a post on another day, but the 9/11 program is well worth hearing (as, really, all of Platt's shows are, but this one more than others). It was not the trite maudlin easily expected music to hammer home whatever message of the day was supposed to be enforced, but a beautiful, diverse collection of songs which said all that had to be said. As John pointed out, there was more---much more---that might easily have fit into the three hours, but it is hard to quarrel with most of what he was able to squeeze in.

Toward the end of the program, John played this (not the video, of course, but the music) sung by Ellen Bukstel and written by her, Bonnie Reiter-Lehrer, Nick Annis and Paul Hoyle

These are the words of that day, but they are the story of our time as well.

Yes, the first two words are in Hebrew and they are particularly familiar to Jews of a certain stripe. (Perhaps not the fools who think that "teaching the President a lesson" by electing a Republican to Congress is a good idea. Others).

But the idea that "We are one people. We are one heart. Tikkun olam. Repair the world" is the essential difference in political philosophies. To those who say: "He has no insurance so let him die. She has no bridge, so let her build one. He wants his children to be educated, then let him teach them. She has no job but that matters not to me" we have our answers:

we now realize, as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take, but we must give as well

and

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Tikkun olam. Repair the world.

This is what these days are all about. Can we see that repairing roads and schools far from where we live enrich our own lives, or do we see this as just some government handout to the people who scream the loudest? Do we see the government putting money in the economy by hiring people to do things for the benefit of us all. to rise all boats---to put money out there that might be spent on a car, and support the salaries of people who might build that car, or do we see this as the product of a government that does not know how jobs can best be made?

Do we demand that government stand by while people die. Do we see government's purpose in how many people it can put to death? Or do we have a different vision for our people and our country?

Tikkun olam. Repair the world.

We will see in the year to come.

Nine, Eleven (Updated)

2011-09-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

There are many things worth writing about this week such as whether some imposter has been masquerading as the President, before the actual guy returned the an evening ro so ago (or, perhaps, whether the imposter was the guy who gave the speech the other night). Were it not This Weekend, it would also be worth writing about someone whose postings were always worth reading, even when some other blogger would challenge some provocative thing he said, but who suddenly left us this week.

There is nothing on earth that would allow this blogger to write about anything other than the events of ten years ago. It is hard to remember how and where, but something appeared somewhere that bleated from my electronic pen about how the time had come for presidents to do something other than kiss babies. The idea that the President was doing a photo op while my former workplace was being destroyed seemed to be a monumental failure. In the days and weeks that followed, those views were hardened, especially when some fool tried to claim that nobody could have imagined terrorists hijacking airplanes to fly into buildings, something demonstrably false.

Time is so jumbled up, but the episodes of West Wing where the President just abandons what he is supposed to be doing, in the wake of an emotional visit to the victims of some natural disaster, has forever seemed to express my view of how the presidency and national leadership has been confused with the requisites of public relations and politics. Someday, maybe, a blog can be written about that.

For now, the most that can be said from this post, was said last year. What follows is that, again, slightly edited:

----
Nine, Eleven

Someday those words will not mean what they do today. Even with Mad Men's searing retelling of it, November 22 comes and goes these days with very little mention. Even December 7, 1941, which I did not live through, but once held strong meaning, seems to have lost its emotional force and if our parents remember where they were when they heard of President Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945, (most of) the rest of us have not taken notice for decades.

My own story of 9/11 is not worth mentioning again. I lost my next door neighbor, and while friends lost loved ones, I lost colleagues.

The first office I could call my own was in Two World Trade Center. It was an odd thing to have your office looking over your shoulder almost everywhere you would go in the city in which I lived. When we moved across the street in the late 1980s, it stayed behind me all the time, and I continued to commute through the Trade Center until about two years before That Day.

Its memory will never cease to bring me to my knees, not in prayer necessarily, or in supplication, but in the force of its horrible terror.

What nine years has done, though, is allowed perspective. On that horrible day, the thought that ran through my head was that the reduction of politics and government to sound bytes, photo ops and feeding the beast of the broadcast media had led to so many deaths because protecting us was now subordinate to fluffery. I learned shortly thereafter, that, indeed, President Bush was reading a book to schoolchildren for a photo op as the Trade Center was under attack and it was many months before we learned of how annoyed he was a month earlier when told of the imminent danger facing our country.

That he was not forced to resign immediately after that became known remains, for me, evidence that we have not learned from our mistakes. That somehow the Republican Party may take control of the United States Congress shows how empty our politics have become. I read the diary of a direct survivor of the attack of that day and just shuddered.

But today, as I hear those names again: a former Boston Bruins defenseman, my next door neighbor, the son of a friend, the brother of another friend, the husband of a woman who has become, at least in someways, a hero to me, the husband of another woman with whom I worked, who has remarried, but will always have a sadness around her, it seems to me that it is time to retire once and for all expressions such as "Ground Zero."

The name of the place is the World Trade Center: "the Trade Center" to those of us who have come and gone from there so many times. I have been there since, taking the train that runs from Hoboken athat used to be the final and first leg of my daily commute. The name of the station to which it runs was and is called the World Trade Center, and, except for a few months right after 9/11/2001, it has gone right into the Trade Center just as it has since the early 1970s.

Ground Zero sounds like a military site, and the Trade Center was, and is, anything but. In fact, that is the whole point. It is a place where people went to work or traveled through on the way to work. Tourists came to eat at the restaurant on the top of 1 WTC (those "north tower" and "south tower" expressions are from those who do not know the area. Most of us knew the buildings by their address.) It was not a military base, nor a legitimate target for anyone. The people who died there were, for the most part, people who simply went to work and those who tried to rescue them.

And it is right to celebrate, finally, the restoration of the Trade Center as a place where people go to work again. My heart sings every time I see the buildings, more beautiful than the fairly pedestrian ones they are replacing, arise once again.

Those who want to use that other expression, the transformation of the Trade Center into nothing more than the site of an attack or the place itself as a monument to hate should be ashamed of themselves. Its use in a political commercial should assure that the candidate who "approved of this message" be defeated, if not reviled.

Somedays

2011-09-10T19:24:00.001-05:00

The version that has the most meaning to me cannot be embedded and so, as we approach that horrible tenth anniversary, there is simply this link

The song is a sad one, and the version here is sadder still, sung by Regina Spektor while in mourning for her friend, the cellist Dan Cho, who had drowned a few days earlier.

But there is something about this song, and not the use of the words "downtown" though maybe that is one of the reasons, that makes me think of that day, the place where I once worked, and the people I knew who lost their lives that day. And I will listen to it at least a half dozen times before going back to work on Monday.

The lyrics are here.

Why Newspapers Matter

2011-09-06T13:34:00.002-05:00

so much hogwash will appear in them this week, but yet, every once in awhile, something such as this pops up.

Sheer Poetry; and worth a subhead

2011-09-05T09:46:00.002-05:00

Buses are not replacing Port Jervis trains, but simply transporting people to Ramsey to jam on NJ Transit trains making interminable New Jersey stops. It was maddening.

Who is this guy?

Judy Rife did a great job on this story, and jogged NJT a bit, I suspect, but her interviewee needs more than hurricane to get him on a bus. (I happen to know that he drove to Ramsey). As a result of NJT's newspaper inspired modifications, he may give them another chance tomorrow.

Something Near and Dear to Me

2011-09-04T20:26:00.004-05:00

We got beat up in the part of the Hudson Valley from where these scribblings emanate, but, aside from a broken railroad, none of it directly involves your blogger. Other people around here and to the north were not so lucky. Hence, this link, to which we were alerted by a close friend. The music is, I am certain, great, given the many names on this thing which are recognizable to this hipster.

Me, My, Mine

2011-09-03T08:54:00.005-05:00

Admit it. Many of us never really accepted the presidency of the person inaugurated in January, 2001. This blog, or whatever it was we did back then, insisted on referring to the occupant of the White House as "President" Bush since how he came to occupy that office was so bizarre and so wrong.

Still, when the country was attacked later that year, we turned to the only President there was and some of us even applauded at the speech he delivered to a joint session of Congress a week or so later (even if we thought of the speech more the product of Michael Gerson, and only reasonably well delivered at that.) We wanted a President that week and he was the only one available.

The current President was, in dramatic contrast, duly and fairly elected. He won states Democratic candidates had not won for many years, and his margin of victory in some states approached and vastly exceeded in several significant places the generally accepted definition of a landslide (winning 60% of the votes cast). Somehow, though, and we know why, his presidency has been rejected by those who did not support his candidacy.

The disrespect shown to, the hostility to and the direct rejection of President Obama has been there since almost the beginning. He is foreign, he is disloyal, he is (omigod) a Muslim (or he's not "as far as I know"). He is referred to by public officials as "Obama" and sometimes, "Barack" and not "the President" or "President Obama," making a mockery of the close friends of the man who became President in November, 1963, who refused to call the man they knew as "Lyndon" as anything but "Mr. President" or President Johnson.

And now we have the most incredible of them all. The President asks to speak to a joint session of Congress about the most pressing issue before the country today and the Speaker refuses to invite him. Something about important votes that night, or security considerations. ("Ummm, sorry Frank. I know the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor yesterday, but you haven't given us much notice. Maybe you could come later in the week?")

There was a debate scheduled that day? Put it off. Delay it an hour (it is being held on the west coast where 6pm would be a better time than 5pm anyhow). The President wants to speak to a joint session. There is only one answer to that request. Even if he were "President" Bush. Especially if he is President Obama.

And, of course, the President gave in. He always does. He was not born in Kenya, but he grew up in Hawaii. They do not flip the bird at drivers who cut them off in Hawaii, but, of course, drivers to not cut one another off in Hawaii.

Here, on the mainland, we revel in how mean we can be to one another. The Majority Leader of the United States House of Representatives, ostensibly representing people whose homes, lives and jobs were ravaged further by a natural disaster announces that whatever assistance the government can provide them will have to be offset by cuts to programs which assist other people . The Congresswoman who purports to represent the district where these words are written chimes in with the same message, and then denies it when angry victims of a terrible storm (aided by a foolish decision to try to protect them from the noise caused by traffic) question her about priorities and loyalty.

Put all the spin on this that you want. They didn't say it has to be offset now or the real issue is whether the government should continue to pay for research into developing an electric car. We know better, because you have told us your views of government, ad nauseum: You want it to keep the Canadians on their side of the border and otherwise shrink it to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. You do not like government helping other people with what you consider to be your money even if it was "your money" and the chicanery you employed to get that money, which threatened to send people into the streets without their homes and children to go to bed hungry.

Me, my, mine. The mantra of those who have and want more. Why should they have to pay taxes to fund schools if their children are all grown? Why should they care if some elderly person who is not one's own parent or relative cannot afford medicine, or even food?

The New York Times waded (oh; wrong word) into a story that concerns your blogger and his neighbors, about the massive destruction of our commuter railroad, something essential to many who commute from Orange and Rockland Counties north, and importantly, west of New York City. We are, of course, within the are that pays a sales tax to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a public agency (in that goofy New York sort of way that pretends to isolate it from politics) that operates bridges, tunnels and mass transit in the area, other than those which run between New Jersey and New York.

The issues about the MTA and its general lack of regard to its west of the Hudson customers are not worth discussing here, at least today. what is worth reading, though, are many of the comments below it: the brutish, piggy nastiness of the Santelli/Cantor crowd whose mantra is that if it is not important to me, it is not important.

Try, for instance, "Bill"'s announcement that he does not approve of the choice others made as to where to live:

Just because you can travel a hundred miles each way for work each day, by rail or by car, doesn't mean you should.

or, "OT":

perhaps they should have considered more carefully the risks associated with living 100 miles from their place of work.

or, the guy from South Carolina who describes us as

commuters who wish to continue their lifestyle of big city wages and small town expenses

Well, Bill, it is 55 miles each way for me. Maybe the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is not really necessary as with some of the subway stops in residential portions of Brooklyn. How come some of us pay a toll to cross into and out of Manhattan, but the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges are free? Whose idea was it to build two new large office buildings at the World Trade Center?

And, Mr. Cantor, or Mr. South Carolina, tell me how the people in your states would fare were it not for a military establishment we pay for with our taxes. Nobody has the right to live in the confederacy and take advantage of wealthier states who subsidize their life style.

No. Let's not go there. This is the debate that was largely inaugurated by the New Deal.

It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in and parts of the United States of America -- a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer....

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize, as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take, but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward

To some people this is an evil socialism. To others it is the only way that government can properly function. There is, Mr. President, no middle ground in this debate much as you love trying to find one. The pigs among us always want one thing: what is good for them personally and immediately. They compare the federal government to running a private household because that make sense to them. The federal government has no responsibility beyond their individual needs.

So, as Jon Stewart so perfectly explained it, here and here and even "moderate" blogs are starting to notice, a war on the poor---why, they have refrigerators and dare to consider themselves poor---is just what one would expect from the me, my mine crowd. They are not poor, after all, so what's the big deal?

The rest of us, the vast majority of us, know better. If Pat Robertson and Michelle Bachmann see the hurricane as a sign from God, maybe it is God's way of saying that the stimulus being proposed is way too small. Here is a hurricane which will require that you spend more money fixing up what you had and, in the meantime, create a few jobs for people who desperately need them.

And we know this, as President Kennedy explained to the people of Arkansas in October, 1963:

which is more wasteful: the waste of life and property and hope or a multi-purpose project which can be used by all of our people? Which is more wasteful: to fail to tap the energies of that river, to let that water flood, to deny this chance for the development of recreation and power, or to use it and to use it wisely? Which is more wasteful: to let the land wash away, to let it lie arid, or to use it and use it wisely and to make those investments which will make this a richer State and country in the years to come?

These projects produce wealth, they bring industry, they bring jobs, and the wealth they bring brings wealth to other sections of the United States. This State had about 200,000 cars in 1929. It has a million cars now. They weren't built in this State. They were built in Detroit. As this State's income rises, so does the income of Michigan. As the income of Michigan rises, so does the income of the United States. A rising tide lifts all the boats and as Arkansas becomes more prosperous so does the United States and as this section declines so does the United States. So I regard this as an investment by the people of the United States in the United States.

Choose a side, Mr. President. We know you have, but that you don't like having to do so. We will be listening whenever you are permitted to address them and when all the Santellis and Boehners and Cantors and McConnells start whining, we will know better.

Libya

2011-08-22T13:12:00.002-05:00

What we are seeing today is, of course, one way to go.

The other would be this Times editorial at the time said this,

Post Partisanship

2011-08-20T10:46:00.002-05:00

A friend, not usually one to be overtaken by excessive enthusiasm,said, during the few days after the 2008 election, that it meant that the United States was finally entering the post-racial period we thought might come about after the end of the civil war, after Brown v Board of Education, or, at the very least, after the enactment of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid 1960s and the abolition of the poll tax. We may be on our way there but, at least so far, we have not come close to that day, despite the election of President Obama.

The post-partisan era that the President believes in is not as close to the horizon and it remains uncertain whether it is such a good idea anyhow. After all, things work best when what government does is based on a robust debate about the alternatives, rather than some royal personage simply announcing what fits their fancy. What we have today is neither, though. We have, as has become increasingly obvious, rational debate trumped by made up facts, gossip, and winks and nods suggesting a knowledge of secret truths which are, actually, false. As the wise and observant Kurt Andersen put it today in the Times:

the most troubling thing about [Texas Governor Rick] Perry (and Michele Bachmann and so many more), what’s new and strange and epidemic in mainstream politics, is the degree to which people inhabit their own Manichaean make-believe worlds. They totally believe their vivid fictions.

With that as the basis of our politics, the idea that people will set aside their preconceived goals for the benefit of the country is almost absurd. One thing is clear and undebatable: talking about it does not make it so. Hence, this now oft viewed clip when the President told Mark Ambinder last December about how he expected the debt ceiling to be raised, should be seen as a lesson learned:

Look, here’s my expectation -- and I’ll take John Boehner at his word -- that nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse, that that would not be a good thing to happen. And so I think that there will be significant discussions about the debt limit vote. That’s something that nobody ever likes to vote on. But once John Boehner is sworn in as Speaker, then he’s going to have responsibilities to govern. You can’t just stand on the sidelines and be a bomb thrower.

Equally certain---or at least virtually so---is the idea that the massive stimulus fueled by government spending, "investment" as the President likes to call it, which our economy desperately needs, will not be enacted in the near future. That is what has the stock market in free fall and why Standard and Poors issued its foolish and ridiculous downgrade of the nation's credit rating. Republicans have decided that their electoral success is dependent on a poor economy and are determined to make certain that is so. After all, the New Deal prevented them from controlling any house of Congress for over forty years except for two slight blips in the 1950s. Fool me once, as a President, a fool himself, once said.

Indeed, it was former Senator Groucho Marx who famously described the basic policy of the Republican Party with respect to anything a President from the other party might propose:

So, if nothing is possible, why propose anything at all? The White House sucked all of us in the other day---including the guy scribbling this crap---by its flamboyant leak last Sunday about a supposed "debate" in the White House about doing nothing because

Mr. Obama and his aides are skeptical that voters will reward bold proposals if those ideas do not pass Congress. It is their judgment that moderate voters want tangible results rather than speeches.

This article accomplished what, at least this chastened blogger thinks, it intended. It provoked screaming, yelling and gnashing of teeth, including the ones facing this computer screen but an understanding that proposals which cannot be enacted nonetheless serve a purpose.

What we have heard so far is not, in Christine Romer's words, "cut it." Yes, it is true that much of what the President actually says and proposes does not get publicized, but the idea that an extension of the so-called "payroll tax holiday," trade agreements with foreign countries and patent law reform (whatever that is) is going to have any real impact is nothing more than a sad joke. To hear David Axelrod contentiously tell Bob Schieffer a couple of weeks back that he had listed

five things that we can do right away that would have a positive impact on the economy

based on the same tepid half measures ("infrastructure bank"?) which, though useful, are not the kind of thing we need or even want to hear, is to hear people who do not have a clue just fumbling along. Surely they have a better and bigger plan and are just low balling us until they announce it with a big flourish. Maybe the two ideas we heard floating around have some merit or would if tweaked a bit, Joe Nocera's "fund" to encourage small businesses to hire (though it has been rightly asked why, even with incentives, businesses would hire people to make and sell things when there is no market for such purchases), or the Maddow propagated Steve Benen idea to "approve" what ever stimulus crap Republican members of Congress have themselves proposed for their own districts, on the perhaps wrongheaded view that they cannot oppose what they themselves have demanded (extended perhaps to also include projects proposed by Democratic members as well). Maybe they don't have merit. Something, though, bigger and better than what we have seen needshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifo be put before us. It does.

The always crucial Rachel Maddow presented a basis for hope yet again that the President understands this. She reported that, while on vacation, the President is apparently reading Rick Pearlstein's book Nixonland (which the rest of us might read, too, were it not for the $5 more than usual price that is required to purchase it as a Kindle book). More significantly, she mentioned an article Pearlstein published in his usual haunt, Time magazine, in which he gently explains the part of his book that the President should take to heart:

It concerns the two major axes upon which major national elections get fought. Sometimes they become battles over the cultural and social anxieties that ordinary Americans suffer. Other times they are showdowns about middle-class anxieties when the free market fails. Normally, in the former sort of election, Republicans win. In the latter, Democrats do — as we saw in 2008, when the tide turned after John McCain said “the fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

Consider 1960. Even with all that famous 1950s prosperity, 1959 saw a recession. Richard Nixon blamed his defeat on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s failure to use government to subdue it. John F. Kennedy, meanwhile, enhanced New Deal programs like Social Security — and a promise to extend that legacy with Medicare was central to his appeal. People remember the U.S.’s first televised presidential debate for the contrast between JFK’s cool and a frantic and sweaty Nixon. What’s forgotten is what made Nixon so frantic: Kennedy’s unanswerable argument that Democrats had created those programs while Republicans opposed them.

Indeed. This, Mr. President, is the point. Having not yet reached the valhalla where national interest trumps partisan politics, voters expect a president who runs as a Democrat to defend what that party accomplished and to bring those programs forward. They further expect the Republican Party, the party of Ronald Reagan to oppose those efforts. You cannot rise above that cloud and it is foolish to try to do that.

You can say that thing have changed since FDR and can even claim---quite falsely---that President Kennedy was all words with nothing to show for them. Jon Stewart, though, proved all of that to be pointless. The arguments that gave the party of FDR comtrol of Congress for decades after the New Deal are quite applicable today and easy to state: Watch and this, too.

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There is little question that President Obama will be re-elected. (Oh, for shame. How can you say that? Look at his poll ratings.) Much of his declining popularity is from disaffected liberals, all of whom will vote for him when the time comes, as will independents who have seen what's going on and are not ready for any of these Republican candidates.

Unless, though, he is elected with a sweeping and real Democratic majority, which will not happen unless he explains why his election alone will not solve any of the monumental problems facing us, we will waste more time and slide further into oblivion.

Keep reading, Mr. President. You apparently read a lot of FDR books before taking office but found them to be inapplicable to our current times. It is time to reconsider that view.

Hell in a Handbasket

2011-08-14T13:39:00.002-05:00

whatever a handbasket is, or why going to hell in it is notable, this is proof that it is happening.

Where once a president, seeking re-election, said:

This Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent....

Of course we will provide useful work for the needy unemployed; we prefer useful work to the pauperism of a dole.

Here and now I want to make myself clear about those who disparage their fellow citizens on the relief rolls. They say that those on relief are not merely jobless—that they are worthless. Their solution for the relief problem is to end relief—to purge the rolls by starvation. To use the language of the stock broker, our needy unemployed would be cared for when, as, and if some fairy godmother should happen on the scene.

You and I will continue to refuse to accept that estimate of our unemployed fellow Americans. Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side.

Again—what of our objectives?

Of course we will continue our efforts for young men and women so that they may obtain an education and an opportunity to put it to use. Of course we will continue our help for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers, our insurance for the unemployed, our security for the aged. Of course we will continue to protect the consumer against unnecessary price spreads, against the costs that are added by monopoly and speculation. We will continue our successful efforts to increase his purchasing power and to keep it constant.

For these things, too, and for a multitude of others like them, we have only just begun to fight

it is now reported that

A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to create jobs and promote growth. It is clear that the House would never pass such a plan....

A series of departures has left few economists among Mr. Obama’s senior advisers. Several of his political advisers are skeptical about the merits of stimulus spending, and they are certain about the politics: voters do not like it.

So there you are.

Have a nice day.

Calling Crazy Out

2011-08-13T11:58:00.005-05:00

Guy comes back from a brief reunion with family members huddled around a beach to find that, in a week of rollercoaster rides on the stock market, brought on by what Paul Krugman aptly described as the "Wile E. Coyote moment" as we pause in our endless debate about how much to cut from our federal budget to discover that what we need is massive federal spending, the talk of the political folk is about whether Newsweek's cover unfairly portrays Congresswoman Bachmann as a crazy woman.

Jon Stewart, of course, had it right. Forget her crazy woman look---it is what she says which mark her as flat out nuts.

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But what of it? She will not be president. The White House can only dream of her as the Republican Party nominee and the party knows this. Hence, they dispatched one of their most loyal soldiers, a former National Review stalwart, to just illustrate one of the seventy-five million reasons she cannot win a national election. If it is all that important to you to know just how lost in the rhetoric of the pathetic know nothingism that has plagued our country since its founding, then try to read Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker without screaming into space. Can't be done.

The more serious issue is whether she is all that far from mainstream Republican "thought" these days. The word "thought" is put in quotation marks because thinking has little to do with it. And, yes, we need to make another reference to the Bush White House "adviser" who in 2004 told Ron Suskind that the "reality based community" just doesn't get it lest we think any of this is a passing fad.

As our economy and, perhaps more, just collapses under the weight of the two terms we allowed that administration to control the presidency, preceded by a Congress the same party led to impeach the prior president while leaving more important issues to be ignored or decided by a fealty to ignorance, the mainstream press just begins to notice what has been so for at least the 15 years since the "contract with America" was endorsed by an electorate addicted to stupidity.

So, finally, with money being lost and credit ratings downgraded, somebody---even Martin Feldstein for crying out loud---notices that maybe the focus of the deficit is a bit misguided but that the government should be trying to stimulate the economy by spending a few bucks. Yet every single Republican candidate for president appearing at the Iowa debate broadcast on their television network the other night, agreed that more cuts are necessary: even cuts ten times the amount that could be recovered from raising taxes on the most affluent among us, are not enough. They remain angry at Franklin Delano Roosevelt sixty-six years after his death for finding ways to protect Americans from the "pure market capitalism" that threatened our country when he took office, and is doing so again.

These "wise heads" suddenly noticing just how crazy these people are when they threaten to prevent the country from paying its debts---and, sadly, this includes our president (a smart man, who grew up not in Kenya, but in Hawaii, going to high school in sandals and thinking the best in people who mean nothing but...) have nothing but themselves to blame. It was only two weeks after the new President was inaugurated, for instance, that Steven Pearlstein (then a sane person) had to explain to his readers that spending is stimulus and vice versa, and to warn about

supposedly intelligent people [who] are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.

That was 2009. The same year that even before his inauguration, the President was warned that this was a time to be bold, not tepid and that with an economy then falling at least $1 trillion under its capacity

Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion [stimulus] plan. And that’s not enough.

and a few weeks later, still 2009---and on the same day as the Pearlstein column explained the English language to people obsessed with Laffer curves or something equally discredited---Paul Krugman observed that

most economic forecasts warn that in the absence of government action we’re headed for a deep, prolonged slump....Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive.

So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh

So cut the comedy, folks. Maybe it took Standard & Poor's two years (much less 15) to notice that

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as
America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective,
and less predictable than what we previously believed

but, their track record of noticing problems only after every other person in the world sees them is legendary (and, of course, none of this has much to do with the liklihood of the country defaulting on, say, T-bills).

What's everyone else's excuse? The brief rant that appeared here last week, noting that in the face of evidence that the source of the nations' growing debt (putting aside the more obvious source from the loss of revenues during in a massively declining economy) was not the FDR-inspired "entitlement programs" but unfunded wars and prescription drug programs to help drug company campaign contributors, the Chief Bloviator of what passes for "Washington Wisdom" questioned his guests, by announcing as if it were fact, that

what really drives the debt, that's entitlement spending, it's been going on this way and was a ticking time bomb since the '60s [and] we're going to solve a political problem but not the underlying fiscal problem, which is what creates our debt

Keep talking, folks. You are doing a great job. Stupid is just plain stupid and treating the stupid as if they are "the other side" of a reasoned argument is not only foolish, it is destructive. See?

Skin in the Game

2011-08-06T09:00:00.002-05:00

No time for a real post this week, so let's just do the David Gregory thing again. He has picked his side, as we have shown before and again exposed the side he has chosen, Here he is, last Sunday, helping Senator Thune, as he " debates" Sen McCaskill.

MR. GREGORY: But, Senator, what's really ludicrous to the American people, even when the American people don't always speak with one voice on this matter, is that Washington is not really dealing with what really drives the debt, that's entitlement spending, it's been going on this way and was a ticking time bomb since the '60s, and Democrats--like you were saying, "Hey, you--we can't deal with Social Security and Medicare." Republicans say, you know, sign tax pledges, that "I'm not going to raise taxes; well, we can't deal with revenues." I mean this is what's ludicrous to the American people. And even here, if we have a deal, we're going to solve a political problem but not the underlying fiscal problem, which is what creates our debt, Senator, no?

Even were he right---that "entitlement spending" meaning, I guess given the reference to the "ticking time bomb since the '60s" medicare and medicaid is the basis of our "underlying fiscal problem" or "drives the debt"---which is actually demonstrably not so, (after all, medicaid and medicare were in existence as the surplus was built in the 1990s), is this the role of the "moderator" of Meet the Press? None of his predecessors would have done so.

He is entitled to his opinion, but if that is his role should he not be balanced by a co-moderator with an opposing point of view---maybe one slightly more fact based?

No. He should just be canned and move his garbage to FOX.

Oh My God! Did you know that we are still hemmoraghing jobs?

2011-08-05T13:24:00.001-05:00

yet we still think the answer is to get government off everyone's back.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tea Party Santelli with the same answer as Herbert Hoover with as much meanness and selfishness as he can muster, still getting face time and applause from the right wing. Just google it.

Nothing is really free, is it?

2011-08-01T19:39:00.000-05:00

A friend writes the following about a book he has read called The Free World, by David Bezmozgis:

Growing up in this country, not the children of those who came here from far off lands, but their grandchildren, we heard that speech all of our lives. Tony Kushner wrote it down and it began his epic play Angels in America:

This good and righteous woman... she was not a person, but a whole kind of a person - the ones that crossed the ocean that brought with us to America, the villages of Russia and Lithuania. And how we struggled! And how we fought! For the family... for the Jewish home! Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America - you and your children, and their children with their goyische names. You do not live in America - no such a place exists. Your clay is the clay of some litvak shtetl, and your air is the air of the steppes, because she carried that Old World on her back, across the ocean, in a boat! And she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue... on Flatbush. You can never make that crossing that she made, for such great voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives, the miles - that voyage from that place to this one - you cross. Every day! You understand me? In you, that journey... is.

We never fully understood what all that meant. We were grateful for what they had done for us, and realized there was a debt we could not repay, but as off putting as that was, we felt somewhat absolved since who wouldn't want to be here, rather than there? On its own merit. Even without those of us who came later. The Soviet Union was a bad place with bad people who, if they could, would drop a bomb on us an annihilate not just we Jews, but everyone else. And the pogroms? How about that?

Yet, the way our parents felt about their own parents, the feelings they passed on to us, the sense that there was something we could do, and had to do, when suddenly it seemed possible that what Gilda Radner misheard as "Soviet jewelry" could be freed, to come here, to go to Israel for crying out loud, to be rid of that tortured land, that became our struggle. We would donate money and do whatever else we could do to free these oppressed people from the same place as our grandparents had come so many years before. In freeing them, we would become free.

Yet even as we did this, our grandparents did not seem grateful or even all that interested. And when they came, these Russians, these former Soviet citizens, did not seem at all to be like our grandparents. They had the same accent, but were different somehow. And some of them did not want to go to Israel, and others found their way not as the model citizens we thought our grandparents to be, but in organized crime. Some of them formed little communities, practicing an extremely orthodox Judaism with which we were unfamiliar, and, worse, yet, seemed intolerant of the way we celebrated what we thought to be the same faith. For this we demonstrated and collected what we called keren ami?

There are few paradoxes of the many which confront us all the time about almost everything that can be explained by anyone but a great storyteller. Only great works of fiction can come close to explaining the otherwise inexplicable, and the greatest novelists of our modern age do it through characters we can understand as complex people and not the paper thin stereotypes of our imagination.

David Bezmozgis fits that definition of the great novelist, at least from his first published novel The Free World. Bezmozgis does not answer any questions, and raises a few thousand more but his story, of the exodus of a Latvian family, mostly Jewish "by nationality" as one of them puts it, from the Soviet Union to a way station of sorts, in Rome, toward the end of the 1970s when after SALT II and before Afghanistan I, Leonid Brezhnev's government decided to allow these emigrations to take place.

Bezmozgis himself, then about six years old, was one of them but the story he tells is very rich, and not, in the main, something observed through young eyes. It is an intensely absorbing story, not simply in its linear tale, but in its descriptions of each of the adult family members and what was at issue as they made what was a perilous, difficult and unsettling journey into what is a different, if not altogether free, world.

These are the stories of real people, not cardboard stick figures, with lives and passions and history left behind, and with, at best, mixed reasons for undertaking such a move. The ostensibly free world means different things to different people and 1978 presented a different world than the one that existed in 1915. In Bezmozgis' telling, one woman, whose departure from the Soviet Union would be the product of a marriage about which she is deeply conflicted, is told by someone who knows next to none of this "If you were my daughter, I would tell you to use your ticket. Nothing is going to change here." Not exactly Emma Lazarus and yet, in the end, something that looks quite the same.

Yet, as one of the wandering Jews realizes while in the midst of his not so Roman holiday, once "life caught up with you, you could never quite shake it again. It endeavored to hobble you with greater and greater frequency. How you managed to remain upright became your style, who you were."

Characters such as those Bezmozgis allows us to meet stick with a reader, of course. The idea that the rest of their lives, after Italy, will remain a mystery, seems almost unfair. Not even a postcard?

Where are they going? Nobody in this traveling party holed up in Italy is quite certain. Someone mentions that "a fledgling community of acquaintances from Riga had settled in a town called Fehr-lon. If all else failed, they could say 'Fehr-lon' and be no worse off than anyone else."

As it happens, my own family, New Englanders born in part to refugees from the same general part of the world, were exiled to New Jersey and it was in what was then called the Reform Temple of Fair Lawn, that my keren ami was collected and where I was bar mitzvah a decade and a half before Leonid Brezhnev decided he could do with fewer Jews. We celebrated the people who came then, and later, but were quite confused when they did not quite see the connection between us. We needed a great novelist to explain, and, as it turns out, his name is David Bezmozgis.

It was, after all, John Updike, and not any historian, social scientist or newspaper columnist, who explained the restlessness and rootlessness many felt as the fifties turned into the sixties and then a decade that saw a president unmasked, gasoline suddenly subject to rationing before Egypt and Israelis agreed to some sort of peace, while Harry Angstrom started selling Japanese cars, which made him rich. And then, just as suddenly, our demand that what we believed to be the captive Jews behind some iron curtain be permitted to join us, was met. What followed was not quite what we expected, but only experts are able to predict the future with the certainty that most of us know in our hearts to be foolishness.

A few years ago, the Russian born musician, Regina Spektor, whose lyrics have long reached deeply into unexpected, even unknown places, wrote about a form of spiritual respect for a higher being that fit perfectly that nearly agnostic view of a Jew quite connected to the cultural aspects of his religion, if not the way is most severe practitioners see it. That these were the lyrics of a woman who came here when she was nine, and was educated almost---but not quite to graduation---in orthodox yeshivas, seemed contradictory or even astounding . But it is not. It is just unexpected.

Not too long ago, she was asked about why she would not want to visit Moscow, where she was born. Her explanation, with a mixture of regret that with all that her family fled---anti-semitism as much as anything else---the Russia of today would be so much more filled with the silly obsessions with the overwhelmingly trivialities so common here---what label a person's clothing displays, what fast food might be available, and all of that, made some sense when she said it, but so much more after reading this wonderful novel.

It is hard not knowing all of the answers, but knowing that people are complicated beings, and rarely do exactly what they might be expected to do is something that only a great work of fiction can explain. David Bezmozgis has written that great novel.

I don't like Mondays, particularly this one

2011-08-01T09:47:00.003-05:00

Wake up. Read Krugman. He's right, of course. The baby Conservative sharing the page with him even agrees, and writes a column which seems to have it about right, too. Small world.

Looking for comfort, but see a blog entry about Gallup polling. Exactly what we feared if the first hundred days were not the rock 'em, sock 'em stuff we needed.

While people kept saying that we ought not to take the 2008 election for granted, some of us did, but with a different warning:

Yes, I am of the "first hundred days" school. There is no question that the 100 days after March 4, 1933 changed our country, the electorate and the very way we think about the federal government in ways that still apply today. (I intend to read Alter's book during the shorter interim between election and inauguration that we have today, but this lecture is worth listening to for those who want a shorter version of the argument. And, yes, though revisionist history refuses to acknowledge it, the first 100 days of President Kennedy and of President Johnson, while not as revolutionary, perhaps, made marks on our country that resonate today as well.

So, yes, thanks, oddly to George W Bush, our time has come. He has made his mark on our country and we owe some thanks to him for showing why more competence and less ideology is necessary in the presidency. But he will not be on any more ballots and will soon become forgotten (though Hoover managed to be a useful word to campaign on as late as 1964).

The point is not to replicate the Roosevelt hundred days. That is ridiculous. The point is to change the country in a way that will command the support of a large majority of the public before the general cynicism about government takes root. It does not mean sending Dick Cheney to prison, though that may be where he belongs. There are more important things at stake.

The other day, I heard someone say that it is not the socialism that Sen Obama is accused of proposing that should concern Americans. It is the "national socialism" that we hear from Governor Plain's campaign and many of her acolytes that should concern us: the branding of some Americans as not "real Americans" and the cause of all of our problems.

Because, my friends (as Governor Roosevelt said well before Sen McCain did), "our problems" are just beginning and they may well be deep, systemic problems ameliorated, if at all, by aspects of the New Deal which still operate to protect against the worst of what we experienced from 1929 until World War II. And, World War II, lest we forget, was the natural outgrowth of what the national socialists (the Nazis in shorthand) achieved by explaining that the economic troubles facing Germans was not their fault, but that of "outsiders" even some who had been born in their country and lived among them for centuries but yet were not "Germans."

In short, bad times almost always bring out the worst in humanity.

We are headed into times which call for a Roosevelt. I hope we have found him, but only time will tell, as the bloviators used to say and should again.

Celebrate indeed on November 4, but do not fool yourself in thinking our liberation is going to come that easy. Many dark days are ahead and we will need the leadership of the best among us to get us through this.

So, today, reading the blog post about how Americans self identify themselves two plus years into this presidency all that can be said is this:

We had a chance and it was in those first hundred days, as hackneyed as that seems. That was the time to show that government can work, at a time when we were giddy about our new president and the departure of the old one.

The sixty vote people killed it, including the faux Democrats such as Ben Nelson, and the lack of fight for a large enough stimulus to change the culture as well as the economy doomed us.

Despite it all, the President was able to have a decent first two years, and to accomplish things that needed to be done, and he should be congratulated for his successes even while we bemoan the abject failure to do what needed to be done. It may not have been his fault, but though he told us he was reading all of those FDR books, he did not learn much from them.

The 100 days are important because once their over, and the usual political divisions re-emerge, the wave a new president can ride goes away and never returns. The failure to achieve something lasting, cost him, and us, in 2010, and the results of that are what we see today. Yes, elections do have consequences.

He can be re-elected, of course, which appears to be the only thing he is devoted to accomplishing henceforth, and his election will prevent even a greater slide than the one we are on now. To think this President, with all his intellect, cannot take us further and can look forward to, at best, stemming the tide for the next six years or so, is deeply saddening.

and, then, because nothing cheers one up better than a dose of West Wing dreaming, there is this, with the great Tori Amos covering the Boomtown Rats song "I don't like Mondays".

Consequences and the Truth about Them

2011-07-30T13:15:00.003-05:00

You can't say you weren't warned. It was repeated over and over again: just because there is no presidential election, does not mean that it is not as important to vote in 2010 as it was in 2008. The bleat in this space went this way:

We are at a very difficult point in our history. The moment we are in always seems more significant than those of the past, and I suspect this election, or this crossroads may not be as much a moment of decision as it seems today, but, as Rachel explained perfectly the other day, we almost seem to have lost the will to do anything but hunker down, tell each other why we don't trust one another and whimper about our broken political system.

This is not the time to put one's head in the sand, or to complain about things we wish the President had done, but did not. Dreaming about third parties, or making ours more liberal, has no place as we approach this election.

Although your faithful blogger is often set straight on any number of websites, the only person who annotates the blather posted under this name at The Public Servant (and thank goodness for that)directed the President's fan club, a dwindling bunch of us, to be sure, to the sage comments of Michael Tomasky and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and there is nothing in either of those posts with which a sane person could disagree. Elizabeth Drew's exasperated rant in the the New York Review of Books has received a fair amount of attention, and there is nothing there either which is not absolutely unassailable.

When the truly brilliant Melissa Harris-Perry, substituting for the essential Rachel Maddow, was presenting her soliloquy for the Governor of North Carolina for vetoing all sorts of garbage, even in the knowledge that her vetoes would be over-ridden by a Republican controlled Legislature, only the most dense could miss the comparison to the Governor's federal counterpart:

She might not be winning all these political fights with the Republican assembly. But Bev Perdue is doing one thing very effectively. She‘s giving the voters of North Carolina a choice in 2012.

You and your uncommonly steely backbone are the thin blue line standing up against what they are trying to do to the state, this new wave of conservatives. And it‘s not just you‘re the one standing there saying nope, nope, nope. But in doing so, you keep articulating that there is another North Carolina, that these people don‘t get to have the last say on everything, that there‘s another way to think about what this place is and why these issues matter.

And so, even though Bev Perdue keeps losing, the fact that she‘s there and keeps fighting, that is awfully important. Bev Perdue is the thin blue line in North Carolina, and I‘ll tell you what? If you don‘t have that thin blue line, North Carolina, well, you‘re Kansas.

It is true. The President has not lived up to the unreasonable demands placed upon him on a magical day in November, 2008. After eight years of a frat boy and his evil handlers as president, following eight years of a president whose intellect was constantly subordinate to political polls and an obsession with finding out just how much he could get away with, cerebral replaced political calculation, and we found out just how far that can get you.

As it turns out, a party can elect the President, and control both houses of Congress at least in a nominal sense, and still be unable to make the sweeping changes which appeared to be required. It turns out that the majority does not rule, at least in the Senate, which requires overwhelming support for anything it might want to enact into law, and some of the people who got elected as Democrats are not, at least in the way we have come to understand what that means. Nonetheless, with an opposition fueled by recklessness, and, unquestionably a disrespect for the President elected over their objection, the Congress and that President were able to do things that had not been seriously contemplated for a generation.

It was not enough. Nobody said it was, but the "everybody" who David Gregory or David Brooks respect, announced over and over that it not only was not enough, but that it was a failure. And that failure had to be, and was sure to be, punished.

And so it was. Not in Nevada, where people came to their senses in enough time to make sure that Sharron Angle was not elected to the Senate, but all around the nation. Fool after fool was elected to Congress by people who believed that government was doing too much, and spending too much, when almost any fool could see that it was was not doing enough and spending way too little. (You have to just gag, which laughing at Senator McCain or at supposed journalists calling him courageous for supporting his party leadership. If these "tea party" fools are hobbits, as he said on the floor the other day, they are his hobbits since his choice of the Grand Hobbit Palin, to run for the office that would place her in the presidency if they were elected and he could not finish his term, did more to embolden Them than anything else that anyone has done in the past ten years.)

The result is what we have watched over the past seven months. The President has not acquitted himself well, to be sure, by adopting the same foolish mantra that sounds as much like the Church did in excommunicating Copernicus over the whole sun as the center of the universe question as anything that has been done at least since most of the nation came to the conclusion that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.

But the problem, as Walt Kelly famously instructed us once, is not the President, or at least it is not the President alone. It is us. We elected these fools, and we knew better when we did it.

----

P.S. In reference to Melissa Harris-Perry, who has presented critical historical perspective on just about everything at least since she started appearing on MSNBC, it can only be hoped that those who can only decide things based on the superficial, might observe that the buffoon, self-promoter Sharpton only satisfies some self imposed burden to give some "black person" an hour every day, if the object is to demean people and show them to be craven fools. Melissa Harris-Perry fills your quota, if that's the idea, but adds so much more, not just by insisting that truths not be swept under a rug of nonsensical self congratulations, but by intelligence, education, and ability to present complex issues in a digestible way, and, there is no way to avoid this coming from a adult heterosexual male, extraordinary beauty. When NBC finally comes to its senses and gives Rachel Maddow Meet the Press to restore it as the place to be on Sundays Dr. Harris-Perry ought to take over the 9 pm hour. In the meantime, there should be a place for her now. Like right now.

English as a First Language

2011-07-25T19:26:00.004-05:00

Someday people will look back and wonder, What were they thinking? Why, in the midst of a stalled recovery, with the economy fragile and job creation slowing to a trickle, did the nation’s leaders decide that the thing to do—in order to raise the debt limit, normally a routine matter—was to spend less money, making job creation all the more difficult?

----Elizabeth Drew

What should the President say tonight?

Something like this:

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.
...

The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent....

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing great -- greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our great natural resources....

Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob...
…

We can never insure 100 percent of the population against 100 percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-stricken old age.

This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.

...

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred.

Progress

2011-07-23T10:53:00.004-05:00

It was May 5, 1961 when Commander Alan B. Shepard became the first American to be launched into outer space

.

Just look at them, President Kennedy, the First Lady, the Vice President, Arthur Schlesinger, Admiral Burke, watching the flight---it took only fifteen minutes, on a black and white television, doing exactly what a New Jersey class of third graders, including one recently relocated from the President's home state, were doing as undoubtedly so many others were doing around the country.

The President does not look exultant nor as someone about to trumpet any triumph of the nation, or of his new administration. He looks, as does the Vice President, concerned.

Yet, as he told us a year or so later

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard

That much we remember of his challenge to this country, as it has been repeated over and over time and time again. We like hearing it, because we did it. President Kennedy told us we could go to the moon and come back and we did it. We have forgotten what else he said that day and what our country was like in 1962.

In 1962, some Americans could not go to a restaurant, or use a public bathroom, or even drink from a particular water fountain not simply because of their race, but because laws had been passed to prohibit people whose color was darker than most of us from doing what seemed to be allowed to most other Americans.

As the President described it a few months later

The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the State in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.

.

And in 1962, a serious illness suffered by to a member of one's family, or even the modest cost of medical insurance for an older person, could easily result in financial destruction. The President of the United States, one of the wealthiest men in the country could understand our plight even from his own experience after his father's stroke:

I visited twice, yesterday and today, in the hospital, where doctors labor for a long time, to visit my father. It isn't easy--it isn't easy. He can pay his bills, but otherwise I would be. And I am not as well off as he is. But what happens to him and to others when they put their life savings in, in a short time?

And he said:

I talked to a Member of the Congress from my own State a week ago, who told me he was going to send his daughter away to school but because his father had been sick for 2 years, he could not do it. And Congressmen are paid... more than most people get.

So therefore now, what is he going to do? His savings are gone--his children's savings, they're contributing though they have responsibilities of their own--and he finally goes in and signs a petition saying he's broke and needs assistance.
...

All the great revolutionary movements of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the thirties we now take for granted. But I refuse to see us live on the accomplishments of another generation. I refuse to see this country, and all of us, shrink from these struggles which are our responsibility in our time.

What does any of this have to do with what we now call "the moon speech" at Rice?

The course he set us on was not simply to give Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin an exciting ride a few years hence:

He said:

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men....

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too....

The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains....

To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. ... But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.

Since Commander Shepard's brief trip into space, this country has been sending humans in furtherance of what Gene Roddenberry would famously describe as a mission to "boldly go where none have gone before." Even as we bored of lunar landings and ended the regular Apollo program in 1972, the Skylab was being planned followed by the space shuttle.

The last of those flights ended, successfully thankfully given that we no longer had the ability to rescue our astronauts had there been a need to do so, on Thursday morning.

We have no plans for further manned space flight. It's too expensive. We have to give tax breaks for the wealthiest so that maybe they will hire some of us. We beg for them to do so, because huge numbers of us are out of work, or underemployed, and no longer receive much assistance in dealing with their plight. Children, as a result, are going to be hungry and, as 60 Minutes showed us, picked up from makeshift shelters so they can go to school and perhaps get some breakfast.

Our government tells us it cannot help because we are fighting two wars, gave tax breaks to those who did not need them, and created a prescription drug program for the purpose of enriching pharmaceutical companies. The wise people who know best tell us that John Maynard Keynes, Franklin D. Roosevelt and every president after him until the one elected in 1980, we wrong: when the economy stalls and people are out of work the government should not spend money, but cut spending, principally by reducing the assistance to those most in need.

In 1961, we could do anything. Today, we can't even find a way to agree to pay our debts. Sadly, what President Kennedy said in trying to convince Congress to take the smallest of steps in providing medical insurance to the poor and elderly, was wrong in one gross respect:

what we are now talking about, in our children's day will seem to be the ordinary business of government

No Time for Rockefeller Republicanism

2011-07-16T13:51:00.001-05:00

this is not the time for Rockefeller Republicanism. We've got a country that is sinking. We've got a country that is on the verge of a crisis in the debt ceiling issue, and that's just one symptom of much larger problems.

---Former Minnesota Gov Tim Pawlenty on Meet the Press, July 10, 2011

In the scary days from the time the stock market collapsed in 1929 until a new President told the nation that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and described that fear as

nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance

the wisest heads around (all men, then) knew the truth of what President Roosevelt ultimately articulated. Looking at Europe's slide into despotism and dictatorship as their economies crumbled under the weight of unregulated greed, rampant stupidity, and a gross inability to adapt to a rapidly changing world, it was widely understood, if not entirely accepted with resounding endorsement, that something big had to happen if the United States were not to fall into the same black hole.

Hence, the philosophy that "government is best which governs least", the fantasy that our nation was the product of rugged individualism rather than a rickety, but enduring and brilliant, joining of states into a union, the product of people with divergent interests coming together for the purpose of controlling their own destiny, had to give way to reality.

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize, as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take, but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress can be made, no leadership becomes effective.

We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and our property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at the larger good.

Once the immediate crisis abated, though, the old ways tried to make a comeback. Somehow the President was convinced by the late 1930s that some federal budget deficit had to be tackled, because it might be immoral to owe so much money. And when the full economy made possible by war had to again deal with peace, the Republican Party found itself a decided minority in the country---its Hooverism discredited along with its other attempts to blame what ails us on Them (people not born here who drink too much---hence, Prohibition---or who bring their histories in distant lands to our pristine shores---hence, isolationsism.

The old guard accepted a committed New Dealer, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, as its first post war presidential candidate but when he lost (after his supporters in the press told the country that was impossible) they put forward the John Boehner of his day---Robert A. Taft---to reclaim their party. That didn't work when another committed New Dealer, but one who managed to liberate Europe from the Nazis, decided he would run for the presidency and won.

They probably did not know that President Eisenhower wrote this to his brother Edgar early in his first term, but it would not have surprised them. They knew that as "Republican" as he was, under the then understood meaning of that term, he was not one of Them:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

To say, therefore, that in some instances the policies of this Administration have not been radically changed from those of the last is perfectly true.

So they (and it sounds as if Edgar was one of them, but held his tongue while his brother was president) seethed and bided their time. Even Nixon was probably not to their liking, but they would bide their time.

And then, finally, in 1964, they won. Barry Goldwater was likely too much of an internationalist for some of them but his nomination, and the repudiation of Gov Dewey's successor in New York, Nelson Rockefeller, began their long desired return to control of the Republican Party. And what he said, even in gross defeat in the general election to follow, was music to tin ears:

The good Lord raised this mighty Republic to be a home for the brave and to flourish as the land of the free -- not to stagnate in the swampland of collectivism, not to cringe before the bullying of communism.

Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven ways -- not because they are old, but because they are true. We must, and we shall, set the tides running again in the cause of freedom. And this party, with its every action, every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom -- freedom made orderly for this Nation by our constitutional government; freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature's God; freedom balanced so that order lacking liberty [sic] will not become the slavery of the prison shell [cell]; balanced so that liberty lacking order will not become the license of the mob and of the jungle....

We see this as the result of a fundamentally and absolutely wrong view of man, his nature, and his destiny. Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberties in return for relieving you of yours, those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for Divine Will, and this Nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom....

during Republican years, this again will be a nation of men and women, of families proud of their role, jealous of their responsibilities, unlimited in their aspirations -- a Nation where all who can will be self-reliant....

We see in private property and in economy based upon and fostering private property, the one way to make government a durable ally of the whole man, rather than his determined enemy. We see in the sanctity of private property the only durable foundation for constitutional government in a free society....

Anyone who joins us in all sincerity, we welcome. Those who do not care for our cause, we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case. And -- And let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by unthinking and stupid labels.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

A nation where the voters were the immediate survivors of a Great Depression which began only 34 years earlier and their children, and who knew what all that meant, and understood what he was saying---and a nation which had lost its young vibrant president to extremism less than a year earlier---was in no mood to hear any of this, but that did not stop them.

By 1980, with a president nominated by the Democratic Party but who viewed the New Deal as a relic of the past and a not the mission of the party he claimed to lead, the forces finally go their way and elected a genial version of the Taft-Goldwater (Hoover) group. Rather than thunder about, this was a movie actor, running against a president who was attacked by a bunny rabbit and could not leave the Rose Garden of the White House to debate his opponents lest he lose focus on the plight of American diplomats held hostage for over a year and, amazingly, easy pickings.

When the movie actor was inaugurated, and the hostages miraculously freed that very day, his inner Taft-Goldwater-Hoover, or the one he had adopted according to the script he was given, explained that the days of "interdependence" were over, and from now on it was dog eat dog, to the victor go the spoils, he with the gold makes the rules. And, of course,

In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

In place of interdependence we had pure greed, dressed up as an economic philosophy called "supply side economics" or, to others, "trickle down" based on something called a Laffer Curve. Ha. Ha, as Regina or Dickday might say.

David Stockman, once a Laffer acolyte, long ago came to his senses but what he could never understand, and still does not, none of this was about economic theory. It was just politics. Those who have get to keep it instead of "limousine liberals" or "welfare queens driving Cadillacs." The economic theory might be all bunk, the politics of greed were brilliant, and they stick, and the United States House of Representatives is ruled by it. Today. 2011.

Well more than twenty years later, a guy vacationing among what used to be called the "eastern establishment"---the Republicans of the type who voted for Governors Dewey, Rockefeller, Scranton and Romney (George, not the wayward son)---stood in a line at a bakery where televisions showed the horrible scenes in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and incidentally mentioned the death of Chief Justice Rehnquist. Those pictures of what happened in Louisiana and the president flying over the scene on his way to play guitar at a lavish birthday party held in his honor in California, seemed to horrify these life long Republicans, the offspring of Republicans, who were themselves the offspring of Republicans. The amazement at this gross incompetence of a shrunken and debilitated government, their shock that this fool in the White House was put there by a Supreme Court he can now reshape with younger versions of the injudicial justices who put him there, was itself an incredible statement, and the most one could say was to marvel that it took Katrina for anyone to see how far the Republican Party of Dewey, Rockefeller, Scranton, Javits, Case and even Everett Dirksen had gone into oblivion, to be replaced by the heirs of Hoover and those who, as FDR called them on that day in 1933

only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers

.

The bakery line must have forgotten those chilling words---"government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" or they would not have been surprised at Katrina.

Yet, we all indulge in self-delusion. There is likely nobody who sees the wreckage of an accident somewhat caused by their own mistake who does not first try to find a reason for what lies among them which does not implicate oneself.

You can say you don't like the New Deal, the Great Society, a President who slept with women to whom he was not married, and whose brother was in a horrible car accident with such a woman, that President Johnson brought on Nixon by his conduct of the Vietnam War, that Presidents Carter and Clinton had views of government much closer to President Eisenhower than to FDR, but voting for a Republican as president, as a United States Senator, as a member of the House of Representatives, certainly to do so after 1980, is almost inexcusable.

If the David Brooks "converted" to Republicanism by William F. Buckley, Jr, and Milton Friedman is suddenly amazed to see his party no longer exists he is almost a decade behind the people on the bakery line during Katrina. He can call Sarah Palin a joke, but he cannot have missed this Michelle Bachmann popping up out of nowhere to claim the crazy dumbbell role that speaks to the Republican Party of today far more than any David Brooks or Everett Dirksen could. The Rockefeller Republican Gov Pawlenty was talking about at the top of this essay was, indeed, Brooks and, despite the Times rules against attacking fellow columnists, it was surely Brooks and his deluded companions to whom Paul Krugman was referring when his Bastille Day column suggested that

Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.

So here we are, on the precipice again, and put there by the wisdom of the always wise American people. We are in the midst of a national crisis---as deep a trough of unemployment as we have seen since the New Deal came to our rescue and rather than stimulate the economy the only way left --- the way it has been done by Republicans and Democrats since it was first tried in 1933---we are not only not going to spend the amounts needed, and to do so in a way that will pay dividends in years to come (which national park established by the WPA did you last visit, or put another way, isn't there a way we could convert our economy into one based on the energy needs of the next generation) it has been decided by one and all that government must spend less money.

Or, in other words, pick the dumbest thing done in the Roosevelt adminsitration (see 1938 above) and replicate that, instead of the massive program designed to pull us out of all of this.

Who could have seen such stupidity coming?

While Posting is Impossible, jotting is not

2011-07-11T18:10:00.003-05:00

1. With all respect to TPM, if I hear these same GOP "talking points" once more (small business cannot take a tax hike) I will explode. So will the corporate jets these small businesses must have for job growth.

2. Paul Krugman is required reading, particularly in times such as this. What he says.

3. We may be seeing a radical end to the Republican Party. Really. What's left of reason within that party (and just barely so) is getting fed up with these crazy people. A default might put us all in the poor house, but at least there would not be a tea party anymore and Eric Cantor would be walking the street selling the same apples right with the rest of us.

4. About a former Red Sox pitcher, someone whose views are the same as mine writes"

His accomplishments on the field are not at issue, nor is his charitable work. What is on trial is his view, so often expressed when he was on our team as well as wearing other uniforms, that he alone can set the rules or the terms of engagement. He will decide when we change managers, and whether Butch Hobson deserves to manage him. He will decide that what's important is whether he can get away with wearing ninja turtle shoelaces when the rest of us thought that losing 7 straight post season games in 1988 and 1990 ought to come to an end, and then he decided to get himself ejected. No he has decided, much as others did, that he gets to decide what the truth is, and that what he says must be accepted as true.

His last season with the Red Sox marked, as Dan Duquette famously said, the beginning of the twilight of his career. He did not want to recognize that, and was insulted that Dan had noticed that and talked about it (I might agree with the second part, but that was too long ago to matter) so he decided to cheat, and to cheat in the same way as Canseco cheated as Oakland won those eight straight post season games against us.

He is a threat to us. His lack of respect for the rules that bind us all deserves to be punished. He meant a lot to me---to us--- once, but he has forfeited what he might have once earned. I will cheer for Carl Yastrzemski forever but I am fine with watching Clemens go to prison, as long as he can't wear a Red Sox uniform while he is there.

Paul Revere (again)

2011-07-03T13:54:00.003-05:00

This will certainly appear again next year on Patriot's Day, but if you bother read the posts here, you should be rewarded by getting this crucial stuff sooner.

The prurient interest in Sarah Palin escapes me, yet I am a Jill Lepore groupie. I love every word of hers I have read, mostly in The New Yorker, and now and then, when she makes a television appearance, she impresses me all over again.

She was on This Week today, which inspired further trolling among her writings, when I cam across this and this.

I will say this: for history, Jill Lepore wins hands down over Sarah Palin (and most anybody else you could mention).

Independence

2011-07-02T09:35:00.003-05:00

This has become an annual rite: the recitation of a blogger, one who sees himself as a defender of all that is the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society about love for this so secular holiday and for this country in which we were blessed to live, and for the luckiest of us, to have been born here. It applies no less this year than any other even if the ties that have bound us all together as one, often frayed, and pulled apart, are really on the eve of destruction.

The optimistic view of our founders (even, perhaps the nine year old John Quincy Adams) that what makes us one (e pluribus unum) made sense under the circumstances of our nation's birth, and maybe it still made sense through the four score and seven years which immediately followed, through Missouri Compromises that solved nothing, and a civil war which ended with the victorious telling the vanquished that they would have to abide by a new arrangement, but whether might makes right, it certainly doesn't make the side with inadequate might see the error of their ways.

A hundred years and then some after our great civil war, though, we watch agog as the side defeated in war, continues to complain about the federal government and to fly the flag of its momentarily independent republic, and to teach its children a bogus version of history.

That old saw about history being written by the victors has a bit of resonance, then, but what is more certain is that the country whose birth this native born New Englander celebrates is not the same one everyone is celebrating. (And, by the way, Madame Bachmann, John Adams was as anti-slavery in 1776 as his then nine year old son became, so you did not have to go all absurdist on us to support the view that some founders were dedicated to ending slavery, if that was your point. Your point, though, was that was a mission of the founders as a whole, which is decidedly was not, making it necessary for J Q Adams and others to continue the fight until the Civil War.)

But, of course, talkin' history is so much a waste of time. We are a nation that cannot remember what we ourselves said just a few years back, or who propose things which we do not really think of as good ideas, simply to make political points:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And so, if last year we could post this, which tells us that only 26% of the country are aware of exactly which country we were part of until we became independent, this year's version is that the actual year in which this happened remains a mystery. Loudon Wainwright III sang this song in 1976, so maybe that's a hint.

So it is hollering into an empty vessel to point out that in our system of government, is not the President who "takes us to war" or, as President Bush himself put it

There is going to be ample time for the American people to assess whether or not I made a — good calls, whether or not I used good judgment, whether or not I made the right decision in removing Saddam Hussein from power, and I look forward to that debate, and I look forward to talking to the American people about why I made the decisions I made

but yet, when President Obama determines that we should support a NATO humanitarian mission in Libya, all of a sudden he is acting beyond his authority. (Apparently, presidents with a black parent, do not have the same authority as the all-white kind).

In the United States of 2011, there is no past, there is just a now, and nothing that ever happened before has any meaning. If someone wants to say that Paul Revere took the signal from the Old North Church as requiring him to ring bells in support of the right to bear arms, then that's what happened, and if Wikipedia says otherwise, just change it. (Longfellow is apparently being exhumed and directed to re-write poems some people were required to memorize long ago). Apparently, John Quincy Adams' childhood is being revised as we speak. ("Founding Youngster" maybe? His poor much maligned mother, Abigail Adams, surely more a "founder" than her nine year old son, gets shunted off to the side yet again.)

Since nothing that has happened before matters, the civil war resolution of issues left open from 1789 (when, for all intents and purposes, the Constitution began to have effect) until the Civil War "settled" them, are meaningless. Hence, those states dragged into a union based on a promise that we will decide the slavery issue some other time, that you won't have to let them vote, but we will count each one as 3/5ths of a person for the purpose of determining how many seats your state will get in the House of Representatives and votes in the electoral college, that at least held out some basis for the idea that a sovereign state could reject those federal laws it believed were repugnant to the Constitution and permitting a state to secede from the union remain open. After all, they joined the union on those understandings (Gov Perry has even suggested Texas had a more explicit promise when it joined the union).

This is the argument we are continuing to have. Some thought these issues to have been resolved by the (forced, though it was) enactment of the 14th Amendment, but, of course, its meaning, purpose and effect has been debated almost since the day it became part of the Constitution. Until recently, the most significant focus was on that part of the Amendment which defined

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, [as] citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside

but it appears that the fourth section of the Amendment, which at first glance appears simply to say that the United States will pay its debts arising out of the Civil War (which, as Lincoln insisted was legally nothing more than "a rebellion" against the federal government) but not pay those debts of the Confederate States of America (a government which the United States does not legally recognize), may soon be at issue. Whether it is or is not a source of executive authority over "debts" of the United States, a struggle over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is at least a direct statement of the questions which divide us, than the many other supposed "issues" brought forward every day (such as whether the federal government require that Americans purchase health insurance).

The Beltway can continue to debate whether the president should be called names for mild rebukes to political opponents who argue that his failure to capitulate to their demands makes him "unengaged". The now suspended fool (the son of a man who has shown more courage more often than most people can even imagine, but seems unable to pass on elements of humanity to his offspring) is typical of those who believe it necessary to "be fair" to the side of an argument that outsiders might think them to favor, and to simply gloss over the failings or ravings of "the other side." It never works, because bullies live to bully people and not to make nice----ever--- and the son of the great man should have known this by now.

Now his partner in nonsense---his co-author in the definitive book about how the know it alls in the Beltway (the ones who repeatedly announced that every "mistake" made, helped the Republican ticket) saw the 2008 campaign.

The partner is beltway blather told the same program, "Republicans in the Morning" (also called "Morning Joe") used a similar and familiar dodge---thought to be the sign of impartiality---pronouncing the argument about the debt ceiling to be kabuki and accusing the President of "posturing."

This is not news analysis. It is just a lump of noise, signifying and illuminating nothing.

Once again, as the country battles for its soul---for what kind of country we want to be after over 230 years trying to figure it out---we get no help from the places protected by the First Amendment to illuminate and not occlude. Olbermann is not the only one who can steal from Murrow who, speaking of the medium which most often broadcast his programs:

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.

He and Keith would say "good night and good luck." We'll say, have a happy Fourth and give your country a few seconds of thought that day, please.

Deep Thoughts

2011-06-27T06:15:00.007-05:00

1. Any person who attends a caucus on behalf of, or votes in a primary for, Michelle Bachmann to become President of the United States should no longer be permitted to vote again.

2. This is a repeat observation about a repeat program: If you can watch this 60 Minutes segment, yet still advocate for massive cuts in federal spending, you have surrendered several of the essential components of what makes up a human being:

3. As virtually useless as the fluffernutter David Gregory version of "Meet the Press" has become (whose up? whose down? who style's best? what's being talked about on twitter?), there were two moments which were worth watching yesterday or reading today. One was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's view of the authority of the executive in a state or nation under a republican form of government.

I am not a fan of same-sex marriage. It's not something that I support. I believe marriage should be between one man and one woman. That's my view, and that'll be the view of our state because I wouldn't sign a bill that--like the one that was in New York.

This is, of course, the Louis XIV l'État, c'est moi ("the state is me") view of government recently popularized by the latest President Bush. (Republicans only object to the appurtenances of royalty when they are donned by Democrats, so as exercised as they are about supporting NATO in Libya, President Bush had to be allowed to "take the nation to war."

It is a great country that allows President Bush and Governor Christie to decide moral questions based on their own religious beliefs. They were not empowered to make those decisions for the rest of us, though.

So many aspire to be Louis XIV, whose point of view seems to appeal to chief executives everywhere, but a century later or so, when Louis' chickens came home to roost, so to speak, it was not a pretty sight. Y'know?

4. As President Roosevelt explained as Europe careened toward it, "I hate war." There is little question that President Obama is not that happy about war, and you probably aren't either. The person who ran Al Qaeda when they attacked our country under the protection of the Taliban is dead and it has now been decided by All Who Know Best, that the United States must now completely withdraw from Afghanistan. A dissenting view on just how easy a decision this is has been published here a few times before, and indeed reference to this wisdom was made this past weekend. The time to consider the consequences of war are before it begins, not a decade later. Notwithstanding the retrospective dissenting views of today, the country had little choice in 2001 but to invade Afghanistan after the government then in place there permitted Al Qaeda to operate there which then did what they did on September 11.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion as to what happens next, though it is difficult for some of us to even come up with that. Here, though, oddly courteous of David Gregory, is what David Rohde, a New York Times reporter held captive by the Taliban, has written in a book he has written about his horrible experience:

At the same time, simply walking away from Afghanistan and Pakistan and hoping for the best is not an option in an increasingly interconnected world. ... Based on my experience in the tribal areas, a sweeping Taliban victory in Afghanistan would embolden hard-line militants who hope to forcibly impose sharia law across the Islamic world. Their belief that they can defeat Westerners who fear death and are unwilling to endure sacrifice will be reaffirmed. It will also send a signal to moderate Muslims that the United States will not stand by them. No clear answer has emerged to the question ... how can religious extremism be countered?

Being captive gives one no special wisdom, but he has seen these people up close and personal, much as Khaled Hosseini had before him as discussed in The Kite Runner. There are no easy answers here; just head hurting moral, political and military questions.

Have a nice day.

Pretense, Magic and Make Believe.

2011-06-25T10:16:00.004-05:00

He was the kind of a phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question. He stepped back, and stepped right on the lady's foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body

---J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

So you may have been watching the Senate of the state where a few us live wondering what we have been complaining about. Senators stated their opinions, for and against the bill, then they voted. It passed. The Governor signed it into law a few hours later. We would love to have a national legislature such as that instead of this mess where a minority party can block everything in one house and other one has nothing but crazy people in charge.

You will have to just accept the fact that what was telecast last night was the Pretend Senate and not the actual one. Debates on the floor of either house of the New York Legislature happen about as often as their basketball teams win championships. Virtually every issue is decided by what we call "three men in the room", the Governor, the Speaker and Senate Majority Leader.

This time around, the Senate Majority Leader was threatened if he even allowed the bill recognizing same sex marriages even to come to the floor. So he did what any courageous leader would do under the circumstances: He demanded that his entire "conference" (that's Albany talk for a caucus of one party's members of a house of the legislature) vote on whether to bring the bill to the entire Senate for a vote. Sort of reminds you of Medal of Honor recipient, Sgt. Sal Giunta, doesn't it?

Your faithful blogger is not gay, and somewhat obliquely has confessed to sins about the issue, belatedly recognizing that things that are deeply upsetting to other people are no less significant just because they have no direct bearing on one's own life. What happened last night was what should have happened. And it is a great thing; a wonderful achievement accomplished despite some of the most vile "debates" in and outside our state capitol. (Orthodox Jews claiming to be the exclusive authority as to who is, or is not, a Jew based on whether one agrees with them fall into a subcategory of vile which only a few of us see, though vile it is.)

As it happens, a refugee from the gross affront to representative democracy known as the New York Legislature, a very decent, and quite intelligent man named Dan Feldman who earnestness and seriousness meant very little in such a place, and finally left when it became clear that he could accomplish little more there, has written a book largely defending the place, while pointing to its deficiencies. There is much to quibble about in its pages, just as some of his political positions can be the subject of legitimate disagreement, but more often than not he hits the spots right on.

The scariest parts of his observations of a legislative process that descended into the mud well before the federal Congress followed suit come toward the very end of his book when talks about things which happen which simply put people in abject fear

When a spate of such incidents comes to the attention of the public, government must respond in some official way in order to avoid jeopardizing its legitimacy.

A page or so later, he observes that

Participants in a representative democracy need hope to continue to feel bound to the political institutions of their country. They do not have to win every time, or even most of the time. But they do need to see that government can and will act. This keeps them engaged

.

And that is what this is all about, isn't it? Yet, in the face of massive unemployment, our national legislature can conjure about no solution, and, in the face of almost universal academic agreement that the government must put as much money as possible into the economy, demands, instead, massive cuts.

And the very same people who lectured us about loyalty requiring that we support a president who believes that we need to go to war, now tell us that this President has to be resisted and that he cannot take the country to war, only Congress can. No kidding.

Afghanistan, these posts have argued, presents no simple answers and certainly not one to be decided by chowderheads voting on the issue: the same people who thought that a war in Iraq was the same as a war against Al Qaeda, who thought it important to re-elect President G.W. Bush to protect the country during a war he began by massive lying to the nation and the world.

And quoting Dan Feldman one more time,

It's not that voters are stupid. Rather, they cannot be expected to follow the issues, or the candidates' credentials, with the care and attention that political professionals devote to them. Further, they respond emotionally, as humans must. They want reassurance, inspiration, pride, confidence, and maybe a little entertainment. Supplying those needs must be a higher priority for a successful electoral politician—most of the time, anyway—than presenting an accurate portrayal of the complexity of the issues of the day.

True enough, but invective, and irresponsibility, while entertaining, does nothing to even make a dent in the problems we face. Polls show unhappiness with the President and even support for Republican control of Congress, even while Republicans see it useful to allow the federal government to default on its debts. Doesn't seem reassuring or inspirational, does it?

Thank goodness for Eric Cantor!!!

2011-06-23T19:42:00.001-05:00

If anyone doubted this (and I suspect few outside the White House and Treasury did), there will be no "adults" coming to the rescue it appears. Congressman Cantor has announced that it will be impossible for him or his party to vote to extend the debt limit (to agree to pay our national obligations) without an agreement by Democrats not to seek a repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.

Congressman Cantor has done us a service. Even the giddiest advocate of bipartisanship can now see, there is no such thing, and all thanks to Eric Cantor, the "honest broker" with whom we thought we might "make a deal." No matter what the consequences, those recognized even by their own acolytes as well as by sane people all over the land making sure the wealthy contributors who might otherwise not be able to give them the millions needed to fund all their assaults on the political system, takes precedence.

Sayeth Eric the Good:

There is not support in the House for a tax increase, and I don’t believe now is the time to raise taxes in light of our current economic situation. Regardless of the progress that has been made, the tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue.

Unemployment, a possible new great depression, financial panic not seen since FDR rescued the nation from the last pigheaded mess they made is of no importance. Only politics.

Even the President, Vice President and the Treasury Secretary, all believers that sonner or later common sense would reign, may now recognize what they are dealing with is insanity. There are no wise heads left to bring the party back to Planet Earth. Sen Lugar has failed, Sen Spector was driven from the party, Sen McCain has lost his mind, and Senator Dirksen has been dead for a long time.

A Republic, if you can keep it

2011-06-18T10:53:00.005-05:00

Now we know that, despite all appearances, Congress can act as one body and do what needs to be done. To be sure, it cannot deal effectively with a deep recession and massive unemployment, it has not found a way to protect people who have or are in danger of losing their homes after a virtually unregulated financial community found as many means imaginable to make money by conning as many people as possible, it stands by and does nothing as over reliance on fossil fuels threatens first our national security and then the planet itself, and remains unwilling to address the complete corruption of our political system resulting from the system by which campaigns are funded.

But at least they have protected us from having a member of Congress who tweets photographs of parts of his body that cause schoolchildren to giggle.

This whole two weeks of junior high school hijinks taking over what passes for political thought were not about anything important, but what it says about the republican form of government the nation's founders established is both extremely important and deeply saddening. When the only politician to state the obvious is Charles Rangel, among the most shameful (and shameless, if both of those are possible) among members of Congress who are overwhelmingly the wrong people to whom to entrust the legislative functions of our government, the unlikelihood that these people can even make a dent in the problems facing us becomes quite clear.

Cenk Uygur spoke for many in pointing out the political folly of what the Speaker-in-exile and her followers did

but, frankly, the episode raises more issues than simply how Democrats scare easily.

Anthony Weiner must go because he is a jackass, but Senator Joseph Lieberman is allowed to remain a committee chair in a Senate controlled by Democrats even after running up and down the country telling everyone to vote against the party's nominee for president whose election, he said, would be dangerous for the country.

No wonder then, that when said nominee becomes president, facing an immediate crisis as the nation's economy is collapsing, other faux Democrats, most notably Ben Nelson, make it impossible to enact sweeping government spending programs to help to pull us out and get people back to work. The immediate result was not only predictable, it was predicted. In fact, without magical powers Paul Krugman could tell us even before the President was sworn in that he could

see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

Let’s hope I’ve got this wrong.

Some guy blogging away at the same time (though not in his underwear the way such bloggers are often described) put it this way:

It is not the time for the well meaning Republicanism of the last two "Democratic" presidents, or for the loud noises followed by routine capitulation which the Senate Majority Leader favors, nor is the incoming http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifadministration's hope for consensus and 80 vote approval by the Senate of their proposed solutions as important as the need to restore government to its role to protect its citizens from the ravages of a greedy unfettered marketplace.

or, even before the election itself:

Unless he has a nearly FDR-like first 100 days, and he just won't since, as with most politicians of the day----your heroes the Clinton family very [much] included, [Mr. Obama] is way too cautious to do what he would have to do to be a transformational force, we will be back to the nightmare by this time two years from now.

There are better ways to approach these things, as Joe Nocera reminded us this morning. But Senators Glass and Steagall did not have to worry about Senator Nelson or Senator Lieberman. And so, "compromise" is better than nothing, but not much better.

Where did all that get us? Instead of an historic 100 days, we get a watered down health care bill---the best that could be achieved but hardly what we might have expected---and now blame for the continuing economic crisis. And, people we know who lost their jobs two years ago, still unemployed.

We don't give up hope, we can't, but even when the paths are clear we seem unable to find our way. Still, the last time we were allowed to talk about the present and the "Stanley Cup Champion Boston Bruins" we also had to put up with Nixon. This week was the first in one guy's relatively long life that we could say those words and not have to worry about that, too. This is progress.

David Brooks trotted out another one of insipid pox on all sides things yet again the other day, even before trying to compare the virtual overthrow of the government we like to call "Watergate" with another one of those government does what money wants it do, no kidding, things he has "discovered."

A newspaper published in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City, which runs Brooks' column, published the Democrats are as crazy as Republicans column a couple of days after it first appeared in the Times, but, wittingly or not, tossed a political cartoon on the same page that undermined Brooks' silly message, with what most sane people have noticed:

This is not what the founders had in mind but exactly what Franklin thought could happen.

Perspective(s)

2011-06-11T10:17:00.006-05:00

Let's be clear on this. Your blogger has a strong connection to the district Congressman Weiner represents, but he does not live or vote there. The Congressman's value to those who see the New Deal as an irrevocable compact between the government and the citizenry, has been long apparent, but his interminable press conference on Monday and its shocking revelations about him, led to this post on Daily Kos:

Truly a jackass... (2+ / 0-)

He went from being considered a bit of a jackass, to a really brave teller of truths in a place where truth is rarely seen, back to being a jackass.

Obviously the press and broadcast interest in this junior high school cafeteria type story is ridiculous, but as a judge once explained to me when enormous numbers of reporters showed up to cover a fairly run of the mill case, they get interested when something is about sex. (Had she not told me this, I think the judge thought, I would not have known this.)

Still, Congressman Weiner: once you decided to represent ou[r] interests, and I don't mean just your congressional district, you owed us much more than you have shown this week. Going back on Rachel's show and lying to her!!!! You are truly a jackass.

Not a hypocrite, just a jackass. The reason Republicans (and Spitzer) have to resign for crap like this is that they hold themselves out to be arbiters of right and wrong in our personal lives. I have never seen Congr Weiner do this.

He will not be Mayor, but maybe he gets a prime time television program.

If so, it should be called "Jackass."

With all due humility, that is all that need to be said on this supposed "subject." Whether the Senate Majority Leader, House Minority Leader (and Speaker-in-exile-and-waiting), or the chair of the DCCC think so or not, it is up to the voters in Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Sheepsheads Bay, the Rockaways, and the several other colofully named neighborhoods he represents who get to decide. Those of us who think Michelle Bachmann is an embarrassing fool, or Joe Barton a disgrace to the planet have had to put up with them given the votes of their constituents. Mrs. Pelosi can manage to tread water even where her tiny flock includes a Congressman who thinks he is in middle school.

You don't like lying politicians? Neither do any of us. Listening to Congressman Weiner tell Rachel Maddow flat out lies as a guy uses the podcast of her program to make a brutal commute almost tolerable is really more than that guy should have to endure. As political lies go, though, there have been worse in relatively recent memory:

TIM RUSSERT: Do you still believe there's no evidence that Iraq was involved in September 11?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last
talked, Tim, of course, was that report that--it's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. Now, what the purpose of that was, what transpired between them, we simply don't know at this point, but that's clearly an avenue that we want to pursue.

---Meet the Press, December 9, 2001, almost two months after it became apparent the claim "didn't add up."

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

----President G.W. Bush, State of the Union, January 28, 2003

Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed. These tubes are controlled by the Nuclear Suppliers Group precisely because they can be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium. By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

---Secretary of State Colin Powell, to the United Nations Security Council, February 5, 2003, about six months after it became "fairly well established" that these claims were false.

Q Why shouldn't this be seen as an intelligence failure, that you were unable to predict something happening here?

DR. RICE: Steve, I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking

----Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to the President of the United States,May 16, 2002 well after the precise threat was made repeatedly

I just want to say that I didn‘t send the picture. I don‘t know who did and what they were intending to do. But I consider it a prank and we‘ve been trying to move past it ever since

----Congressman Weiner to Rachel Maddow, June 1, 2011.

So, we report, you decide. As lies go, which of them, if any, do you think may have caused lives to be lost? If lies need wall to wall teeth gnashing, which of them should put our mouths at risk?

And yet, ever day, your blogger passes by huge numbers of television cameras staking out a building where Congressman Weiner maintains a district office. There there are, sitting and waiting to talk to him, to take his photograph, and to ask people about him, on the same day that a 16 year old girl, going to the beach on a stfling hot day in the first week of June, was killed when someone fired shots on the beach's boardwalk.

That murdered child was at the beach because of stifling heat which, oddly, has swept the country in the first week of June: during the season formerly known as "spring."

We are told in the Times article linked above that

In some states, including Connecticut, where children were allowed to go home early this week, school would not have been in session had it not been for storms that shuttered schools for several days in January and February

All of this comes after an "unusual increase in April tornadoes" was followed by even worse ones in Joplin, Missouri. Tornadoes even hit Springfield, Massachusetts, where few could remember any other ever arriving there, and fires ravage Arizona.

In the meantime, during the few minutes that are left after dissecting just how much of a creep is Congressman Weiner, the avatar of political thought among somewhere more than 40% of the country has decided that any candidate who says

I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that . . . so I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you’re seeing

is thereby disqualified from any nomination that a major political party might make as its candidate for President of the United States even if said candidate resolutely opposes almost every tepid suggestion of what to do about it.

The New York Times resolutely insists that

it may be decades before science can conclusively demonstrate whether or not human-driven warming is affecting tornado frequency

but the question is surely whether "science" will be allowed to make that determination or whether, say, Limbaugh or other politicians get to decide instead. Then again, in Arizona, it has been decided by some that the fire must have been started by illegal immigrants.

What do we expect, though? Less than three years after a culture of greed and corruption, enabled by some nonsense about how important it was to dismantle government regulation of businesses which, while unregulated, all but destroyed our economy and, frankly our nation, again almost did the same thing
, various half measures were slipped past a Congress where one party has decided to block by filibuster anything that could cause one of its client contributors to lose a minutes of sleep. One of those things was the creation of a unit of the federal government to be called a "Consumer Financial Protection Bureau" which would try to assist people who might otherwise be victims of the same things that got us in the mess we were in when the Bush administration was mercifully put out of our misery.

The person who thought this up, who has explained its necessity and knows what is likely to happen without it, Dr Elizabeth Warren, is currently employed by the federal government. She cannot be appointed to the job because that same major political party that could not nominate anybody who suggests that climate change might be a legitimate something to worry about, does not want her to upset anyone. They cannot really come up with a legitimate reason for blocking her appointment or, for that matter, anyone else's to head this new unit other than, as Groucho Marx, Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar once put it, "whatever it is, I'm against it".

But, really, some creepy guy is sending pictures of what he believes to be enticing photographs of parts of his body. Who has time to cover anything else?

------

Post (or actually pre-) script.

Earlier in the week, before the Weiner obsession became what it is today (and, now, even Debbie Wasserman Schultz, crushing the view that someone as smart and beautiful as she is, could rise above the crap that passes for thought in D.C, has jumped into the frenzy, but she, who used to live in that district, obviously does not anymore) today's post was to be built around these two items:

the Times reports:

With equipment prices dropping, and tax incentives to subsidize capital investments...[w]orkers are getting more expensive while equipment is getting cheaper, and the combination is encouraging companies to spend on machines rather than people.

“I want to have as few people touching our products as possible,” said Dan Mishek, managing director of Vista Technologies in Vadnais Heights, Minn. “Everything should be as automated as it can be. We just can’t afford to compete with countries like China on labor costs, especially when workers are getting even more expensive.”

This is not President Obama's doing, nor his fault, but somebody has to do something about this instead of simply giving up.

Maybe next week.

Misdrection

2011-06-04T13:32:00.000-05:00

So Sarah Palin does not know the story of Paul Revere's Midnight Ride. Her alter ego from Minnesota got her Concords mixed up a month or so ago and thought maybe the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in New Hampshire (hence, the first in the nation primary?). Well she did not suggest the association with the primary, but it is worth wondering what these would be or self-appointed "leaders" think the "tea party" was all about.

Perhaps there is some insight here into why This Crowd seem to dislike teachers so much. Not a lot came out of whatever was spent on educating these two or the massive numbers of fellow numbskulls, disdaining the "reality based community" where the rest of us are forced to live. At the same time, this whole thing has ceased to be as funny as it once might have been.

Millions of Americans are out of work and closed and shuttered businesses litter what's left of many of our towns and villages. Those of us still employed see less traffic commuting to work, although trains in the New York metropolitan area still seem relatively full (largely because cutbacks have forced them to have fewer cars on each trip).

While it was widely believed, prior to the New Deal, that these "business cycles" were not something which should involve or concern the government, those with some sense of what Paul Revere was trying to do, or where Lexington and Concord are, understood, though wrongly, that those days of a stick its head in the ground government, were long gone.

Maybe President Roosevelt had a better grip on history when he described the

twelve years [before 1933 when] this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

Restore it, sadly, they have and they are stronger than ever. History shows us the road back from massive unemployment. President Roosevelt explained it on the day he took office:

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing great -- greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our great natural resources.

But it is more than 70 years later. Those alive then and still around today were all very young at the time. Grateful, perhaps, for what government did, they were, for the most part, removed from the literal experience of the prior generations, struggling to find work and finding it only with the help of the government. In the meantime, those who have long considered "the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs" as FDR described them, have re-emerged in full force and we can see, as the President did in 1936

that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Just flip through a week of news articles, and see what the President meant. Do we have the kind of program outlined above to "prime the pump" by giving people jobs, by employing them in ways to improve our world, our country, our safety and our future? No. Not even close. A teeny weeny step in that direction, far less that what was needed, came forth after enormous struggle in 2009, but since then, nothing. Not a peep. It's a "non-starter" we are told. There is no interest in government spending more money to get things going again, while fixing our roads, developing high speed rail, moving away from the carbon based sources of energy upon which we currently rely, and, ummm, teaching our children.

Instead, we are told, with no evidence to support it, and ample and recent precedent to show its falsity, that what needs to happen is less spending and fewer taxes, all in the strange pursuit of reducing a deficit. If that were truly a a concern, of course, it would be observed that said deficit was wiped out in the 1990s by a vibrant economy and not by reduced spending, only to be restored by tax cuts and wars when Republicans took over the legislative and executive branches of government.

But, of course, that's reality. The unreality is that causing the United States to default on that debt is of no concern to one political party in pursuit of the goal to hurt as many people dependent on the government as possible, so as to permit those who do not need help to enjoy more tax cuts.

Unless the President and Senate are willing to take yet another giant step backward, they tell us, the government will not be permitted to pay those from whom we have borrowed money to fund Republican-inspired tax cuts, and prescription drug program designed to enrich pharmaceutical companies and two wars. And yet, the claim is,

“We didn’t create this mess,” one Republican told [Treasury Secretary] Geithner...[even though] Independent analyses have shown that more than half of the $14.3 trillion debt is from policies enacted during the past decade when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, and much of the rest from lost revenues and stimulus spending and tax cuts since Mr. Obama took office at the height of the financial crisis and recession.

And, continuing in the deadpan deadpan voice of the New York Times:

the grim reality of widespread unemployment is drawing little response from Washington. The Federal Reserve says it is all but tapped out. There is even less reason to expect Congressional action. Both Democrats and Republicans see clear steps to create jobs, but they are trying to walk in opposite directions and are making little progress.

Republicans have set the terms of debate by pressing for large cuts in federal spending, which they say will encourage private investment. Democrats have found themselves battling to minimize and postpone such cuts, which they fear will cause new job losses.

House Republicans told the president that they would not support new spending to spur growth during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday.

Keep reading, if you can. It may have been worse in days of yore, but what we have here is a failure to engage, much less communicate. And, sure, let's spend a whole week seeing if a congressman can tell whether it is really his body part in a photograph being passed around as if it were that of a flag being hoisted over Iwo Jima.

In Memoriam

2011-05-28T10:33:00.002-05:00

There are any number of things worth addressing this weekend: the way that four dead presidents could rally a congressional district in upstate New York to win a House seat---quite a trick, a recollection of why many people considered President Clinton to be the last reasonable Republican president but no Democrat, and why making Elizabeth Warren THE issue in the 2012 elections would allow the country to make its voice known (as a recess appointment that expired right in the middle of the campaign surely would), but this is a weekend for memories. It is for barbecues and pool openings, too, for the beginning of the summer and for the Bruins first march toward a Stanley Cup in twenty-one years, but a moment to remember those who got us this far is also due.

In one of his many appearances with Rachel Maddow, Paul Rieckhoff, the Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, discussed the connection between our gratitude for the military and intelligence people who finally punished Osama bin Laden for the attack he loosed on our country, and our obligations on this holiday. He was eloquent is doing so, and said something well beyond what chants of U-S-A or flag pins can say:

we‘re really grounded in the reality of how much of our lives as a community of veterans has been dedicated to this moment. I mean, for the last 10 years, our brothers and sisters have been looking for this guy, have been hunting this guy—even when a lot of Americans forgot about it and moved on to other things.

And our community‘s paid a tremendous cost. So, we think about the friends we lost. We think about the families and we think about the folks who‘ve been wounded. But we‘re proud. We‘re especially proud of the SEALs and all the operators involved in this operation who are absolutely incredible. And now, the world is going to find out why we have such respect and admiration for them.

...

I think that people need to remember how they feel now. Remember how they felt[the] night [bin Laden was found]. Remember that unity. Remember that sense of pride and carry it over.

Memorial Day is coming up in a couple of weeks. And we need folks to remember that day and keep this energy and keep this momentum and keep this unity because it‘s unlike anything I‘ve ever seen. And the only time I‘ve ever, in my life, seen unity like this was after 9/11, and that was for something very different. So, I think we have an opportunity to harness that and to really support these folks and support our military and become stronger as a country....

And, as we remember those who gave their life for their country, this corner of the world will remember Lieutenant (j.g.) John F. Kennedy, whose was born 94 years ago this weekend. He barely survived his naval service in World War II as we have come to know over and over, but the inspiration for, and challenge to, the generation that grew up during his presidency and its calamitous aftermath, is his most lasting legacy. His voice still resonates despite every effort conceivable to mute or distort it.

Somebody responded to a post in this spot about President Kennedy's Madison Square Garden speech about why expanding social security to include medical care to the elderly was something we needed to do, by allowing that the speech "Must've Been Part of the Impetus That Got Us...Medicare not so much later under LBJ" which seemed funny since it ignores to almost certain reality that medicare became law only because President Kennedy's death made it all but mandatory that his initiatives be enacted into law in his memory.

That is what it means to give one's life for the country, and it is right to remember him today, along with all those, military and otherwise, would have done more than anyone could reasonably ask to allow us to live the lives we live.

NY-26

2011-05-25T09:50:00.003-05:00

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, August 14, 1935:

We can never insure 100 percent of the population against 100 percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-stricken old age.

*This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.

President Harry S Truman, July 15, 1948

Now everybody likes to have low taxes, but we must reduce the national debt in times of prosperity. And when tax relief can
be given, it ought to go to those who need it most, and not those who need it least, as this Republican rich man's tax bill did
when they passed it over my veto on the third try.

The first one of these was so rotten that they couldn't even stomach it themselves. They finally did send one that was somewhat
improved, but it still helps the rich and sticks a knife into the back of the poor....

The Republican platform is for extending and increasing social security benefits. Think of that! Increasing social security
benefits! Yet when they had the opportunity, they took 750,000 off the social security rolls !

I wonder if they think they can fool the people of the United States with such poppycock as that!

Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, August 14, 1960

Today we commemorate one of those battles - the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935 - the most important single piece of social welfare legislation in the history of this country. It was 25 years ago this very day that Franklin Roosevelt could say, after a long and arduous struggle: "Today a hope of many years standing is in large part fulfilled"; and with that he signed his name and social security became law.

For millions of Americans, with that one stroke of the pen, their insecurity and fear were transformed into hope - their poverty and hunger were transformed into a decent life - their economic degradation was transformed into a chance to live out their days in the dignity and peace they had so richly earned.

But the job which Franklin Roosevelt set out to do in 1935 is not yet done. That opening battle was won - but the war against poverty and degradation is not yet over. And no one realized this more than Franklin Roosevelt himself. "This law," he said, 25 years ago today as he signed it, "represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built, but which is by no means complete." We are here at Hyde Park today - not merely to commemorate the cornerstone - but to help complete the edifice....

No costs have increased more rapidly in the last decade than the cost of medical care. And no group of Americans has felt the impact of these skyrocketing costs more than our older citizens. Almost 20% of all those on social security must use one-quarter to one-half of their meager annual income for medical expenses alone. Those over 65 suffer from chronic diseases at almost twice the rate of our younger population - they spend more than twice as many days restricted to bed - and they must visit a doctor twice as often. And even these impressive figures do not tell us of the uncounted thousands who suffer from lack of needed medical care - from lack of vital drugs - and of hospitalization simply because they cannot afford to pay the bills.

Of course some of those who are now uncared for can get free health care. But such public assistance is often painstakingly slow, the tests for giving it are often rigid and unrealistic. The care itself is often impersonal and inadequate.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

And even more important - thousands of our older citizens would rather endure pain and suffering than rely on public charity. And they should not have to ask for charity.

Commercial from the re-election campaign of President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964:

On at least seven different occasions, Barry Goldwater has said he would drastically change the social security system. ... Even his running mate, [upstate New York Republican Congressman] William Miller, admits that Barry Goldwater's voluntary plan would wreck your Social Security.

Whenever they think they can get away with this, the Republicans trot out the same thing and try to do what they always do: take hard won benefits away from the middle class and the poor so that they reduce the taxes paid by the wealthy. Whenever they try to do it, and people see that they are trying to do it, they lose, and they lose big.

Including last night.

Us and Them

2011-05-21T12:23:00.004-05:00

You can feel it. The tide is turning. Heads are over the sand, and what they see is a political party that votes to continue subsidies to oil companies and rails against the concept of affordable health insurance for all. (They call it "Obamacare" which says more than its abject rudeness suggests. Would anyone who did not agree with the project to build the interstates throughout the country refer to them as "Eisenhighways"?) They claim to want to balance a budget but refuse to even think about letting tax cuts for the wealthy expire favoring, instead, cutting "entitlements" that the rest of us have come to depend upon. Their enemies, they have told us, are public employees: teachers, police officers, firefighters, and the unions that protect their---our---rights to be dealt with fairly.

The election next week in the New York congressional district near Buffalo that has been rock ribbed Republican for decades will underscore what has happened. This is not a cause for celebration so much as a call for us to do more to wipe this political point of view for the respectability it continues to be accorded by David Gregory and the rest of the beltway news establishment, even as it has been roundly rejected everywhere else.

A year or so ago, as the health care proposal was dying its thousand deaths, by filibusters, falsehoods and foolishness, portions of a speech on the very same subject, but by President Kennedy in 1962, was posted here. Even if you were alive when President Kennedy explained why it was our responsibility as a nation to take care of the sick among us, you almost certainly did not see this speech even though ABC, which had nothing else to broadcast in those days, televised the whole thing. It was a beautiful and hot May day in much of the country, and air conditioning was not as pervasive then as it is today. Few people voluntarily stayed home to watch this speech, except, of course, the homebound.

Maybe one viewer was the President's father, one of the world's wealthiest men but "recovering" (that's an expression; he never did) from a stroke. And there was his son, the President of the United States and also quite wealthy, talking about

visit[ing] twice, yesterday and

today, in the hospital, where doctors labor for a long time, to visit my father. It isn't easy--it isn't easy. He can pay his bills, but otherwise I would be. And I am not as well off as he is. But what happens to him and to others when they put their life savings in, in a short time? ...

This argument that the Government should stay out, that it saps our pioneer stock--I used to hear that argument when we were talking about raising the minimum wage to a dollar and a quarter. I remember one day being asked to step out into the hall, and up the corridor came four distinguished-looking men, with straw hats on and canes. They told me that they had just flown in from a State in their private plane, and they wanted me to know that if we passed a bill providing for time and a half for service station attendants, who were then working about 55 to 60 hours of straight time, it would sap their self-reliance.

The fact of the matter is what saps anyone's self-reliance is working 60 hours at straight time, or working at 85 or 95 at a dollar an hour. Or depending upon filling out a pauper's oath and then going and getting it free.

Nobody in this hall is asking for it for nothing....

We aren't able overnight to solve all the problems that this country faces, but is that any good reason why we should say, "Let's not even try"?

That's what we are going to do today, we are trying. We are trying. And what we're talking about here is true in a variety of other ways. All the great revolutionary movements of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the thirties we now take for granted. But I refuse to see us live on the accomplishments of another generation. I refuse to see this country, and all of us, shrink from these struggles which are our responsibility in our time. Because what we are now talking about, in our children's day will seem to be the ordinary business of government.

This was not the speech he made which we remember best, of course. It was hardly as eloquent, and, if you watch it on the link provided in the prior post, you will see the conditions were even worse than those of Washington in the aftermath of a snowstorm. It was hot, the room was dark and nobody wanted to be there.

But the point the President made that day, that we cannot do it all now, but we have a duty to begin is an echo from that famous speech:

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days; nor in the life of this Administration; nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

Those of who spend much of our time riding the fortunes or troubles of the Boston Red Sox have learned all about this from our manager, Terry Francona, the best to lead the Red Sox in the fifty-three years they have occupied one guy's summers and a person who, oddly, is often called "Tito" becuase that is his father's name. President Obama uses his father's name, too, but that was not his choice necessarily. Both of them, though, preach the same thing: take the long view and don't get caught up in the crisis of the moment.

The Red Sox lost the first six games they played this year and they were 2 and 12 shortly thereafter. And there was Terry, required by custom, by the region where he works, and by the times we live in, to explain to us, through the news media, what he is going to do about the problem and the anguish it caused us all.

And Terry would explain that he is mindful of the problems, he sees what is happening and he will do what he thinks can reasonably be done to make things better. It is a long season, though, he would remind us and it is never a time to panic. You cannot fail to adjust to realities, he told us night after night, but you cannot swing back and forth making radical changes. You need to have patience, he told us, no matter what everyone around you is yelling.

The Red Sox are now one-half game out of first place. There will be more problems to come (the team has too many lefties in its starting lineup and two of its five starting pitchers are injured), but we know now, as we should have known then, that a calm, sustained approach to what faces the team, will serve us much better than the screaming into the night that many proposed.

Osama bin Laden was found because the President we have today, and the administration he heads also believes in patience, in doing what can be done today, but always with an eye toward what might take longer to do. And in both his case and in Terry Francona's plans are one thing: execution is another. Terry has 25 guys on his team. The President has many more and we are part of it.

Let us begin.

Briefly....

2011-05-21T09:53:00.002-05:00

When Peter Gammons began the full page Baseball Notes column in the Boston Globe (Nick Cafardo is the current keeper of that flame), he often included a little segment at the end, captioned "briefly..." which was often the most interesting part. (It was always funny to hear broadcasters on Sundays disgorge the nuggets from Peter's column as if they had mined them personally instead of reading them where I did).

The version of briefly which follows are a few items which, for various reasons---one of which, sadly, will be explained --- will be posted here but not at the other venues where the stuff which appears here gets a slightly wider distribution.

1. The Red Sox. Actually, today's main post will say a few things about Terry Francona who, like our president, is vastly underappreciated. Listening to his pre- and post- game comments, and his weekly seminar on the Big Show, explains what leadership is all about and the value on the long view. He is the best Red Sox manager since these eyes and ears first set upon this club and he has truly proven it by the way he has kept everyone---players, fans and the like---able to deal with 0-6 and 2-12 to pull to within 1/2 game of first.

Following his lead, and knowing what faces him, the old routine which custom dictated when, as a parent, one is in the company of other people with children, when the child who is not yours acts up and required discipline. The rule, as widely understood, would be to pretend you did not see or hear anything.

So Posdada refused to play last weekend because he felt disrespected. We all had the sturm and drung of it blasted in our faces all evening Saturday, but when Terry had similar issues with Big Papi a year ago, we heard very little about it, expect when Ortiz* decided to go public with his complaints, and, then. too Terry and the rest of Sox management let it go without comment.

That's the way to do that stuff. David can no longer hit lefties reliably well. This year he has done better---he is at a more than respectable .288 against lefties at this second---but it is unlikely he can keep that up. When his weakness there becomes pronounced, Terry may have to do things, Papi doesn't like. That Papi sympathized with Posada's plight and did so publicly was not the best part of the weekend.

2. The Broons (aka the Bruins). That their success so far in the Stanley Cups (if I hear one more airhead refer to "the NHL playoffs" I will burst into flames) is the product of relative or unqualifiedly newbies such as the "I am everywhere" Tyler Seguin, the "whatever the team needs, I'll do it" Michale Ryder, as much as Zdeno Chara (good Bs team are always led by defensemen) and Tim Thomas (as shockingly sensational as he has ever been) i the best part. That the Bergeron likely to make the most impact in this series, at least is not the great Patrice Bergeron is the only down note, although this bloggers affection for the Terry Francona, the President of the United States and Celtics coach Doc Rivers, does not extend to Claude Julien, who does not inspire much confidence. It has been a long, long time, and one too many men on the ice calls, since the last Cup. It is time.

3. Superman/Smallville. I suppose every scrawny Jewish boy was attracted to the Superman story, especially in the late 1950s, but this one (whose mother harbored at least the thought that her second grade son wanted glasses not so much to improve his eyesight but to emulate Clark Kent) never really grew out of it. Clark as a foreigner who treasures his ability to blend in, his inate goodness and that of his parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, and his determination, have always meant a lot.

George Reeves, of course, defined the character for me, though the comics reboot in well after I was a regular reader, fixed a few parts of the myth which really sold Superman on me. The most important of them was that in what the comics call the "post-Crisis" (something I choose not to discuss here) Superman became the disguise worn by Clark, rather than the other way around, as the older comics and those sort of goofy movies---which followed the old story, rather than as updated---- had it.

Reeves, though, was far more Clark Kent than Superman since Kent did not require as much trick photography. There were episodes where Superman's appearance was less than five minutes of a show dominated by Kent, and some of Reeves' best moments were as Clark Kent, such as the time he was fed to the ocean by pirates. Clark is so much easier to identify with, of course, and I did and probably still do.

I think my favorite of the Reeves series was the time Kent had to convince a blind girl that he was Superman, so that she would agree to go with him for an operation which, assisted by Superman's various abilities to see what doctors could not brought back her sight and made her flight around with Superman all that more interesting. Superman described the sights and made reference to other cultures (not in this clip, though) without the condescension which was rampant then (and now)

So Smallville became a secret obsession for me, and I loved much of it. Maybe the last three seasons were not as good as the first seven, but no big drop off.

The last ten minutes of the series were as great as could have been imagined. It has been well established that Superman’s first appearance in public is to save Lois from being killed in an airplane crash, and they did not tamper with that. The Lex Luthor as President seven years hence was nothing new; that story was told in the comic books many years ago. (Pete Ross as President, too, by the way, and married to Lana Lang, but that’s probably too complicated in this telling of the story). The “preview” of such a story which we we got, and the explanation of why an adult Superman does not have to cope with a Luthor who knows that he is also Clark Kent, all but guarantees that this is intended to resume at some point as a new Superman or Lois and Clark series. I suppose it does not need the exact same actors, but we’ll have to wait and see how everyone feels a few years hence.

4. Our egalitarian system of justice. This will probably be a longer post someday, but for now it is worth noting that the promise of Runneymede, especially as reaffirmed by Henry III that made it possible for the complaint of a woman who works in a hotel to result in the arrest of the the head of the International Monetary Fund. The people responsible for the prosecution of this case are among the best and most competent I have ever met and that the French are stupefied by all of this, tells us as much about what the Anglo-American system of justice has brought to the world as almost anything else imaginable. If I were to ever chant "U-S-A" or "U-K slash U-S-A", it would be for this.

5. Israel. This cannot be blogged about anymore because the responses and the "discussion" that "I/P diaries" create are just too painful. I cannot continue to pretend that there is no antisemitism in the world if I post on this subject, and this denial of reality is important to me. I will say only this: I am very proud of the President and if you think what he said was not important, you have not followed all of this as closely as others do. I have long been impressed with Tzipi Livni, but her importance to our future cannot be underestimated. That the Israeli news media gets bollixed up in the same silliness as ours does, is really sad, and incredible given the circumstances, but, really, this photograph of the Opposition Leader fixing her husband's tie cannot be even as remotely important as some people seem to think:

This is a really important and very scary moment for everyone, and for Jews particularly. It is a time that calls for courage and for vision and I spell that "President Obama" and "Tzipi Livni".

I expect to post a more universal diary later this weekend, but the Bs could get in the way.

Hope

2011-05-14T12:32:00.004-05:00

You know what hope is
Hope is a bastard
Hope is a liar
A cheat and a tease
Hope comes near you?
Kick it's backside
Got no place in days like these

Nick Hornby, as sung by Ben Folds, "Picture Window" from Lonely Avenue

It has been suggested, more than once, that the posts that appear under this name are not as cheery as they might be or once were. Starting this one with dark lyrics from song by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby about a family watching an apparently incurable loved one checking into a hospital "with a view of Parliament Hill" promises yet another trip down the same path, but there is some good news out there:

President Obama will surely be re-elected, and that is a good thing and the virtual certainty of his re-election has little to do with Osama bin Laden. Our president is a good one, maybe a great one or one who might become a great one. We will somedat remember his presidency fondly, and truly, will mourn its passage when he leaves the office in 2017. This post will not debate that, a Rachel Maddow segment linked to in last week's post makes the case as to what his presidency has accomplished so far, and this one, similar to many of her recent segments, should suffice to explain how far the Republican Party has drifted away from any platform that could elect a president. Have your Obamabot conversations elsewhere (at least this week) and save for another day your concerns that, say, a New Yorker cover could alter the likely results of next year's presidential election.

Here, though, is our weekly dose of bad news. His re-election, even his greatness, will not---without something else that does not appear to be forthcoming---not nearly enough to prevent our further sinking into a morass from which we may become unable to escape.

Every day we read the same general articles. The two in Wednesday's New York Times were typical (by the same reporter, Fernanda Santos, interestingly enough) but no less significant in reporting something we see almost every day that is not spent worrying about which movie star broke up with which other one:

One reported that young teachers, recruited away from whatever more lucrative opportunities that the well educated have presented to them, likely will be among those laid off as the New York City school system is forced into massive layoffs.

The other was about how our refusal to pay for the most essential of functions has resulted in schoolchildren forced into finding a way to get through the day without using a bathroom and special education students receiving physical therapy in a hallway "between a classroom and a tall file cabinet" as the obviously talented Ms. Santos writes.

These stories are about New York City mainly because your blogger works there--- not far from Corona, the site of the overcrowded school Ms. Santos describes----but they surely could be from almost anywhere else in the country. And it comes on the heels of the increasing proof that the selfishness and greed that have replaced our sense of national mission to improve the lot of the people who live here and of those around the world, have consequences that are dire in ways we can hardly begin to forecast.

These posts have cataloged some of these kind of stories before, but the latest, telling us that three quarters of high schools students could not name a power granted to Congress by the Constitution, answers such questions as why people believe that voting for some person who gets elected president is their sole responsibility as a citizen, and that if the president cannot accomplish what needs to be done, someone else should be "put in there" to solve the problem.

An electorate with such a dim awareness of what goes on in front of their very noses, is likely to be in a constant state of agitation, but easily manipulated by those who have specific goals in mind which may not be in accord with the views of those who vote, but have no other connection to their government. With beltway enablers who believe that political neutrality means simply allowing "both sides" of an question to speak, no matter how ridiculous, selfish, greedy or otherwise absurd "one side" is, our schools crumble and idealistic teachers forced from the profession, while Congress debates just how much more it can cut from a budget which should instead be increased to meet the needs of the country. (As Rachel pointed out this week, the Sunday shows all decided that a national security issue required huge numbers of Republicans---former Bush administration officials----to be put front and center since, as we know, only Republicans know how to protect the country.)

The shock the freshman Republicans expressed when they found out that, contrary to the Beltway wisdom, the conversion of Medicare into a voucher program, so as to finance the continuation of massive tax breaks foolishly enacted a decade ago, was grossly unpopular, is itself an indication of how out of touch our Congress for sale has become. It presents, though, little cause for hope since all the electorate cared about was getting what they had expected to get. Paying for it is of no concern, but if it is, get what the country needs from someone else.

Hope, we recall, is a city in Arkansas that gave us a president. Hope, we recall, is what President Obama represented in 2008 but hope can also be, as Nick Hornby says, a bastard, a liar, a cheat and a tease, especially when it becomes the only way to treat a patient.

We are a broken country but what we need cannot come from one man sitting in the White House. Hope can propel is forward, but the extent to which we ever reached greatness came from our commitments to educate our children, to care for the sick and elderly, to try to improve the lot of those with whom we share the country and the world, as well as to protect us from harm, both from abroad and self-inflicted by the greedy among us,

not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich

Those were the words, of course, of the president who inspired so many of us to heed his call and become public servants and to do for our country. And, again, while the Koch brothers or the late President Reagan tell their acolytes that it is just those public servants who are destroying their dream, these same words from That Speech, published here almost every week it seems, serve as the only real response that makes sense:

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation,"² a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Next week we will try for some giggles including a non baseball explanation of why Red Sox manager Terry Francona, in a manner similar to that of our President, has shown us all how to meet the problems we face. Promise.

Preserve, Protect and Posture

2011-05-07T09:29:00.006-05:00

The Washington Post, reviewing Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Solution, described one of its anecdotes, likely from former CIA director George Tenet or one of his allies:

an unnamed CIA briefer ... flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Condoleeza Rice, national security adviser to the President, testifying before the so-called "9/11 Commission" April 8, 2004:

Former New Jersey Governor and commission chair, Thomas] KEAN. I've got a question now I'd like to ask you. It was given to me by a number of members of the families. Did you ever see or hear from the F.B.I., from the C.I.A., from any other intelligence agency, any memos, discussions or anything else between the time you were elected or got into office and 9/11 talked about using planes as bombs?

RICE. Let me address this question because it has been on the table. I think that concern about what I might have known or we might have known was provoked by some statements that I made in a press conference. I was in a press conference to try and describe the Aug. 6 memo, which I've talked about here in the - my opening remarks and which I talked about with you in the private session. And I said at one point that this was a historical memo, that it was not based on new threat information. And I said, No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon - I'm paraphrasing now - into the World Trade Center using planes as missiles. As I said to you in the private session, I probably should have said, I could have not imagined. Because within two days people started to come to me and say, Oh, but there were these reports in 1998 and 1999; the intelligence community did look at information about this. To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman, this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us.

The New York Times, May 2, 2011:

Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after weeks of surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, American intelligence operatives felt they were onto something big, perhaps even Bin Laden himself. It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as his hiding place. Rather, it was a three-story house ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls, topped with barbed wire and protected by two security fences. ...

On March 14, Mr. Panetta took the options to the White House. C.I.A. officials had been taking satellite photos, establishing what Mr. Panetta described as the habits of people living at the compound. By now evidence was mounting that Bin Laden was there.

...

Back in Washington, Mr. Panetta met with Mr. Obama and his most senior national security aides, including Mr. Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The meeting was considered so secret that White House officials didn’t even list the topic in their alerts to each other.

That day, Mr. Panetta spoke at length about Bin Laden and his presumed hiding place.

“It was electric,” an administration official who attended the meeting said. “For so long, we’d been trying to get a handle on this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is.” ...

On March 22, the president asked his advisers their opinions on the options.

Mr. Gates was skeptical about a helicopter assault, calling it risky, and instructed military officials to look into aerial bombardment using smart bombs. But a few days later, the officials returned with the news that it would take some 32 bombs of 2,000 pounds each. And how could the American officials be certain that they had killed Bin Laden?

“It would have created a giant crater, and it wouldn’t have given us a body,” said one American intelligence official.

A helicopter assault emerged as the favored option. The Navy Seals team that would hit the ground began holding dry runs at training facilities on both American coasts, which were made up to resemble the compound. But they were not told who their target might be until later.

Last Thursday, the day after the president released his long-form birth certificate — such “silliness,” he told reporters, was distracting the country from more important things — Mr. Obama met again with his top national security officials.

Mr. Panetta told the group that the C.I.A. had “red-teamed” the case — shared their intelligence with other analysts who weren’t involved to see if they agreed that Bin Laden was probably in Abbottabad. They did. It was time to decide.

Around the table, the group went over and over the negative scenarios. There were long periods of silence, one aide said. And then, finally, Mr. Obama spoke: “I’m not going to tell you what my decision is now — I’m going to go back and think about it some more.” But he added, “I’m going to make a decision soon.”

Sixteen hours later, he had made up his mind. Early the next morning, four top aides were summoned to the White House Diplomatic Room. Before they could brief the president, he cut them off. “It’s a go,” he said.

During those first hours after the 9/11 attack, the murder of so many people who had never heard of Osama bin Laden, the destruction of the place where at least one public servant toiled in his first years as a professional age earner and who knew many who died that day, it was hard not to wonder whether the presidency had become less about protecting the country than the best platform from which to campaign for re-election, and for like minded people to be elected to serve in Congress.

Learning that, on that horrible day the president, indeed, was reading a book to schoolchildren in what has come to be called a "photo op" simply underscored that thought. After the national security adviser said nobody could have imagined what had happened, knowing that was either plainly false or our entire national security apparatus is made up of gum and tissues, could throw a person into hysterics.

You will recall I hope, the White House opposition to such a commission, its attempt to enlist former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger as its chair, only to have him resign when one of the victims' wives, a lawyer, asked him whether he had any bin Laden clients, and then their attempt to prevent Ms. Rice's testimony and the relase of the now famous memo.

But you may have missed or forgotten about this part of the commission's final report:

we offer a reminder, and an explanation, of the one period in which the government as a whole seemed to be acting in concert to deal with terrorism-the last weeks of December 1999 preceding the millennium.

In the period between December 1999 and early January 2000, information about terrorism flowed widely and abundantly. The flow from the FBI was particularly remarkable because the FBI at other times shared almost no information. That from the intelligence community was also remarkable, because some of it reached officials-local airport managers and local police departments-who had not seen such information before and would not see it again before 9/11, if then. And the terrorist threat, in the United States even more than abroad, engaged the frequent attention of high officials in the executive branch and leaders in both houses of Congress.

Why was this so? Most obviously, it was because everyone was already on edge with the millennium and possible computer programming glitches ("Y2K") that might obliterate records, shut down power and communication lines, or otherwise disrupt daily life. Then, Jordanian authorities arrested 16 al Qaeda terrorists planning a number of bombings in that country. Those in custody included two U.S. citizens. Soon after, an alert Customs agent caught Ahmed Ressam bringing explosives across the Canadian border with the apparent intention of blowing up Los Angeles airport. He was found to have confederates on both sides of the border.

Just as President Obama was required to explain that he was born in this country, President Clinton spent much of his presidency fighting off investigations and ultimately impeachment. President Clinton may have brought some of this on, but it can scarcely be doubted that this nonsense may have contributed to the loss of American lives. And, by the way, we need no photos to prove that bin Laden is dead. The President said so and the word of the President of the United States (at least of this President of the United States) ought to be sufficient at this point.

So, as it turns out, it is not something endemic to government that we cannot be protected from harm. As Rachel Maddow has observed more than once, when the government is run by people who disdain government, and think government is "the problem" it is simple for them to make what they believe to be so.

The other day, some smartass posted these photos and said that each made 1000 words unnecessary.

Hope the words don't detract from the force of the photos.

We elected the right person in 2008. If you still have any doubts, listen to Rachel's latest summary of what has been accomplished since then:

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Nuff said.

Two Thousand Words Which Need Not Be Said

2011-05-04T10:54:00.004-05:00

since each picture says 1000 of them:

We Elected the Right Guy

2011-05-03T20:13:00.002-05:00

Maybe "inexperience" is what is need to recognize who is, and who is not, an "ally"

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and, in advance of Memorial Day, this, from those no good commie pinkos on the left:

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and, if yo u are tired of ass hats chanting "U-S-A" but are nonetheless proud to be a citizen of this nation, see if you can make it through this without at least the hint of a tear:

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Taking Our Country Back

2011-04-30T09:12:00.003-05:00

Imagine John Adams, marked by the same man for hanging a decade earlier, for his role in the rebellion of the English colonies against the Crown. Yet now it was June, 1785 and he was presenting himself to King George III as the Ambassador of the United States to the Court of St. James. It is one of the most gripping scenes in David McCullough's magnificent book, and its dramatization in the television version was almost as good.

The connection between these United States and what was Great Britain and is now the United Kingdom remains strong, though. It is from our history together, after all, that the foundations of our law---the common law as we have called it---were established and, of course, we still speak roughly the same language.

To refer to "the Queen" without identifying which of several there still are in the world, means, in this country, no less than in Britain, Queen Elizabeth II, the daughter of a another King George: George VI. A movie about King George's battle with a speech impediment and his inspirational presence during World War II was widely praised last year and hugely successful in this country as well as the one where he actually was sovereign.

His great grandson got married yesterday, as you may have heard. George VI was Albert or Bertie until he became King, so it is hardly certain what name Andrew would assume were he to become king or how his wife, now H.R.H. the Duchess of Cambridge would be, as they say, "styled." What is certain is that whatever its acknowledged faults and whatever the causes which led to our "separation" were the monarchy retains surprising force in former colonies ostensibly united in the belief that all men (and eventually all women) were created equal.

And, indeed, our union of sovereign states, born by rebellion but with a significant disagreement that remained unresolved through independence, remains quite imperfect. By force of arms, the issue which divided us was resolved, at least under the law: including three amendments to the written Constitution we had substituted for the royal writ. One of those amendments enacted by the victors of "a great civil war" formally abolished the slavery and another established that

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside

That means that a person born in this country, except to people serving under the flag of another country (such as diplomats) meets the Artilce II requirement that

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President

Still, it might be expected that those who held other views, whose states joined the union based on their contrary opinions, and who were literally forced to adhere to laws passed after their defeat in battle, might resent having been required to accept what was unquestioningly not what they intended for the state formed in the eighteenth century or its union under the Constitution established in the last decade of that century.

That resentment---the refusal to accept the legitimacy of what was decided not be reason or vote, but at gunpoint---has lasted to this day. While the proponents of slavery blew apart the Democratic Party as it existed just prior to the civil war and, sadly, allowed to reassert it substantial influence a decade or so following that war, those forces of reactionary thought, unhappy with the New Deal, even more unhappy when President Truman ordered that the military be desegregated and a Supreme Court did the same for public schools, and reaching the last straw when the civil and voting rights acts were enacted in the mid 1960s, turned to the party of Lincoln, and took over the Republican Party lock, stock and barrel.

With the control of a political party---one which has enormous financial resources and, by control of the Supreme Court, the assurance that that advantage will have direct electoral consequences, they are doing again what they so successfully did in the relatively immediate aftermath of the civil war to subvert the consequneces of the military victory. So, for instance, if the Constitution was amended to provide that

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude

there were still many ways to keep Them, citizens only because the victorious forces in war said they were, from actually voting. And, though one of those longstanding tricks, the poll tax, was finally abolished in 1964, almost one hundred years after the end of the civil war, there were still many ways to keep as close a form of enslavement active as President Johnson, himself a self described child of the south, addressed the Congress in 1965 and reminded Americans that:

the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes. Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application, he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of State law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write.

For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin. Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books -- and I have helped to put three of them there -- can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it. In such a case our duty must be clear to all of us. The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend that Constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath.

The legislation he supported, part of the proposals he inherited when his predecessor was murdered while visiting Texas, was enacted in 1965, no doubt, in part, due to the desire to fulfill the program of the President who was prevented from pursuing it by an assassin's bullet.

Whether such legislation of not enacted then could pass today, it permitted enough people to register to vote as to enable the election as president of a man whose father was from Africa, and who had married a woman who lived in Hawaii. Their child, the President, was born there and, hence, was a native born American citizen. (He ran against a man born, not in a state, but in the Canal Zone, but there was no real argument that he was not qualified for the presidency as a natural born United States citizen.

But it has never been necessary to teach a particular old dog any new tricks. A man whose father was black, and whose name is that of his father: Barack Hussein Obama, Junior, is not like us, he is not us, and thus should not be permitted to be president, even if a majority of the citizens allowed to vote, want him to be president.

It is not hard to see that stereotypical southern sheriff who anybody who needed a haircut in the 1970s was sure to meet while travelling below thee Mason-Dixon line: and you can hear him say, "Now, boy, of course, if you are who you say you are, you sure could be president of the United States. But how do we know that you were born in this country? You call that a birth certificate? Why it don't look like any birth certificate I ever done see? What else ya got?"

Is this too much of a cheap shot; too much "Cool Hand Luke" and too divorced from reality?

No.

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And when a woman whose music has often been the subject of posts here, and who immigrated to this country from the Soviet Union when she was nine and her family could see no future in a country riddled with anti-semitism, saw all of this---including the segment posted above, she threw this little item up on Facebook:

Regina Spektor
Our president is being treated like crap by an entitled egomaniac and a bunch of ignorant racists like him.... "gets off his basketball court..."

What was thrown back at this little post was both amazing and not. Sad, but confirming. The refugee from the Soviet Union---long a citizen of this country, though, and not one who takes lightly to criticism of her adopted country from those who live elsewhere, almost ruefully had to say, a few hours later:

Regina Spektor
i am amazed at the response to my own opinions being posted on my own facebook page. they are definitely strong and maybe i worded them harshly? it's hard to tell, cause i'm me and i know my intentions very well... I do wonder if this is the place for it all- it's not a dinner at a friend's house. it brings the ugliness out in how people treat each other. hmmmm...
reg

John Adams did not risk his neck for these people and for this garbage. And the fight against this mindless intolerance and these gross claims of superiority continues more than 230 years after our declaration of independence. It truly makes at least one person wonder if we might have been better off trying to work things out with the Crown.

Trouble in Paradise

2011-04-23T04:30:00.005-05:00

Bob Woodward: The story is dry. All we've got are pieces. We can't seem to figure out what the puzzle is supposed to look like. John Mitchell resigns as the head of CREEP, and says that he wants to spend more time with his family. I mean, it sounds like bullshit, we don't exactly believe that...

Deep Throat: No, heh, but it's touching. Forget the myths the media's created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Bob Woodward: Hunt's come in from the cold. Supposedly he's got a lawyer with $25,000 in a brown paper bag.

Deep Throat: Follow the money.

Bob Woodward: What do you mean? Where?

Deep Throat: Oh, I can't tell you that.

Bob Woodward: But you could tell me that.

Deep Throat: No, I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I'll confirm. I'll keep you in the right direction if I can, but that's all. Just... follow the money.

---W. Mark Felt, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post as dramatized in the motion picture "All the President's Men" (1976).

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

When Winston Churchill let forth this bleat, used since then as a club to answer any critic of a democratic system of government, he was, as leader of the opposition Conservative Party in 1947, defending the right of a wholly undemocratic body, the House of Lords, to delay the effect of legislation the Lords opposed. The reason the Government had decided that it had enough of the Lords, was its interference in the Government's efforts to help the British economy recover from the ravages of the recently ended war. The Lords (and Churchill) believed, naturally, that what the Government was doing amounted to socialism.

He did not suggest that the Prime Minister was not born in Britain and was actually from Kenya, however.

The form of "democracy" we have established on these formerly British shores is, of course, a Republic, where we elect people to represent us in legislative bodies. It has not always worked very well, though, because the people elected, seeking their own re-election, are loathe to agree to anything that might anger a potential voter. The result, frequently, is mush.

There is, for instance, something about the phrase Missouri Compromise, that makes people far removed from the events of those days, believe it to be a tribute to representative government because opposing ideas were somehow muted by an agreement that, while not pleasing everyone, resolved the issue of the moment. Of, course, nothing could be further from the truth.

The half baked and almost absurd Compromise was actually enacted twice by Congresses unable to to resolve the vastly different views of slavery and what the federal government could do about it. Since no problems were actually solved, it led to even more friction and did nothing but delay the only way we could come up with to resolve those differing opinions: an insurrection by one side against the other which we have come to call The Civil War.

As we cut to our times, we make a slight detour to a United States Supreme Court opinion, as destructive to our country as of its other disasters (Dred Scott---which held the Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional among them). This one was called Buckley v. Valeo and, rather than repeat anything previously posted under this name, you are respectfully referred to, for instance, this.

For now, let's just look at one portion of this decision and consider how much it has exacerbated Congress' built in and long established inability to resolve the conflicts among us. When, after watching how an incumbent president could pervert the electoral system and then cover it up and heeding Director Felt's then anonymous admonition to follow the money, Congress was able to muster enough bipartisan outrage to reform the way we conduct our elections, the Supreme Court held it, as with the Missouri Compromise, was unconstitutional. Under the First Amendment, the Court held:

So long as persons and groups eschew expenditures that in express terms advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate, they are free to spend as much as they want to promote the candidate and his views....the First Amendment right to "`speak one's mind . . . on all public institutions'" includes the right to engage in "`vigorous advocacy' no less than `abstract discussion.'" New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S., at 269 , quoting Bridges v. California, 314 U.S. 252, 270 (1941), and NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S., at 429 . Advocacy of the election or defeat of candidates for federal office is no less entitled to protection under the First Amendment than the discussion of political policy generally or advocacy of the passage or defeat of legislation.

It is argued, however, that the ancillary governmental interest in equalizing the relative ability of individuals and groups to influence the outcome of elections serves to justify the limitation on express advocacy of the election or defeat of candidates .... But the concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment, which was designed "to secure `the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources,'" and "`to assure unfettered interchange of ideas for the bringing about of political and social changes desired by the people.'" New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, supra, at 266, 269, quoting Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1, 20 (1945), and Roth v. United States, 354 U.S., at 484 . The First Amendment's protection against governmental abridgment of free expression cannot properly be made to depend on a person's financial ability to engage in public discussion.

That last sentence deserves special emphasis since the over thirty years since then has shown how ridiculous it was and remains. The supposed First Amendment right to flood campaigns with money has exacerbated the power of those with money against those without to an extent President Nixon would have welcomed. The Court took the Watergate reforms and turned them into a ratification of what Nixon had wrought. Put the government for sale to the highest bidder and the most conservative candidate will almost always win unless they out forward someone who is overwhelmingly incompetent (see George W. Bush, a discovery made by the electorate about six years into his presidency).

It is little wonder then, that polling shows a huge disconnect between David Gregor, the rest of those who feed off Washington and the nation as a whole . In D.C. the recession is over and the economy slowly recovering. There is no need for further governmental stimulus, to these people, and, to the contrary, government spending must be reduced even if it puts more burdens on people counting on the social safety net.

In the rest of the country, though, the recession is such that everyone knows at least one person who lost his or her job, went through what unemployment benefits there were and now just stares into space, trying to figure out the next move. 60 Minutes told us how this was effecting a generation of children , but the widely viewed program barely made a ripple in the self-obsessed world of those who have spent the several weeks since then debating and arguing about more cuts in social programs.

Their audience are no longer voters who will likely vote predictably the way they are told to by those whose money is critical to the re-election of the "Representatives" and Senators who might otherwise see things differently than they do. The President hinted at this the other day when he described the pointedly piggish "Ryan plan"---hailed within the beltway and its followers as the epitome of courage and manliness---and said, instead,

I don't think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.

This was met by those feeding off the Valeo trough as rude and offensive: as if the President showed up at one of their fundraisers wearing a tee shirt. But they will win this argument, because it is not an intellectual battle to determine what is right and wrong among conflicting ideas. It is, instead, day to day preening to impress those with money to give them more so that they can stay in office longer. And the words campaign finance reform, they tell us, are the three most boring words in the English language. That should be so, but it appears to be that way, at least from here.

They were defeated in 2008, but they were carrying their not so bright President, unmasked and naked, and he brought out a groundswell that overwhelmed their natural advantages. Maybe the Governor of Wisconsin will do the same in 2012. They have little chance of picking up the White House given the personality driven nature of those campaigns but a decent chance of controlling both houses of Congress. By now, even the most monarchistic among us have noticed that a President, unlike a pre-20th century king or queen, has little hope of making a dent in the agenda that truly faces us, when Congress is a wholly owned subsidiary of people with completely different ideas.

Today is Patriot's Day and tonight is Passover

2011-04-18T05:00:00.001-05:00

And you know, they work together for me; born in New England of the faith that directly celebrates the exodus from Egypt.

And, yes, the poem we (New Englanders) all memorized when we were children, is worth remembering today and, as in prior years, it is posted here, but below.

But as a nation of immigrants, Regina Spektor's unfinished, but beautiful and poignant song, Rockland County, has as much to say about the day and its twin holidays, as does Longfellow:

Condescending down the stairs
I'm condescending down the stairs
I look out for a moment

Condescending down the stairs
I'm condescending down the stairs
I look down at the bottles

I just know I got something coming
If I got anything coming at all
I just know I got something coming
If I got anything coming at all

There are immigrants, I know
Who came, like me, as little kids
They think that
today
it's so different

They believe that immigrants
Shouldn't be allowed to come here anymore
They're bad
for
the economy

I just know they got something coming
If they got anything coming at all
I just know they got something coming
If they got anything coming at all

When I landed I didn't see
The Statue of Liberty
Like so many
immigrants
before me

In the airplane,
I didn't sleep
I stayed up watching 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit'
in English -- I loved it, but didn't understand it

Then I woke up in the middle of the night
In a big room with golden curtains and a fold-out couch
I thought I was in heaven or in Cinderella

Then I woke up in the middle of the night
In a big room in my cousin's house in Rockland County
I thought I was in heaven or in Cinderella

I heard the swimming pool noises
I didn't know they were swimming pool noises
I heard the swimming pool noises
And there was a dog, a dog, a real live dog

I heard swimming pool noises
I didn't know there were swimming pool noises
I heard swimming pool noises
And there was a dog, a dog, a real live dog

Ooh...

OK. Longfellow:

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,--
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,--
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,---
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;=
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

Chag Sameach and Go Sox; y'know

Visions

2011-04-16T09:03:00.007-05:00

It was very late when the President appeared before cameras a week ago Friday and croaked out something about how great it was that people who wanted to visit national monuments would be able to do so the following day. He told us:

A few months ago, I was able to sign a tax cut for American families because both parties worked through their differences and found common ground. Now the same cooperation will make possible the biggest annual spending cut in history

The next day, when he bounded up the stairs at the Washington Monument to underscore how great it was that tourists did not have their trip to the capitol disturbed, and to revel in what was accomplished, it was easy to imagine why the President might want to steer clear of the relatively nearby memorial to his audacious predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

President Roosevelt died sixty-six years ago this very week. In those waning hours of a titanic struggle over a "budget" for a fiscal year well over half over, a president elected on a platform of "change" from eight years of a Republican presidency dedicated to the destruction of everything Roosevelt in favor of the oligarchs and robber barons who famously hated FDR when he took them on in 1933, announced that their goal was his goal. All agreed, he appeared to say, that the biggest problem facing the nation at large, a country again laid low by crippling unemployment and a recession that mathematical calculations may claim to be over but experience does not, was a federal budget deficit. The protections against the depredation that almost destroyed the country by 1933 would have to take a back seat to the cause of balancing the federal budget.

The third Democratic president elected since Richard Nixon was able to use the antipathy toward Democrats that resulted from the Vietnam War and the tumultuous events of 1968 to sneak into a presidency he proceeded to disgrace, had sold out his party, just as the two others had. The struggles---the wars between two distinct views of what government is about---were over, the two others had tried to tell us.

One said, moments after taking office that,

We have learned that "more" is not necessarily "better," that even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems.

As the PBS series American Experience reported:

At a breakfast meeting, Carter berated the Congressional Democratic leadership for adding $61 billion in new programs to his budget. "The Democratic Party needs to remove the stigma of unjustified spending," he said.

"Mr. President," Tip O'Neill reminded Carter, "the Democrats are the champions of the poor and the indigent."

The next president elected by Democrats made the word triangulate a famous one, and told us that the "era of big government is over." Adopting the Republicans mantra worked well for that president. They impeached him.

And now it was happening again. The cries of pain were heartfelt and meaningful. We had been abandoned a again by a president who thought he could rise above it all, or could find "common ground" with people who believed his entire presidency to be illegitimate. As Rachel Maddow's perfect metaphor explained, if you do whatever the creature says it wants by whining, the creature will always get what it wants by whining.

There was no mistaking the strategy. David Plouffe, who takes credit for the President's election, travlled the Sunday morning talk show circuit and the message was clear and succinct:

listen, the president came together with Republicans and Democrats on behalf of the country in December, led an effort to cut taxes , and now we've come together to cut spending

The Republican answer to everything is to cut taxes, and to cut spending. If people get hurt, that's the way it is, FDR be damned (long time ago, different era, he's dead, etc. etc.) And the president elected as the nominee of the Democratic Party agrees.

And then there was The Speech:

From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity. More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.

But there’s always been another thread running through our history -– a belief that we’re all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. We believe, in the words of our first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.

and

Part of this American belief that we’re all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security and dignity. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff may strike any one of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” we say to ourselves. And so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, those with disabilities. We’re a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further. We would not be a great country without those commitments.

and

As a country that values fairness, wealthier individuals have traditionally borne a greater share of this burden than the middle class or those less fortunate. Everybody pays, but the wealthier have borne a little more. This is not because we begrudge those who’ve done well -– we rightly celebrate their success. Instead, it’s a basic reflection of our belief that those who’ve benefited most from our way of life can afford to give back a little bit more. Moreover, this belief hasn’t hindered the success of those at the top of the income scale. They continue to do better and better with each passing year.

and

In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That’s who needs to pay less taxes?

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that’s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That’s not right. And it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President. (Applause.)

This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don't think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. That's not a vision of the America I know.

The America I know is generous and compassionate. It’s a land of opportunity and optimism. Yes, we take responsibility for ourselves, but we also take responsibility for each other; for the country we want and the future that we share

and, yes,

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.

All right. That last one was from President Roosevelt, not President Obama but that is the point: Things are not so different. The arguments are the same ones, by roughly the same people (not the exact same people, of course, but people with the same outlook.)

In fact, as the great Rachel pointed out (as, ahem, posts under this name have said over a number of years), not a lot has changed in the core divisions within this nation since our founding and through he civil war:

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As the equally sensational Jon Stewart observed, the same people who habitually suggest that President Obama is some sort of exotic semi- or actual foreigner took great offense at his calling them out.

To Joe Scarborough the offense was that the President was suggesting that his opponents were un-American something he said, over and over, would not be tolerated if a Republican President said it (as, for instance, when President Bush repeatedly claimed when, though Democrats largely gave him exactly what we wanted in the run up to the war in Iraq, he campaigned in 2002 and 2004 as if a vote for Democrats was a vote for surrender).

His inane claim about who gets away with what aside, Congressman Scarborough (retired) missed the President's point, or at least, pretended he did. It was not that one could not endorse a Republican point of view and be a good American. It was that the Republican plan is based on a different view of this country than many others have.

The issue, the President said, requires that we

choose a vision of the America we want to see five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road....[T]he way th[e Republican] plan achieves [its] goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known certainly in my lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what we’ve known throughout our history...

The America I know is generous and compassionate. It’s a land of opportunity and optimism. Yes, we take responsibility for ourselves, but we also take responsibility for each other; for the country we want and the future that we share. We’re a nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness. We sent a generation to college on the GI Bill and we saved millions of seniors from poverty with Social Security and Medicare. We have led the world in scientific research and technological breakthroughs that have transformed millions of lives. That’s who we are. This is the America that I know. We don’t have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit our investment in our people and our country.

Yes, these are just words, but they are powerful ones. They draw the line in the sand so many have wanted to see. And, yes, while the President's track record as a negotiator is nothing to rely on (read David Remnick's book for a portrait of a man who craves agreement), his speech this week carries with it the same type of promise that the first President Bush made with his famous "no new taxes" speech at the 1988 Republican Convention. To renege on the no Bush tax cuts extension for the wealthy pledge would doom this President just as the unfulfilled Bush promise cost that President his re-election.

We are not united states today, any more than ever we were. Saying that we are does not make it so, as Rachel has explained over and over and our era's Civil War documentarian, Ken Burns, has also suggested.

Paul Krugman summed it up perfectly on Friday:

given the hysterical Republican reaction, it doesn’t look likely that we’ll see negotiations trying to narrow the difference. That’s a good thing because Mr. Obama’s plan already relies more on spending cuts than it should, and moving it significantly in the G.O.P.’s direction would produce something unworkable and unacceptable.

What happened over the past two weeks, then, was more about staking out positions than about enacting policies. On one side you had a combination of mean-spiritedness and fantasy; on the other you had a reaffirmation of American compassion and community, coupled with fairly realistic numbers. Which would you choose?

The two visions of our future are quite on display now. There is, as Dr. Krugman said, no clear middle ground, so now is the time to decide which one should prevail.

Mean Girls (and Boys) and the Mean Women and Men they Have Become

2011-04-09T13:40:00.003-05:00

So that's how it ends. As NBC News White House correspondent Chuck Todd told Chris Hayes last night, the "price" for keeping Congress from cutting its minimal support of Planned Parenthood, was to make further cuts in other programs so that different poor and/or elderly and/or sick people get hurt.

And, again, we are told this has to be done. The government "needs" to cut its spending during a recession. Just as we "needed" to continue huge tax breaks for the wealthy supported by people who claim to be dedicated to reducing the federal budget deficit. And the programs that "need" to be cut are the ones who aid the people who need the government's help the most.

Scrooge could not have said it better.

Your blogger has decided to allow something other than today's news to enter his cranium, lest he explode or otherwise injure himself. It may not be possible, though.

As it turns out, volume one of the vaunted Autobiography of Mark Twain, which Garrison Keillor decidedly did not like, but which your blogger enjoyed, ended with a 1906 letter from Helen Keller to Mr. Clemens (the author, not the steroid taking pitcher) thanking him for participating in an event in New York to raise funds to help the "adult blind" get useful employment.

The true message of New York is not the commercial ticking of busy telegraphs, but the mightier utterances of such gatherings as yours. Of late our periodicals have been filled with depressing revelations of great social evils. Querulous critics have pointed to every flaw in our civic structure. We have listened long enough to the pessimists. You once told me you were a pessimist, Mr. Clemens; but great men are usually mistaken about themselves. You are an optimist. If you were not, you would not preside at the meeting. For it is an answer to pessimism. It proclaims that the heart and the wisdom of a great city are devoted to the good of mankind, that in this the busiest city in the world no cry of distress goes up, but receives a compassionate and generous answer. Rejoice that the cause of the blind has been heard in New York; for the day after, it shall be heard round the world.

Yes, Mr. Clemens, the force of Miss Keller's words will last a thousand years; at least one hundred years so far. But, alas, Mr. Clemens, these one hundred years later, compassion has become a dirty word.

As has rational thought.

This is Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich talking to the aforementioned Chris Hayes last night:

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And here is Secretary Reich's further amplification on this point in his own blog:

All the while, [President Obama] and the Democratic leadership in Congress refuse to refute the Republicans’ big lie — that spending cuts will lead to more jobs. In fact, spending cuts now will lead to fewer jobs. They’ll slow down an already-anemic recovery. That will cause immense and unnecessary suffering for millions of Americans.

The President continues to legitimize the Republican claim that too much government spending caused the economy to tank, and that by cutting back spending we’ll get the economy going again.

... And he continues to draw the false analogy between a family’s budget and the national budget.

He is losing the war of ideas because he won’t tell the American public the truth: That we need more government spending now — not less — in order to get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession.

That we got into the Great Recession because Wall Street went bonkers and government failed to do its job at regulating financial markets. And that much of the current deficit comes from the necessary response to that financial crisis.

That the only ways to deal with the long-term budget problem is to demand that the rich pay their fair share of taxes, and to slow down soaring health-care costs.

And that, at a deeper level, the increasingly lopsided distribution of income and wealth has robbed the vast working middle class of the purchasing power they need to keep the economy going at full capacity.

President Obama remains, for many of us, a source of hope and inspiration. He is eloquent, intelligent, thoughtful, and well equipped for the tasks at hand. He has been dealt, unquestionably, a difficult hand, dealing with as low rent a Congress as can be remembered even for those with memories that stretch back to the mid 1960s. Indeed, if you did not vote last fall, or, worse, voted for a Republican, you really have no right to complain. You were warned what might happen and what happened was worse than what was imagined by most.

Still, when the President says that the agreement reached last night insured

a budget that invests in our future

or that

beginning to live within our means is the only way to protect those investments that will help America compete for new jobs -- investments in our kids’ education and student loans; in clean energy and life-saving medical research. We protected the investments we need to win the future

he knows better and is being generous to people who will not even think about reciprocating the gesture. They will, instead, tell their supporters that the President is a Muslim from Kenya who wants to impose a new socialism on them.

Even while hoping that this agreement was not reached to protect the high school class whose trip to D.C. the President oddly suggested last night was at least one factor, the landscape he faces, thanks at least in part to all those who stayed home last November, is not a good one. It is even more insane than the public it purports to represent, and just as racist. Moreover, our friends on this side of the political divide need to recognize that our views do not command even the hint of a majority in either house, nor, more than likely, in the rest of the country, as reflected in the opinions of the increasingly idiotic people with whom we live.

So this will go on and, as Secretary Reich says, the bullies will not be satisfied by concessions. Unhappy with the President as you may be, the only way out of this will be his re-election with coattails that restore Speaker Pelosi and somehow hold the Senate. In the meantime, teeth gritting will have to become fashionable.

The Company We Keep

2011-04-02T16:30:00.001-05:00

None of this should have surprised anyone, particularly those who could not bring themselves to vote, or otherwise support candidates whose election would have gotten in their way. The handwriting was on the wall, plain for everyone to see or, perhaps, to read. But either the President disappointed, or did something with which the voter disagreed and they got elected.

So now, in those offices about which nobody seems to care until its too late, Governors are moving against labor unions, and public employees, tearing down murals which celebrate labor in a Department of Labor. They are providing tax benefits for the wealthy, then complaining of a budget crisis that has to be resolved by cutting aid to those who need it the most.

What, may a screaming lunatic ask, did anyone expect?

We no longer have politics in this country, let alone government. We have replaced all of that with screaming. If you say red, I say blue. If you then say, well, maybe blue, now I am for red.

The silly back flips from by Former Speaker Newt Gingrich were much ballyhooed this week, but they were not an outlier: some notably absurd refusal to take any position that mirrors the President's. His comments were the most broadcast, but hardly the only instance of a Republican simply refusing to agree with anything that comes from the mouth or pen of President Obama.

Here is what the President said on Monday about why the United States, when asked to do so, had to be part of whatever international response there would be to what was happening in Libya:

In this particular country -– Libya -- at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale. We had a unique ability to stop that violence: an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves. We also had the ability to stop Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground.

To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and -– more profoundly -– our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.

Who, particularly those who, wrongly and grossly so, saw a war in Iraq as being a justifiable response to the the attacks of September 11, or those who believe, incorrectly but plausibly, that the United States could have done more to prevent the wanton murders in Germany during World War II, cannot see the force of those words?

Had either President Bush or the fabled President Reagan said any of this, as well they might have, though only one of them had the ability to do so, there would have been suggestions that these words should be engraved into the facing of every federal building in the land. But it was President Obama who explained who we are, and why we are obligated to assist in these efforts, even if the outcome (or "the endgame" as they call it) is uncertain.

Hence, Mayor Giuliani, Sort of Governor Palin Sen McConnell and Other Similar Deep Thinkers have to explain how wrong he is, wildly misrepresenting what the President said while doing so. (Senator: the President made clear that the policy of the United States is to support "regime change" in Libya, but not by military force---or military force alone. Which part of this do you truly not understand, and which are you pretending not to follow?).

The topper, to date, was this beauty from the always pitch perfect Louie Goemert of Texas:

The other day, Bill Maher made the point that others have cautiously put forward before, such as here. There are other factors at work, of course. President Clinton was not black, even half black, and They hated him enough to impeach him. President Roosevelt was as blue blood as possible and, as he revelled in it, they hated him, too. President Kennedy was Catholic and they hated him as well, some because he was Catholic, to be sure.

This is of another type, though. Without taking Donald Trump more seriously than is reasonable, acknowledging that even Bill O'Reilly finds this nonsense to be unworthy of discussion, but noting that Lou Dobbs could not let it go a year or so ago, the suggestion that the President is from Somewhere Else (and Trump's beyond the beyond claim that nobody in Hawaii has any recollection of him, meaning that David Remnick must be in an the scam, can only be seen through the prism of our centuries long struggle with race.

Just listen to this, from someone who claims to be a religiously pious man:

"I do think he [Obama] has a different world view and I think it is, in part, molded out of a very different experience...Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas."

And, the "correction" to the effect that the President "grew up" in Indonesia not Kenya (he grew up, for the most part, in Hawaii), did not touch his essential point. It made me recall the several dozen times when, as a child and young man, a Jewish boy, introduced to gentile adults (usually the parents of some schoolmate or other acquaintance) would quickly come to discuss Israel assuming that we Jews think of nothing else. Since these conversations generally took place in the New York metropolitan area, the instinct to talk baseball would not improve the situation since the Jew was from New England and his team was not all that interesting to the Mets, Yankees, Dodger and Giant fans who would keep talking about Israel.

The point, understood then and now is that Some People are Different Than We Are and, y'know, should be watched carefully.

So you wonder about the company we keep. They include some hate filled so-called pastor whose "trial" of Islam ended with burning of a book treasured by millions, who retaliated by murdering people who work for the United Nations and threatens others. This piece of garbage, using the First Amendment to jeopardize others in the name of hate, believes he has been wronged and is entitled to call on the government to serve his disgusting ends.

So, yes, we are different.

Lou Gorman

2011-04-01T14:18:00.004-05:00

There are worse things such as "The sun will rise, the sun will set and I'll have lunch" in the midst of biter negotiations with a spoiled brat pitcher who wants to take as much money from the club as he can, and I can even forgive him for not knowing where we might play Willie McGee.

I never faulted him for the Bagwell for Larry Andersen trade because we needed something at that second, or at least we thought we did. All of us.

Lou Gorman died today. He was a nice guy and a very good general manager of our beloved Boston Red Sox. I met him once, while he had some relatively honorary role in the organization, and he proudly showed off his 2004 World Series ring:

Opening Day

2011-03-30T19:09:00.003-05:00

Rosh haShanah, Yom Kippur and Opening Day. Right? In the beginning...

So here we go:

Boston
New York*
Baltimore
Tampa Bay
Toronto

Detroit
Chi(A)
Min
Cle
KC

Texas
Oak
LAA
Sea

Phi
Atl
NY(N)
Fla
Washington

Cin
SL*
Hou
Chi(N)
Mil
Pit

LAD
SF
SD
Col
Ari

I toyed with the idea of New York(A) being too old and not making the wild card
and it could happen, but lineups with A-Rod and Cano in them will score runs. Yes, I frequently expect the Red Sox to win but not always. In 1986 I was shocked at how well they played, just as in 1978---oh, I am not going to talk about 1978 as we go into the season with the highest pre-season expectations since then.

On the other hand, I cannot see how 100 wins is likely, given the division. Tampa Bay may slip to fourth, but even there remain a very good team with arms all over the place and a great manager who can make the most of them. It will be as brutal as ever in the East, but our manager is the best in the game and, well, he has the tools this time as never before.

Spring training means nothing, except, sometimes, individual performances. So, to my eyes, Beckett and Daisuke still have a lot to prove. Josh is pitching as I write this, but Houston is not a good team and they are all eager to just get this thing over with to start the season. I don't hold much stock in Daisuke's decent few innings on Sunday either, for the same reason. To me, it looked as if he was down to one dependable pitch, the fastball, and the other slop he puts up there looked okay mainly because he threw it so rarely. Pap, too, does not look good at all, but Dan Bard can step in if necessary. I have never been a big fan of Jencks. I am trying to change my mind, but so far, he has given no reason for me to do so. And, really, aside from history and all that, what is Wakefield doing on this team? Wouldn't we rather have Atchison out there, or Aceves?

And, I dissent from the established view of the cognoscenti that Oakland will win in the west. Texas remains really good; even better now with Adrian Beltre essentially replacing Vlad in that lineup and bringing a inconceivably better glove to third base than Michael Young's. Yes, yes, Cliff Lee. They only had Lee for half a season last year (not even that).

On the other hand, as great as it was to watch the Giants win last year, they have holes all over the place. I cannot see a repeat and, finances aside, the Dodgers are in a much stronger position, I think. The Pads are my team in the NL West nowadays but they need another year to get it together.

I can't stand LaRussa for reasons I have mentioned many times. He does know what he is doing, though (and condones cheating, too). So that terrible NL Central could have them or Reds on top, with the other team the wild card.

Yes, Philly is real good. The Mets are terrible, but Florida and Washington are not even trying.

2011-03-29T20:12:00.000-05:00

Goodbye to City of Palms

2011-03-29T15:11:00.002-05:00

I only got to Chain O'Lakes once in the almost thirty years the Red Sox trained there since moving back to Florida from Scottsdale, Arizona when I was in my teens.

Today was their last game as the home team at City of Palms Field where their spring games have been since 1993 (which seems as if it were yesterday) when they left "the Have"---Winter Haven where Chain O'Lakes is. The Sox move into an as yet unnamed semi-replica of Fenway Park closer to the Ft Myers airport next year. Certainly another team will take up residence in City of Palms, and presumably the Sox will play there often since the traveling will be easy. I expect to see them there and at the new park some March to come.

But it will not be our home park anymore. So, sort of, this is goodbye to place that served its purpose, mostly, except for requiring the minor leaguers to play down the street, and the fact that our Florida League team could not play there because the Twins own the territorial rights.

Perfect Timing

2011-03-26T10:34:00.004-05:00

If he ever had ever heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, it had never made much impact on him. It was so long ago, and in New York and the victims barely spoke English. And, anyways, what does it have to do with him?

And there he was, nearly a century later, and the Governor of Wisconsin: the state that had the Oshkosh Factory strike and Robert M. LaFollette and so much more that changed the nation in which we live. And, now he was talking to David Koch, a very wealthy man, who could really help him make his name in turning back Wisconsin's history and then the nations. Or at least he thought he was. He wasn't, of course. It was an adventurous blogger named, but he thought it was Koch and he wanted to make sure the rich man knew where this new Governor thought he fit in the new history they could write together:

this may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan, whose 100th birthday we just celebrated the day before, had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air-traffic controllers. And, uh, I said, to me that moment was more important than just for labor relations or even the federal budget, that was the first crack in the Berlin Wall and the fall of Communism because from that point forward, the Soviets and the Communists knew that Ronald Reagan wasn’t a pushover.

Then, perhaps to appropriately remember the young immigrants who jumped to their deaths or were burned to death at the Triangle building still standing 100 years later on Greene Street, just off Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, New York, New York, an air traffic controller---the only one on duty at the important airport near Washington, D.C. called---you cannot make this up---Reagan National Airport, fell asleep on his fourth consecutive 10 p.m to 6 a.m. shift and two incoming flights had to land without clearance or assistance from the tower.

The Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (called, usually, "the FAA") was "personally outraged" he reassured us and once the sleeping culprit was found to have fallen asleep because he was tired, and not because of any drugs he might have taken, he was suspended. From now on, the tower will have two people on duty at all times.

Whew. Fortunately, with such decisive action we won't have to ask why a supervisor (who would not have been in any union even had the Great Reagan not run the union the controllers formed for themselves---PATCO---out of town causing Gov Walker to, perhaps, literally wet his pants) was on duty, or why he was doing four consecutive overnight shifts. We won't have to examine what the working conditions of the people charged with guiding airplanes out of the sky, and no union will be around to question whether how the FAA meets its responsibilities, because the union is gone and, whaddya know, so is communism in eastern Europe.

But the FAA's boss is "personally outraged."

The people who owned the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory would surely wanted to have suspended the person whose cigarette might have caused the fire that destroyed their plant, their business, almost their freedom, and, of course, the young women who died. It is hard to believe that they weren't "personally outraged."

We are over-regulated? If you own the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or want to make money flying airplanes with passengers, you might think so, but a moments reflection might make you wonder who would want to fly if there were no air traffic controllers to guide those flights to a landing.

But the taxes we have to pay to support all of this are too high. General Electric does not think so,
or at least they ought not to.

Maybe this is too hard to understand. After all, who needs an education, when you have Michelle Bachmann around? (No word was provided on whether U.S. History was included in her curriculum, or its relationship to geography). In Park Slope, in Brooklyn, one of the best neighborhoods in the city, some children who should be entering kindergarten may not find a place in the local school

People who either failed to get an education, or ignored or forgot what they were taught, or simply say whatever might sound good to other empty headed people, have an answer for all this:

No new taxes. Public employees are responsible for the dire straits of our economy. The deficit---the horrible thing that was wiped out simply be the taxes collected when the economy was buoyant, albeit artificially---means that government needs to cut spending during a severe economic downturn.

As Bob Herbert explained this morning in his last New York Times column, these are the political conversations of a nation in a deep nosedive. And, sadly, there are no air traffic controllers around to help us out of this one.

------

A brief postscript: With the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, your intrepid blogger was introduced to the Cooliris thing that appears in the margin. Today's wall is an experiment, but, of course, concentrates on videos which relate to Regina Spektor and her music. Further examination of this thing will likely result in other "walls" since this is the place for such fun and games. If all this bothers you, please just ignore it.

Eating Cake

2011-03-19T11:03:00.003-05:00

For those who are neither economists nor actors who play them on tv, it is not as easy as it is for Paul Krugman. With a Nobel under his belt, his Princeton and New York Times credentials intact, and maybe with an eye to not having to run naked through the streets, he tells us he has

developed a strong tolerance for nonsense. After all, if I got upset every time powerful people were illogical and/or dishonest, I’d spend every waking hour in a state of raging despair

For the rest of us, whose only contact with the people who decide these things is through television, radio or what passes for news dissemination in other forms, it is hard not to begin emulate air raid sirens. As Dr. Krugman observed later the same week, the fairy tale land that houses our national government has decided that the aftereffects of the economic collapse that their groupthink devotion to "de-regulation" are no longer something they need to try to fix.

While almost all of us have either lost our job or know someone who has, the need for a new New Deal has apparently passed, according to the current version of the same groupthink that got us in this mess. When people and businesses are unable or unwilling to spend money, the government's obligation to do so, to stimulate the economy has been self-evident at least since 1933, though, of course, there is a large segment of the population (the "haves" and the "think they are or may someday be the haves") who dissent from this relatively simple point.

And since there are many things a government, particularly the federal one, can do to stimulate an economy that has a concomitant effect on the welfare of those in need, or even the rest of us who drive on highways, would like to find another way to get to work, or feel the need to educate our children and protect all of us from harm, the need for the government to spend can achieve some significant ends.

Hence, in the 1930s, it was decided to improve the system of benefits for the unemployed, and to provide social security, particularly to those who would spend too many years unable to participate in the marketplace, much less survive. The people who opposed the government's involvement in the economy, did not, of course, like any of this and since then they have tried to repeal them or set them back.

And while President Eisenhower might have told his brother that these efforts were "stupid" and the number of people supporting them "negligible" his confidence that foolishness would never reign was misguided.

In fact, as Doc Krugman has observed a couple of hundred times, or at least it seems so, it is the Official View of Official Washington that the social security system needs to be "fixed" even though there is no evidence to support alarms that are designed to justify more good ideas from the same people who told us deregulation was a necessary.

Since this nonsense has worked so well, these same forces (yes, the same general group that "hated" FDR and whose hatred he welcomed) they have added to their lexicon of Official Truths that the massive collapse of our economy was not the result of rampant speculation and financial chicanery by the newly dereuglated, but because of "entitlements": the protections from depredation that were the lasting legacy of the New Deal, and public employees (of which, as always noted, your blogger is one).

That Social Security must be fixed and the deficit (essentially the product, by the way, of reduced tax revenues given the massive unemployment, and the larger benefits that need to be paid to those who would otherwise have nothing) the most important issue facing the Congress, a group of politicians unable to see what the rest of us can not escape, has become the currency of political thought is unquestionable. Those who still work need a little distraction as they get ready to travel on broken highways or defunct trains, but what they get instead are Professors Scarborough, Barnicle and their little sidekick,
Brzezinski, agog when the Senate Majority Leader dissents from the wisdom of the sages.

That anyone could say such a thing---that Social Security is fine--- and there are way more important things to do, is seen in our nation's capitol as so absurd that it must be the product of insanity or craven politicians still fighting their last re-election campaign. That Senator Reid's election was not even remotely as close as the experts told us it would be, that perhaps that is because the unemployed know better, does not even begin to enter their worldview.

The tea party people might have been on to something, thought the other things that move them caused them to get to the wrong conclusion. That our government is populated in its legislative branch, and some pockets of its executive, it appears, by smug, know it alls who actually know very little except what they tell each other, is unquestionably so. And "unquestioned" is the right word, because many of them cannot even begin to question the nonsense peddled to them.

And so the rest of just look at them with crumbs falling from our mouths.

Coming Up this weekend

2011-03-17T10:55:00.004-05:00

Professors Scarborough, Barnicle and their little sidekick,
Brzezinski, were just agog that Senator Reid dissents from Beltway opinion.

But Senator Reid may not be a craven politician still fighting his last re-election battle, as he was portrayed by the ostensibly neutral Kelly O'Donnell.

He might be right.

Updated.

Fingers on the Scale

2011-03-12T09:07:00.005-05:00

Nothing in the following post is intended to or can be read to suggest that any political organization or affiliations as exist in the United States of America are off shoots, related to, intentionally emulating or seeking to impose a fascist or communist system in this country. It just seems that way sometimes.

We heard them everyday in the summer of craziness during President Obama's first year, breaking up meetings members of Congress had to discuss a reform of the health care system, bullying those with contrary views. Not exactly the beer hall putsch, but not how we think our political system should or does operate.

The overheated screams accusing the President of being a fascist, a socialist or both, struck many of us as truly odd since our complaint was not the government was threatening to take everything over, but that it had become unresponsive to great needs on the one side and rampant fraud and corruption on the other. Before we could worry about a government dictatorship, we needed to see the existence of a government at all.

And in rapid succession over the past weeks or so, the point was graphically illustrated for us. 60 Minutes broadcast a searing report on the growing number of children suddenly thrown from a middle class life into abject poverty when their parents lost one, then both incomes. At least a few people watching this had to wonder whether insuring that the extreme wealthy continued to receive the tax breaks they berated Congress into giving them in 2001 and demanded their extension last winter, at the cost of disabling any effective government programs to help those with such sudden needs

The answer is surely not as simple as private citizens coming to the aid of the specific people identified in a television program, who represent a much larger community. The question is how did it come to pass that government has abandoned the mission it took on in 1933 to protect those who need its help?

You know the answer. The creed of the greedy, masquerading as a political philosophy:

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem

So, they tell us today not to pay attention to starving children. The country's problem is caused by a federal budget deficit, and the only thing to do now is to cut, cut, cut. Shrink it until you can drown the government in a bathtub as Grover Norquist once told us.

The other view, the one that got us through the Depression and ushered, after a world war, the greatest period of prosperity the nation has ever known, that government must spend when others cannot or will not, is simply ignored in the flood of certainty that the federal budget deficit must be reduced even if children must go to sleep hungry, is nothing worth considering. As forecast in these very pages last week (not a particularly daring prediction, of course) polling which shows growing numbers of people disagreeing with the Official Wisdom of our public officials, would be dismissed as nothing more than the reluctance of a stubborn electorate unwilling to come to terms with What Must Be Done.

And since these opinion makers do not like too many people to notice how few clothes their emperors are wearing, they rig the debate and simply ignore any opinion other than the one they have embraced. As is universally understood, the motion picture actor, David Gregory (attempting to play the part of journalist, though not convincingly enough to completely debunk the idea that he is simply parodying actual news correspondents) illustrates better than anyone else the Beltway Knows Best ability to simply blow through opposing points of view.

One day in January he asks the Senate Majority one of those usual loaded questions that presupposes the conclusion he and his friends have already reached.

MR. GREGORY: Social Security, how does it have to change? What they put on the agenda is raising the retirement age, maybe means testing benefits. Is it time for Social Security to fundamentally change if you're going to deal with the debt problem?

Nothing in that question about what "debt problem" he means, particularly since social security is funded and administered outside of the federal budget which is said to be so horribly out of balance. So the question really is nothing more than why won't you agree to these Republican ideas, Mr, Majority Leader?

so the answer is not the one he wanted:

SEN. REID: One of the things that always troubles me is, when we start talking about the debt, the first thing people do is run to Social Security. Social Security is a program that works, and it's going to be--it's fully funded for the next 40 years. Stop picking on Social Security. There are a lot places we can go to...

MR. GREGORY: Senator, you're really saying the arithmetic on Social Security works?

SEN. REID: I'm saying the arithmetic on Social Security works. I have no doubt it does. For the next...

MR. GREGORY: It's not in crisis?

SEN. REID: No, it's not in crisis. This is, this is, this is something that's perpetuated by people who don't like government. Social Security is fine.

Oh, my. We can't have that. It's not in crisis? Is Senator Reid crazy?

Must be, because less than two months later, Gregory flatly tells his audience that social security is a "budget busting program." Not that people say it is. It is. He says so.

MR. GREGORY: The White House and Republicans are far apart on how deeply to cut government spending. But is there an opening to fix budget-busting programs like Social Security and Medicare? I'll ask my exclusive guest this morning, White House chief of staff William Daley....

We will put side for now the ridiculous MTP (under Gregory, the showman) assertion that all of its guests are "exclusive" meaning, it appears, that at the exact second they are on MTP, they are not talking to anyone else.

Of greater importance is the "know it all" faux-question posed to the President's chief of staff, about "the big driver of the deficit, as you know"

MR. GREGORY: The big driver of the, of the deficit, as you know, Social Security, Medicare, those are the real budget busters. And it was interesting, Speaker Boehner gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal. I'll put a portion of it on the screen. This is what he said. Speaker Boehner said Thursday, "...he's determined to offer a budget this spring that curbs Social Security and Medicare, despite the political risks, and that Republicans will try to persuade voters that sacrifices are needed. In an interview with The Journal, Boehner said House Republicans would offer a budget for the next fiscal year that gets goals for bringing the programs' costs under control."

Is this an opening here? Did the president and Boehner talk about this and say, "Look, let's do something here together?"

Not only does he define "the problem" as the way Republicans see it, he tells the chief of staff that the Republican Speaker is courageous in trying to limit, end, destroy or otherwise trim back programs Republicans opposed when they were enacted, came to terms with eventually, but now want ended, lest they cost their benefactors anything.

Sorry, David. No dice. Sorry to disappoint you.

MR. DALEY: Well, the president's been saying for quite a long time that we, we've got to, not only address our current budget problems, we've got to get to these large--I would take some exception with your statement. Social Security is not the big driver of the deficit right now.

Well, actually, ever but we can accept that answer.

So this is how it all breaks down. And as far as sides trying to take over the government; trying to end the traditional functions of the legislative process within a republic, try these on for size:

Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 2, 2011:

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- At the last minute, Ohio Senate Republicans have changed the makeup of a committee that will vote whether to approve a controversial bill that would overhaul the state's collective bargaining rights.

Sen. Bill Seitz, of Cincinnati, who opposes the bill, has been removed from the committee and replaced with Sen. Cliff Hite, of Findlay. The switch was made to ensure the Senate Insurance, Commerce and Labor Committee passes the bill, said Sen. Kevin Bacon, chairman of the committee.

Senate President Tom Niehaus decided to replace Seitz with Hite, Bacon said before the committee hearing this morning. As president, Niehaus has authority to remove and replace Republican committee members.

or this lovely example of representative democracy:

Those who decided to sit the last election out because they were angry with something the President did or did not do made all of this possible. But what these people have or are threatening to do with their supposed Mandate establish that the extreme fears expressed during the election were not extreme. Yes, the President owes us more than he has shown us, but punishing him with a lack of support endangers us all.
----

P.S. Tomorrow will bring us Frank Rich's last column in The New York Times. We will find him when he finally surfaces in New York Magazine this summer, but this is not a good time to lose his voice, even for a few months, and to have it re-appear in a less popular place than where it is heard right now. Nothing we can do about it, but to relish what we get as a farewell, and hope for the best in short order.

Choosing Sides

2011-03-08T23:21:00.003-05:00

This is a preview of this weekend's post. Comments will be accepted and, perhaps, incorporated:

MTP, Jan 9

MR. GREGORY: Social Security, how does it have to change? What they put on the agenda is raising the retirement age, maybe means testing benefits. Is it time for Social Security to fundamentally change if you're going to deal with the debt problem?
SEN. REID: One of the things that always troubles me is, when we start talking about the debt, the first thing people do is run to Social Security. Social Security is a program that works, and it's going to be--it's fully funded for the next 40 years. Stop picking on Social
Security. There are a lot places we can go to...
MR. GREGORY: Senator, you're really saying the arithmetic on Social Security works?
SEN. REID: I'm saying the arithmetic on Social Security works. I have no doubt it does. For the next...
MR. GREGORY: It's not in crisis?
SEN. REID: No, it's not in crisis. This is, this is, this is something that's perpetuated by people who don't like government. Social Security is fine.

MTP, March 6, 2011:

MR. GREGORY: The White House and Republicans are far apart on how deeply to cut government spending. But is there an opening to fix budget-busting programs like Social Security and Medicare? I'll ask my exclusive guest this morning, White House chief of staff William Daley....

MR. GREGORY: The big driver of the, of the deficit, as you know, Social Security, Medicare, those are the real budget busters. And it was interesting, Speaker Boehner gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal. I'll put a portion of it on the screen. This is what he said. Speaker Boehner said Thursday, "...he's determined to offer a budget this spring that curbs Social Security and Medicare, despite the political risks, and that Republicans will try to persuade voters that sacrifices are needed. In an interview with The Journal, Boehner said House Republicans would offer a budget for the next fiscal year that gets goals for bringing the programs' costs under control."
Is this an opening here? Did the president and Boehner talk about this and say, "Look, let's do something here together?"
MR. DALEY: Well, the president's been saying for quite a long time that we, we've got to, not only address our current budget problems, we've got to get to these large--I would take some exception with your statement. Social Security is not the big driver of the deficit right now.

Dangerously Out of Touch

2011-03-05T09:50:00.005-05:00

Go ahead. I dare you. Watch those Sunday talk shows from our nation's capitol and see how much of what passes for political discussion concerns the need for government to cut back on spending. David Gregory will almost certainly ask someone what ideas there are to get "entitlements" "under control".

Then, even if you have already seen this, listen to what those who study these things say (about halfway into this):

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As discussed ad nauseum here and elsewhere, these are not outlier opinions or those of the radical left. It is the view of almost every economist who does not work in Washington or for a political point of view. Yet the noise machine keeps telling us about deficits, and excessive government spending.

Of course, as Jon Stewart pointed out repeatedly during a week of virtual tributes to schoolteachers such as his mother, this demand that government balance its budget does not apply when discussing tax breaks for the wealthy:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

What did we expect? Some of us are practically unable to discuss politics without talking about how stupidity reigns supreme across the land and that those who revel in anti-intellectualism can hardly be expected to support schools.

Still, the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll that got so much notice this week offers some hope doesn't it? The public may actually be seeing through all of this noise, and remembering, perhaps, what parents, grandparents and, ahem, teachers, might have told them about the Depression, the New Deal, the growth of unions and of the middle class, might be rethinking the refrain made popular by the movie actor who played the part of President of the United States from 1981-1989.

[By the way, we are obligated to note here that the best actor to portray a President of the United States, has a son whose is self-destructing on national television, providing yet another excuse for what passes for news to be diverted to a voyeuristic delight in watching someone kill himself. This is a truly sad aside, which presents little more than a reason to feel very bad for the actor who so brilliantly portrayed the greatest president fiction ever created, President Josiah Bartlet).]

Returning to reality, sadly, all the poll means to your self-absorbed Congress and its hangers on, is that the public is being stubborn in opposing what "everyone knows" must be done. Chris Hayes, unsurprisingly, brilliantly explains what he aptly describes as Washington's "disconnect" in The Nation this week and the question that follows from that is what are the ramifications of a government which has been bought and paid for, and no longer even considers what is best for the country, and what a growing number of people seem to understand.

Don't look here for an answer, just a stab at hysteria. Nick Hornby and Ben Folds may think "he should know. He's got his own blog" but this blogger does not. What is out there does not suggest solutions or much of a positive future, but who knows, maybe FDR will come back to life.

Maybe, if he does, he will threaten Congress the way President Roosevelt did when he took office 78 years ago yesterday:

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But, in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis -- broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

For the trust reposed in me, I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.

Take that. And, you know, it is not clear that people today would support a would be near dictator any less than they were prepared to do in 1933.