Bad Choices

The botched war in Afghanistan, like the economic crisis and the broken health-care system, is an inheritance from which Obama is trying to extricate the country. In each case, the institutional, historical, and political constraints under which a President must operate mean that the solutions—or, if there are no solutions, the ameliorations—are doomed to be nearly as messy as the problems.

...George W. Bush proclaimed...“Our war on terror is only begun, but in Afghanistan it has begun well.” In truth, it had not begun so well...the perpetrator of 9/11 had been allowed to escape...the American forces that could have captured him were held back by an Administration already planning its misguided invasion of Iraq. The evidence, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report concluded last week, “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.”


There are no good options for the United States in Afghanistan. That has been the conventional wisdom for some years now, and this time the conventional wisdom—the reigning cliché—happens to be true. President Obama did not pretend otherwise in his address at West Point last week. His grimly businesslike speech was a gritty, almost masochistic exercise in the taking of responsibility. What he had to say did not please everyone; indeed, it pleased no one. Given the situation bequeathed to him and to the nation, pleasure was not an option. His speech was a somber appeal to reason, not a rousing call to arms. If his argument was less than fully persuasive, that was in the nature of the choices before him. There is no such thing as an airtight argument for a bad choice—not if the argument is made with a modicum of honesty.

In November, two months into the grueling, three-month review of Afghanistan policy that culminated in last week’s address, the Pentagon offered the President four options, each accompanied by a number, with each number representing an increase in the American troop commitment. But these were variations on a theme. As Obama seems to have realized, his true choices, of which there were also four, were wider and more fundamental: to begin immediately to wind down the American military presence; to maintain the status quo; to commit to a more or less open-ended, more or less full-fledged “counter-insurgency” war; or to pursue some version of the course he has now charted, in which a fresh infusion of military force and civilian effort is paired with a strong signal that America’s patience and resources, on which there are many other demands, are not unlimited.

Obama did the best he could to make a positive case for the path he has chosen, but—chillingly, bleakly—the principal virtue of his choice remains the vices of the others. Withdrawal, beginning at once? The political and diplomatic damage to Obama would be severe: a probable Pentagon revolt; the anger of NATO allies who have risked their soldiers’ lives (and their leaders’ political standing) on our behalf; the near-certainty that a large-scale terrorist attack, whether or not it had anything to do with Afghanistan, would be met at home not with 9/11 solidarity but with savage, politically lethal scapegoating. Even so, if “success,” however narrowly defined, is truly an outright impossibility, then withdrawal may still be the most responsible choice. But it is not yet obvious that a better result is out of the question. “To abandon this area now,” the President said, “would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on Al Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.” The consequences could also include a second Taliban emirate, a long, bloody civil war, and a sharp, destabilizing increase in Islamist violence, not only in Pakistan but also in India and elsewhere. The status quo? To “muddle through and permit a slow deterioration,” the President said, “would ultimately prove more costly and prolong our stay in Afghanistan, because we would never be able to generate the conditions needed to train Afghan security forces and give them the space to take over.” Or a full-scale counter-insurgency war—in the President’s words, a “dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort, one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade”? That, too, must be rejected, “because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests.” Such a war—such a project—would be hugely out of proportion to whatever marginal security gains it might yield. And it wouldn’t just be beyond “a reasonable cost.” It would be beyond our political, institutional, and material capacity, and therefore impossible.

A dismal process of elimination has left the President to design a strategy that he believes is the only one that offers a chance, in his words, “to bring this war to a successful conclusion.” Or, at least, a bearable one. Deliver a hard punch to the Taliban, break its momentum, and welcome its defectors; throw a bucket of cold water on the hapless and corrupt central government; carve out space and time for projects of civilian betterment and the development of Afghan forces that are capable of maintaining some semblance of security; forge “an effective partnership with Pakistan”—to list the elements of Obama’s strategy is to recognize its difficulty. It is full of internal tensions, most prominently between the buildup of troops and the eighteen-month timeline for beginning their withdrawal. (To the extent that the troop surge weakens the enemy while the timeline focuses minds in Kabul and Islamabad, however, that tension could be a creative one.) The plan does not, of course, guarantee success. The best that can be claimed for it is that it does not guarantee failure, as, in one form or another, the alternatives almost certainly do.

At West Point in June of 2002, George W. Bush proclaimed to the graduating cadets, “Our war on terror is only begun, but in Afghanistan it has begun well.” In truth, it had not begun so well. Six months earlier, the first Taliban emirate had indeed been routed from power. But, at the same time, the perpetrator of 9/11 had been allowed to escape from his mountain hideout; the American forces that could have captured him were held back by an Administration already planning its misguided invasion of Iraq. The evidence, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report concluded last week, “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.”

That was the speech in which the then President—no doubt with Iraq in mind, though he made no mention of that country—expanded what was already being called the Bush Doctrine to embrace the notion of preventive war. Obama, in the aftermath of his West Point speech, was widely condemned—and grudgingly praised—for allegedly adopting “what sounds like the Bush Doctrine” (Rachel Maddow) and “a rehash of the Bush Doctrine” (Mary Matalin). Not so. Whatever the Afghanistan war’s origins (and they were retributive, not preventive, except in the sense that every war, and every act of statecraft, is aimed at “preventing” something), this is not a preventive war. It is an actually existing war, and Obama’s purpose is clearly to bring it to a non-disastrous end.

The botched war in Afghanistan, like the economic crisis and the broken health-care system, is an inheritance from which Obama is trying to extricate the country. In each case, the institutional, historical, and political constraints under which a President must operate mean that the solutions—or, if there are no solutions, the ameliorations—are doomed to be nearly as messy as the problems. If there is no Obama Doctrine, there is an Obama approach—undergirded by humane values but also by a respect for reality. The most telling signpost in Obama’s speech may have been neither his call for more troops nor his timeline for removing them but his use of a quotation from another President who inherited a seemingly intractable war: “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.” That was Dwight D. Eisenhower, in one of the homelier passages from his canonical farewell address, delivered the year Barack Obama was born. President Eisenhower’s point was that a nation’s security is all of a piece—that military actions do not inhabit a separate universe but must be weighed on the same scale, and be subject to the same judgments, as a nation’s other vital concerns. That seems to be President Obama’s point as well.


~Hendrik Hertzberg

A Tragic Mistake

I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not.


“I hate war,” said Dwight Eisenhower, “as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

He also said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

I suppose we’ll never learn. President Obama will go on TV Tuesday night to announce that he plans to send tens of thousands of additional American troops to Afghanistan to fight in a war that has lasted most of the decade and has long since failed.

After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option.

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.

More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.

I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not.

Politicians are seldom honest when they talk publicly about warfare. Lyndon Johnson knew in the spring of 1965, as he made plans for the first big expansion of U.S. forces in Vietnam, that there was no upside to the war.

A recent Bill Moyers program on PBS played audio tapes of Johnson on which he could be heard telling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “Not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 [American troops] are going to end that war.”

McNamara replies, “That’s right.”

Nothing like those sentiments were conveyed to the public as Johnson and McNamara jacked up the draft and started feeding young American boys and men into the Vietnam meat grinder.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam. There was every reason for American forces to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. But that war was botched and lost by the Bush crowd, and Barack Obama does not have a magic wand now to make it all better.

The word is that Mr. Obama will tell the public Tuesday that he is sending another 30,000 or so troops to Afghanistan. And while it is reported that he has some strategy in mind for eventually turning the fight over to the ragtag and less-than-energetic Afghan military, it’s clear that U.S. forces will be engaged for years to come, perhaps many years.

The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But that would have taken great political courage. It would have left Mr. Obama vulnerable to the charge of being weak, of cutting and running, of betraying the troops who have already served. The Republicans would have a field day with that scenario.

Lyndon Johnson is heard on the tapes telling Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, about a comment made by a Texas rancher in the days leading up to the buildup in Vietnam. The rancher had told Johnson that the public would forgive the president “for everything except being weak.”

Russell said: “Well, there’s a lot in that. There’s a whole lot in that.”

We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war.

~Bob Herbert

Corporatism vs. Capitalism

When I heard the word "corporatist" a couple of years ago, I laughed. I thought what a funny, made up, liberal word. I fancy myself a die-hard capitalist, so it seemed vaguely anti-business, so I was put off by it.

Well, as it turns out, it's a great word. It perfectly describes a great majority of our politicians and the infrastructure set up to support the current corporations in the country. It is not just inaccurate to call these people and these corporations capitalists; it is in fact the exact opposite of what they are.

Capitalists believe in choice, free markets and competition. Corporatists believe in the opposite. They don't want any competition at all. They want to eliminate the competition using their power, their entrenched position and usually the politicians they've purchased. They want to capture the system and use it only for their benefit.

I don't blame them. They're trying to make a buck. And it's a hell of a lot easier making money when you don't have competition or truly free markets or consumer choice. All of these corporations would absolutely love it if they were the only choice a consumer had.

Blaming the corporations for this is a little silly. It's like blaming a man for breathing or a scorpion for stinging. That's what they do. In fact, they are legally bound to make their best effort at not just crushing the competition, but eliminating it. Lack of competition will lead to making more money (presumably for their shareholders; though realistically it winds up being for their executives these days).

As the saying goes, "Don't hate the player, hate the game." We have to understand how this system works and then account for the abuses that are likely to arise out of it. I don't hate the scorpion for stinging but I also wouldn't put a bunch of them in my bed. And I wouldn't take kindly to someone else putting them there, either.

Politicians are very cheap to buy (and senators from smaller states are even easier to buy - great bang for your buck). So, obviously corporations are going to look to buy them so they can pass laws to kill off their competition. If you don't understand this, you're being at least a little bit dense.

You should lose significant credibility as a journalist if you're naïve enough to believe that corporations would not do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Come on, can anyone really believe that? Yet, in today's media atmosphere, saying politicians are in the back pocket of the corporate lobbyists who raise the most money for them is seen as an unacceptable comment. Anyone who challenges the system is portrayed as an outsider, fringe element who must be treated with scorn and shunned. We are told in earnest tones we must trust the corporations and not question the motives of the politicians.

The sensible approach would be to recognize the problem and figure out a way to avoid it the best we can. Money always finds a way in, but we can at least be cognizant of the issue and try to combat it as much as possible. We must do this as citizens who care about our democracy, but we must also do it as capitalists.

I believe in the capitalist system. I think it makes sense and it is attuned to human nature. People do not work to the best of their ability and take only as much as they need. They work as little as humanly possible and take as much as humanly possible. Capitalism helps to funnel these natural impulses in a positive, hopefully productive manner.

But in order to have capitalism we must have choice. If consumers do not have different companies to choose from, if the markets aren't truly free and there is no real competition, then you kill capitalism. Corporations are a natural byproduct of capitalism, but as soon as they are born they want to destroy their parent. Corporations are the Oedipus of the capitalist system.

In order for capitalism to work, they must not be allowed to succeed. We must guard capitalism jealously.

So, it is of the utmost importance that we watch politicians with a very wary eye. Campaign contributions are a tiny expense to a large corporation. And the politicians treasure them too much. It is an easy sale. So, beware of politicians receiving gifts.

The perfect example of this is the health care reform debate going on now. And perhaps there is no better example of a politician who works for his corporate overlords than Max Baucus, who has received nearly three million dollars from the health care industry.

I don't blame the health care companies. I would do the same thing in their position. In fact, it is their fiduciary responsibility to buy an important (and cheap) senator like Max Baucus (he's cheap because he comes from the small state of Montana, where it is far less expensive to buy ads and crush your political competition with money they cannot possibly match).

If the health care companies can eliminate their competition, they'll make a lot more money. That is why there is so little competition among corporations in so many parts of the country now and why they are desperate to avoid the public option. They'd have to be stupid and negligent not to buy Max Baucus. He is the head of the Finance Committee and in charge of writing the most touted and awaited version of the health care bill.

I don't blame them, I blame us. How stupid and negligent are we to let that guy write this bill? The media should be treating Baucus and many of the other senators (who all get millions from the health care industry) with enormous skepticism. Instead, they are treating them as if they are honest actors who would never be affected by all that money.

They treat their concerns as if they are legitimate issues. The Republicans and the corporatist Democrats pretend to be fiscal conservatives who care about the budget when they are trying to kill the most important cost constraint in the whole bill - the public option. If you're a budget hawk, that's the last thing you'd kill, not the first. That's what keeps our costs down.

You see, these politicians betrayed their real motives in this debate. They made it crystal clear that they are not, in fact, conservatives or moderates or centrists or even capitalists. They are corporatists. They look out for the interests of the corporations that pay them above all else. Capitalists believe in competition. They believe it lowers costs and gives consumers better choices.

So, I would ask the media to please stop calling these politicians conservatives or even capitalists. And could you please look out for the rather obvious fact that they might not be working for us but for the people who pay them?

Of course, the media outlets might be able to better recognize this if large corporations didn't also own them. But that probably wouldn't affect their judgment either, would it?

~Cenk Uygur

Pining for the Fjords

"To allow private insurance companies to let private profit maximizing decisions get in between a patient and a doctor is close to unethical for us."


A Real Socialist State

As a Norwegian, looking at the U.S. health care debate from the outside, I cannot help but laugh sometimes. It seems like the word “socialism” has become a swear word. In Norway, we just re-elected a “socialist” government. That does not mean that we live in a communist state. We have full-fledged capitalism over here, and we are just about the richest country in the world, per capita. But we have chosen to let the state supply world class health care to all inhabitants.

To allow private insurance companies to let private profit maximizing decisions get in between a patient and a doctor is close to unethical for us. In Norway, you get the same care no matter if you are a homeless drunk or the C.E.O. of one of the biggest companies. And that’s how it should be. They say that the measure of a country’s success lies in how it treats its most unfortunate citizens.

— Gjert Myrestrand

Snake's Navel

I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything --pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic-- as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though --what really got them to pissing all over themselves-- was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake's Navel wasn't real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn't use them kinds of terms in his sermons.

~James Lee Burke

Vacuum

The following is so astute, on-point, and well-written, that I've simply posted it in its entirety without my customary witticisms and embellishments. Certainly it illustrates, if such an illustration were necessary, why Mr. Rich is lead columnist for the Times in the featured Sunday slot while I write on a self-published blog for a handful of leftys, right-wing nuts and the occasional poor soul who wanders in looking for a recipe for strawberry syrup.

Obama’s Squandered Summer

In the meantime, a certain damage has been done...The inmates took over the asylum...poisoning the national discourse... The lies...ran amok... culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president might speak to the nation’s schoolchildren on a higher plane than, say, “The Pet Goat.”

FRANK RICH
September 12, 2009

The day before he gave his latest brilliant speech, Barack Obama repeated a well-worn mantra to a television interviewer: “My job is not to be distracted by the 24-hour news cycle.” The time has come for him to expand that job description. His White House has a duty to push back against the 24-hour news cycle, every 24 hours if necessary, when it threatens to derail his agenda, the nation’s business, or both. This was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted. The president deserves his share of the blame.

After a good couple of years of living with the guy, we know the drill that defines his leadership, for better and worse. When trouble lurks, No Drama Obama stays calm as everyone around him goes ballistic. Then he waits — and waits — for that superdramatic moment when he can ride to his own rescue with what the press reliably hypes as The Do-or-Die Speech of His Career. Cable networks slap a countdown clock on the corner of the screen and pump up the suspense. Finally, Mighty Obama steps up to the plate and, lo and behold, confounds all the doubting bloviators yet again by (as they are wont to say) hitting it out of the park.

So it’s a little disingenuous for Obama to claim that he is not distracted by the 24-hour news cycle. What he’s actually doing is gaming it for all it’s worth.

As a mode of campaigning, this tactic was worth a great deal. Obama not only produced eloquent speeches — especially the classic disquisition on race that silenced the Jeremiah Wright pogrom — but also executed a remarkably disciplined tortoise-vs.-hare battle plan that outwitted and ultimately vanquished the hypercaffeinated political strategies of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. As a style of governing, however, this repeated cycle of extended above-the-fray passivity followed by last-minute oratorical heroics has now been stretched to the very limit.

Wednesday night’s address on health care reform was inspired, lucid and, in the literally and figuratively Kennedyesque finale, moving. It was also (mildly) partisan, a trait much deplored by high-minded editorial writers but in real life quite useful when your party is in the majority and you want to rally the troops to get something done. But there was little in the speech that Obama couldn’t have said at the summer’s outset. Its practical effect may prove nil. Short of signing a mass suicide pact, the Democrats were always destined to pass a bill. Will the one to come be substantially better than the one that would have emerged if the same speech had been delivered weeks earlier? Not necessarily — and marginally at most.

In the meantime, a certain damage has been done — to Obama and to the country. The inmates took over the asylum, trivializing and poisoning the national discourse while the president bided his time. The lies that Obama called out so strongly in his speech — from “death panels” to “government takeover” — ran amok. So did all the other incendiary faux controversies, culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president might speak to the nation’s schoolchildren on a higher plane than, say, “The Pet Goat.”

None of this served his cause of health care reform or his political standing. The droop in Obama’s job approval numbers isn’t remotely as large or precipitous as the Beltway’s incessant doomsday drumbeat suggests. But support for his signature program declined, not least because he gave others carte blanche to define it for him. Perhaps the most revealing of all the poll findings came in an end-of-August Washington Post query asking voters what “single word” first came to mind to describe their “feelings” about Obama and his health care proposals. For Obama, the No. 1 feeling was “good.” For the policy package he’d been ostensibly selling all summer, the No. 1 feeling was “none.”

It’s not, as those on the right would have us believe, that Obama’s ideas are so “liberal” that the American public recoiled. It’s that much of the public didn’t know what his ideas were. Even now I’m not convinced that most Americans know what a “public option” really means or what Obama’s precise position on it is. But I’d bet that many more have a working definition of “death panels.” The 24-hour news cycle abhors a vacuum, and the liars and crazies filled it while Obama waited for his deus ex machina descent onto center stage.

That he let the hard-core base of a leaderless minority party drive the debate only diminished his stature. That’s why his poll numbers on “leadership” declined. The right-wing fringe has become so deranged that it will yank its kids out of school to protest the president and risk yanking more Americans off assembly lines by boycotting General Motors to protest the administration’s Detroit bailout. Even Laura Bush and Newt Gingrich stepped in last week to defend Obama’s classroom homily from the fusillades by some of their own party’s most prominent ideologues. The White House should have landed a punch before they did.

Obama would have looked stronger if he’d stood up more proactively to the screamers along the way, or at least to the ones not packing guns. As the Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith has reminded us, it didn’t harm the New Deal for F.D.R. to tell a national radio audience on election eve 1936 that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies. Indeed Obama instantly gained a foot or two in height Wednesday night once that South Carolina clown hollered “You lie!” (One wonders what this congressman calls the Republican governor of his own state, Mark Sanford.) As the political analyst Charlie Cook has pointed out, Obama’s leadership poll numbers have also suffered from his repeated deference to Congress. Waiting for the pettifogging small-state potentates of both parties in the Senate’s Gang of Six is as farcical as waiting for Godot.

Now that he has taken charge, Obama will speed the process and, we must hope, secure reform that may make a real difference for everyone, starting with the 46-million-plus Americans who have no health insurance. But when we gain some perspective on the summer of 2009, the health care debate, like the crazed town-hall sideshows surrounding it, may seem very small in the history of this presidency — maybe even as small as the Condit follies and the breathlessly reported shark attacks of summer 2001 now look in the history of the previous administration.

The reason is that health care reform, while an overdue imperative, still is overshadowed in existential urgency by the legacies of the two devastating cataclysms of the Bush years, 9/11 and 9/15, both of whose anniversaries we now mark. The crucial matters left unresolved in the wake of New York’s two demolished capitalist icons, the World Trade Center and Lehman Brothers, are most likely to determine both this president’s and our country’s fate in the next few years. Both have been left to smolder in the silly summer of ’09.

As we approach the eighth anniversary of the war that 9/11 bequeathed us in Afghanistan, the endgame is still unknown and more troops are on their way. Though the rate of American casualties reached an all-time high last month, the war ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking the issues important to the American public. Most of those who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). But the essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan — and make the heavy sacrifices that would be required — or look for a Plan B was punted by the White House this summer even as the situation drastically deteriorated.

No less unsettling is the first-anniversary snapshot of 9/15: a rebound for Wall Street but not for the 26-million-plus Americans who are unemployed, no longer looking for jobs, or forced to settle for part-time work. Some 40 million Americans are living in poverty. While these economic body counts keep rising, tough regulatory reform for reckless financial institutions, too-big-to-fail and otherwise, seems more remote by the day. Last Sunday, Jenny Anderson of The Times exposed an example of Wall Street’s unashamed recidivism that takes gallows humor to a new high — or would were it in The Onion, not The Times. Some of the same banks that gambled their (and our) way to ruin by concocting exotic mortgage-backed securities now hope to bundle individual Americans’ life insurance policies into a new high-risk financial product built on this sure-fire algorithm: “The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return.”

When we look back on these months, we may come to realize that there were in fact “death panels” threatening Americans all along — but they were on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and on Wall Street, not in the fine print of a health care bill on Capitol Hill. Obama’s deliberative brand of wait-and-then-pounce leadership let him squeak — barely — through the summer. The real crises already gathering won’t wait for him to stand back and calculate the precise moment to spring the next Do-or-Die Speech.

A Loony-Toons Hero is Something to Be

"I’d have been willing to bet that we had a national consensus on the undesirability of a congressman yelling out 'You lie!' during an address by the president of the United States."

Gail Collins
NYT 9/12/09
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/opinion/12collins.html


Gail, Gail, Gail; where have you been? I would have taken that bet in a heartbeat! Had you in mind a wager of a size that would have allowed me to pay my health insurance premium this month? You had? Drat; yet another missed opportunity in a life full of them.

In fact, I would have quickly jumped on the contrapositive in any proposed wager that started out, "I'll bet that we have a national consensus on..."

(A digressive note to sticklers of the mathematically literate variety: I don't actually recall the distinctions between reverse, inverse, converse and contrapositive, and thus it's highly likely I've misused "contrapositive". I apologize, but I really liked the feel of the world when I rolled it around on my tongue and figured it was close enough. Sue me.)

The only thing more predictable than that this clown (I may properly call a US Congressman a clown under the New Protocol, may I not?) would become a wing-nut hero, is...um...uh...er...hmmmm. Actually I can't think of anything more predictable.

My other great regret, in addition to missing the opportunity to separate you from a few bucks, is that the New Protocol was not in place during the Bush years. Can you imagine him addressing Congress and someone jumping up and yelling "You lie!" every time he did? It would have looked like a giant whack-a-mole game! Cracks me up just thinking about it.

By the way; what's the deal with these fake "Joes" the Rushfoxicans keep trotting out? First there was the presumptive nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, "Joe the Plumber", whose name was actually Sam and who wasn't really a plumber; now we've got good ol' reg'lar guy "Joe" Wilson whose actual name is Addison Graves Wilson Sr.

You neednt' answer; that was a rhetorical question, of course. In the good old days, before the dumb fucks finally figured out that there weren't enough rich WASPs to allow them to win elections reliably as their real selves, fronting their real agendas, Addison Graves Wilson Sr would have been a classic moniker for a Republican, and would have been borne with pride. Now...not so much. Pass the pickled pig balls, Janey Sue.

Almost Rational

Quasi-interesting piece by David Brooks in today's NY Times on the Obama health care speach.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/opinion/11brooks.html

Brooks is a staunch conservative who has concluded -- are you listening, wing-nuts? -- that the current health care system is unsustainable and presents a grave threat to the country's long term economic outlook.

My response follows.

Mr. Brooks:

I'm a liberal (my definition; not necessarily those of other liberals, and certainly not the caricature beloved by conservatives) who reads your column, but I admit I'm not of the "David Brooks is the Conservative Even Liberals Respect" school. Mostly you exasperate me, and I'll further admit that I have difficulty approaching your current work objectively owing to what I perceived as eight years of defending/enabling the thoroughly indefensible and detestable Bush regime, which -- putting aside ideology -- even the most charitable could only rationally describe as (at best) incompetent.

But you've apparently made a reasonably objective and intellectually respectable study of health care issues and I'd like to respond to a few points in your column of 9/11/2009.

>>...the House health care bill. That bill would add $220 billion (that’s 2.2 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the first 10 years and another $1 trillion (10 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the next 10 years. >>

Surely, Mr. Brooks, neither you nor anyone else can know this. I do not accuse you of inventing the numbers, although you offer no citation, but of repeating with certitude an inherently highly questionable estimate that pretends to exactitude.

But my objection does not rest solely, or even primarily, with educated-guesswork, crystal-ball-gazing and subjectivity masquerading as hard data ("The color blue is 18.694% prettier than the color red")

The primary problem with such a statement is that it ignores key, salient points justifying the whole exercise of health care reform to begin with, to wit: to have it function more efficiently; to ultimately reduce health cares cost as a percentage of GDP; to reduce the financial burden on American corporations and individuals.

At the risk of sounding like a loony supply-sider: must not, for example, the resultant corporate savings, increased corporate competitiveness and increased corporate profits, resulting in turn in increased tax revenues and increased numbers of employees (who also pay taxes thus augmenting the government's treasure rather than being the drains on the economy they would be if unemployed) be netted against the gross costs? I don't for a moment pretend to know the exact number of the off-setting revenues ("You're wrong; the color red is, in fact, 14.673% prettier than the color blue"), but it seems a reasonable assumption that they would not be insignificant.

>>There is no way to get from the House bill to deficit neutrality>>

As I said above, it depends on who's doing the math and the underlying assumptions/variables employed by the mathematician.

>>...accepted the principle of tort reform to reduce the costs of defensive medicine. Once again, the specific proposal Obama mentioned is trivial...>>

I'd be glad to see some sort of tort reform enacted, if for no other reason than to silence (although a healthy bite of facts never do seem to stopper their mouths) the seemingly substantial numbers of people on the right who claim to believe that this alone is the crux of the problem with the current system. As the experiences of Texas and Florida (where vigorous tort-reform legislation was implemented and hasn't made a dent in per capita costs or rate of increase relative to the rest of the country) as well as the recent, oft-cited article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker make abundantly clear, "trivial" is probably as good a word as any to describe the likely effect of even the most aggressive approach to tort reform. But I dislike lawyers as much as the next right-thinking fellow and I’ll cheerfully toss them under the bus on this one.

>>...the public option...the president praised it, then effectively buried it. White House officials no longer mask their exasperation with the liberal obsession on this issue>>

I don't know that this particular liberal is "obsessed" with it, but a single-payer system is simple, efficient, proven to be cost-effective, has been used and continually refined over the years all over the world, is overwhelmingly approved of by the populace of nations where it is in place, and certainly would beat the hell out of the mind-numbing complexity and dubious efficacy of the horse-designed-by-committee we are likely to wind up with in its stead. Can you say "re-inventing the wheel?"

>>...the president also buried the soak-the-rich approach. The House Ways and Means Committee came up with a plan to raise taxes on the rich to pay for health reform. That’s dead, too…The president underlined his resolve to cut $500 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. This is a courageous move that moderates appreciate. >>

Cutting Medicaid courageous?! Certainly history has taught us that nothing in this country requires less political courage than "soaking-the-poor".

As to "soaking-the-rich"...how about as a starting point merely restoring top marginal rates to those in place during the reign of that famous socialist, Ronald Reagan? I've no idea what the political calculus is inside the White House, but it is surely astute to separate the two issues. Let's reform the health care system without getting demagogued by the FOX "News", AM radio lackeys of the moneyed interests who invariably -- and oh so easily! -- manage to persuade people making $40,000 per year that they will wind up destitute if marginal rates on incomes over $200,000 per year go up a point or two. No, no, by all means let it lie, for now. Then we can soak the rich.

>>Which is not to say that this is effective health reform...Obama said that parts of the system work...they don’t...>>

Amen, brother. Our proposed solutions differ, as do our underlying philosophies, but we certainly agree on that.


Regards,

Len Safhay

I see the future...

Rather than keeping the faithful readers of Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes -- all three of you -- waiting to read the Rushfoxican Party's thoughtful, nuanced response to the speech that the President of the U.S. is going to give this evening, I thought I'd go out on a limb and report what they will say before they say it.


He's a Communist!

He's a Nazi!

Government programs are evil!

Keep your hands off my Medicare!

He hates white people!

He's going to kill my grandma!

He's going to kill all white grandmas!

He's trying to take my guns!

He's trying to take my grandma's guns!

He's going to cut off my grandma's medicare then put her in front of his death panel and shoot her with the gun he took from her!

He kicked my dog!

He kicked my dog's grandma!


Admittedly, it's not much of a limb to go out on. Kind of like predicting rain in the tropics.

And for all you moronic wingnuts who manage to allow yourselves to be whipped into a frenzy by even the most modest nods toward increased social justice and equity that would still leave us considerably to the right of where we were during your beloved 1940s-1950s (imagine if someone today proposed the Marshall plan, 90% marginal tax rates, the GI bill, etc.?!); who believe (or pretend to believe; it's hard to reliably tell the difference between willful, mind-numbing ignorance and deliberate, cynical provocation) that a two percent increase in marginal tax rates on the top one percent of earners is the acme of socialistic tyranny, here's something for you to legitimately get your panties in a twist about: the speech I wish Obama (who in truth is a centrist by historical standards; moderate in both outlook and temperament) would give, but of course will not. I, on the other hand, am moderate in neither temperament nor outlook and if you want to call me a radical, I won't quarrel with you.

Members of Congress; fellow citizens.

I'd like to begin by apologizing to all thinking people for having wasted valuable time and resources in my repeated, futile attempts to mollify the members of the lunatic fringe whose numbers are relatively insignificant but whose every howl of deranged rage -- scripted and orchestrated by the moneyed interests -- is effectively amplified and exaggerated by the media which has in turn been played by said moneyed interests like a Stradivarius.

I've come to realize that I can no more reason or negotiate with these irrational, data-denying dupes than one could reason with a particularly obstreperous two year old in the midst of a temper tantrum.

I've further come to realize that bought-and-paid-for obstructionists -- including those in my own party such as Senator Baucus -- should be exposed for what they are, i.e. corrupt tools of the plutocracy. I intend to set aside all political calculus and pragmatism and speak truly and directly from this moment on for the rest of my term.

I fully understand that the realities of our current political and media system almost certainly mean that my commitment to speaking truth to and about power will result in my being destroyed and end any chance of my achieving anything of even modest substance. Perhaps I'll even be killed by the forces of the right as President Kennedy was, but more likely and less dramatically I'll simply be marginalized, slandered, scurilously discredited and voted out of office by the oh-so-easily-manipulated public after a single term.

But I've concluded that the situation as it currently exists is intolerable and only a radical re-ordering has any chance of preventing this country from inevitably and irrevocably becoming akin to a giant version of a Central or South American kleptocratic autocracy, with the vast preponderance of the population living in squalid, pestilential slums and a tiny elite residing behind razor-wire-topped walls on palatial estates patrolled by heavily armed guards.

And while it's obvious that no one would like to live on the wrong side of the wall, it's perhaps less obvious that there is no right side. That's why, for example, the well-known communist, Warren Buffet, decries the fact that his $40,000 per year secretary is taxed at a higher rate than he is and believes that he should be paying much more in taxes than he is now. He decries this not simply as a matter of fairness and common decency; he believes this not merely out of sheer altruism, but because he is wise enough to apprehend that the greatness of America was always predicated on a large, prosperous, productive and passably contented middle class. And that a reasonably egalitarian society where even the least among us can afford the basic necessities of food, shelter and medical care is a society that ultimately benefits the most successful among us as well. In short, he understands that it is more in his enlightened self-interest to have billions of dollars in the America that once was and can yet be again, than to have many more billion of dollars in, say, Sao Paulo, where only the force of arms keeps the seething masses from the throats of the masters, the rats have no trouble breaching walls, and the air above their tennis courts is no more fit to breathe than it is outside the most wretched hovel.

This is the disastrous path we've been on for the last thirty or so years, fellow citizens; one that grew parlously steep during the Bush years. And the hidden lords and masters of this country were so emboldened by having a president and government they owned fully, that rather than being sated, they are clinging to that absolute power with a ruthless ferocity and looking always for just one thing: more.

I can no longer in good conscience fail to expose the prime movers and unbridled, unprincipled greed behind this ever more egregious state of affairs nor make any further attempts to negotiate with them; to humbly beg them to please be satisfied with something ever so slightly less than everything.

I frankly have little confidence that anything can be done to stop or even slow them -- so enormously wealthy, powerful, amoral, avaricious and implacable are they -- but I've determined that even if we are destined to go down, I for one intend to go down swinging.

Good night, fellow citizens, and may truth and justice prevail through the grace of a merciful God and the heroic efforts of honorable men and women.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

On the cusp of autumn here in the northeast, I took not a one (as mandated by the holiday) but a two day respite from my, um, labors and fished both Sunday and Monday.

The trico fishing on the Little Lehigh has been spotty of late as summer wanes. Even on the warmest recent mornings, the expected clouds of spinners have failed to coalesce to any significant degree; one encounters only a handful of rising fish in any given pool; and those paltry few only continue rising for perhaps an hour.

But Saturday evening I had tied up a bunch of Griffith's gnats with wispy muskrat under-fur shucks in various sizes and was eager to try them. I had found the pattern in Ed Engle's book, Tying Small Flies, in which he commends it highly. Aside from Engle's testimonial, it appealed to me owing to the use of muskrat for the trailing shuck. I can't vouch for the efficacy of muskrat as a shuck material vis a vis various other natural or synthetic substances, but I've found having a dead muskrat on my desk to be extremely efficacious at keeping Mme. Cloozoe and the little Cloozoes at bay, thus allowing me to tie undisturbed.

The fishing Sunday morning was as it had been of late; not much of a hatch or spinner fall and a mere smattering of sporadically rising fish who had honed over the summer the unerring ability to discern the artificiality of a trico pattern of whatever design or size.

But I had a long stretch of the stream to myself, caught a couple of small trout and -- just as I was about to call it a day -- hooked and landed the last fish I saw rising; a good sized brown of fine color. I caught him at end of a long, tricky cast through a stiff breeze over conflicting currents on the smallest of my muskrat-augmented Griffith's gnats. On that note, I patted myself vigorously on the back, de-rigged, and drove home happy.

Monday I decided to check in on my favorite Brookie stream. A small, rocky creek that I've only ever showed to one other person, I worry about it every summer and every winter and am always relieved each spring and fall to find it in good shape and still containing a healthy population of its own beautiful strain of wild fish.

I usually don't start fishing this stream until about the middle of September, but we've had mostly prematurely cool nights starting in late August and in any event the creek and surroundings are so lovely that a trip there is never wasted regardless of the productiveness of the fishing.

The nature of said fishing could hardly be more different than the hyper-technical variety practiced on the Little Lehigh, of course. You fish a creek like this with a six or seven foot rod. A six or seven foot leader is plenty long enough and 5x tippet is more than fine enough. The fish typically aren't fussy about pattern or size (except on rare occasions when -- inexplicably -- they are) and although you almost never see a fish rise, a good cast to a promising-looking spot is apt to be rewarded with a slashing take that quickens the heart by a wild brook trout that appears, seemingly, out of nowhere.

I arrived at the brook to find the water levels a bit lower than I had hoped, but not disturbingly so, and the water temperature nice and cold. I tied on a good sized winged cinnamon ant which I had selected almost (but not quite) arbitrarily, and on the first cast to the second pool I tried I was fast to a good sized fish.

"Good sized" must be taken in context, of course. In this creek it means an eight or nine inch fish. The largest I've caught was a deep bodied twelve-incher -- a veritable leviathan in these waters.

I worked my way up the stream for a few hours, catching fish steadily, pausing frequently to sit on a rock and smoke and daydream.

Not everyone likes this kind of fishing and not everyone is good at it, (the fish may not be selective and you've got to be pretty damned ham-handed to break one off, but they are easily spooked by clumsy or indifferent stalking and your casts, although not long, must be accurate, sometimes creative, and on the mark on the first attempt with little or no false casting) but those of us who do like it tend to like it a lot.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

September 2, 2009
2:53 pm

The United States is the only country in the entire civilized world that does not provide some sort of governmental health care for the general population.

The idea that somehow this problem rests partially with the Democratic party is rubbish. We have reached a point in this country where large numbers of relatively uneducated people are lead around by their televisions sets like sheep on a sheering day.

You simply have to pull out your calculator and do the math. About half of what you pay the government in taxes goes directly to the military. Half. It really isn’t that difficult to figure out why we have the fiscal problems when the internal government tax for military expenditures is, at this point, one hundred percent greater than expenditures for any health care program.

Yes, the Democratic party gets weak in the knees at times, but lets just be honest: the Republicans think corporate profits are the eleventh commandment. Some would say the first commandment. And then just throw really narrow minded bigots on the airwaves for 20 hours a day and….voila! You have your masterpiece. A country where 10 million people think Glenn Beck knows more about constitutional law and economics than Obama.

— john

Fox "News" Viewers Getting Their Instructions

Liberals will always be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the inherently authoritarian right. We have a visceral indisposition to walking in lock-step; a concern for means as well as ends; a commitment to attempting to discern and speak the objective truth; the capacity to consider points of view we don't ourselves hold; an awareness of and appreciation for nuance. The right is burdened by no such constraints. It makes for an unfair fight and I'm damned if I know what to do about it.

Cheney at Work on his Memoirs

Punked?

It will doubtless come as a surprise to the right-wingers among you, who apparently believe your own bullshit, but there is concern ranging from disappointment to anger among the sentient beings of this country that Obama is perhaps not the progressive they took him to be, but rather a middle-of-the-road, business-as-usual corporatist who will prove either unable or unwilling to shepherd through some of the fundamental changes so vital to the long term ethical and economic interests of the nation; specifically in the area of health care.

In fact, there was a provocative Frank Rich column in the NY Times yesterday that asked whether those of us in the center/left had been misled, or as Rich colorfully phrased it, "punked".

But of course, it's Obama who is getting punked. He's doing exactly what he said he would do during the campaign; attempting to reach across the aisle, striving to move beyond partisanship, searching for common ground and consensus. And as many had predicted, he's finding it somewhat akin to trying to compromise with a spitting cobra; a really agitated, really determined, really stupid spitting cobra.

I think of Obama as the NY Times of political figures. Both are cogent, civilized and rational. And both -- apparently stung by accusations of 'liberal bias' -- have bent over backwards to disprove such assertions, thus allowing the voices of un-reason to effectively emasculate them. And what has been their reward for their earnest, respective efforts? Obama is branded a traitor, a baby-killer, a foreign born hence illegitimate president, a racist and a crypto-communist; and the NY Times is still referred to as Pravda by the no-nothings of the right and their plutocrat manipulator/masters.

I've given up on the Times ever getting beyond characterizing the patent, factual untruths promulgated by the Republican party with adjectives less mealy-mouthed than "disputed", but I still hold out some vague hope for Obama, in part because only six months into my last new job, I still didn't know where they kept the extra paper clips.

My ever diminishing hope is mostly predicated on my perception of his intelligence and character for which I still have high regard. But sadly I've pretty much concluded that the game is unalterably rigged and the entrenched interests arrayed against him are too rich, powerful and implacable to allow for substantive change.

Congress is bought and paid for on both sides of the aisle, and almost as bad as the Republican brownshirt tactics and disinformation squads (death panel, Ms Palin; really?), will be the inevitable crowing and beating of the chest by Democrats when they give us the watered-down, ineffective health care reform that is so clearly and tragically in the offing.

No significant progress will be made as long as the insurance lobby has anything to say about it; and their massive "campaign contributions" (read: bribes) speak volumes. They bring nothing to the table but an ever-growing appetite for money on the backs of the citizenry. Want to save $400 billion on health care? Take out the 'for-profit' middlemen that provide no service but obstruction.

Feast of Fools, Part II

"This is no party of Einsteins...only 6 percent of scientists said that they were Republicans"

"6 in 10 Republicans said they thought that humans were created, in their present form, 10,000 years ago"

"Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt"

Not only are anti-reformists showing up, they’re terrorizing legislators with their tomfoolery when they do. Blinded by fear and passion, armed with misinformation and misplaced anger, they descend on these meetings and hoot and holler in an attempt to shut down the debate rather than add to it.

I must say that this says more about them than it does about any forthcoming legislation. Belligerence is the currency of the intellectually bankrupt.

Trapped in their vacuum of ideas, too many Republicans continue to display an astounding ability to believe utter nonsense, even when faced with facts that contradict it.

A Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll released last Friday found that 28 percent of Republicans don’t believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States and another 30 percent are still “not sure.” That’s nearly 6 out of 10 Republicans refusing to accept a basic truth. Then again, this shouldn’t surprise me. According to a Gallup poll released last summer, 6 in 10 Republicans also said they thought that humans were created, in their present form, 10,000 years ago.

Let’s face it: This is no party of Einsteins. Really, it isn’t. A Pew poll last month found that only 6 percent of scientists said that they were Republicans.

~Charles M. Blow

Feast of Fools

If despair is truly a sin, I'm in severe jeopardy of spending eternity in perdition; or wherever it is atheists like me are sent (an endless Sarah Palin rally?)

The following comment was posted in response to a column in today's NYTimes and pretty well sums up my feelings as well.

Kate Madison
Depoe Bay, Oregon
August 8th, 2009
9:07 am

Okay, Gail, I surrender! Give up! Call in the men with the white coats to take me away!!!

What is going on in America today is in no tradition I can remember, and I am pretty old! I listened to Bill Maher tonight, and his New Rules were positively depressing--although funny in a "gallows humor" sort of way. For instance: 34% of Americans STILL believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11! 47% of Republicans TRULY believe that Barack Obama was not born in the US (maybe that's a good thing?), Sarah Palin says Obama's healthcare plan is "downright evil," and would force her to take her Down Syndrom child before a "death panel" every five years!!! Eeeeek! Get me out of here!

Is it any wonder that our ill-informed, highly anxious citizens are massing at town hall meetings yelling at their congressmen to "Tell the Government to Keep Its Hands Off of My Medicare?" Who think that a Living Will is a "Death Panel?" OMG--is our citizenry really this stupid and uninformed? Will we ever get over ourselves--and the Civil War????

Clunker Class War

I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Fox "News", but, um, fortunately I usually know what they're exercised about because DeFazio makes a pretty effective echo chamber. Bill O'Reilly speaks, the words go into DeFazio's ears, and -- completely bypassing his brain -- come out of his mouth virtually unaltered. That was how I found out about "the war against Christmas", for example.

It's also how I inferred the right's opposition to the Clunker Program, which seems to have the combined virtues of effectiveness, help for everyday people in tough times, support for the battered car industry, reducing mid-east oil dependency, reducing pollution...and all for the cost of about an hour's expenditures in Iraq (best current estimates of the full financial cost of the Iraq "war" total around $3,000,000,000,000; or an average of about $10,000 each for every man, woman and child in the country. My share of the cost of the Clunkers program is $3.33. Money's tight, but I can swing that.)

And of course, the right completely ignores realities regarding the state of the economy which came dangerously close to imploding entirely under Ethelred the Unready Bush and remains in parlous condition, and disingenuously chooses to view this as what it caricatures as a standard liberal giveaway (giveaways are legitimate only when the recipients are, say, Halliburton or the top .1% of earners) as opposed to a specific stimulus designed for current circumstances.

Here's Timothy Egan's take in today's NY Times


August 5, 2009, 9:45 pm

My clunker was a ’64 Ford Galaxie, logging maybe eight miles to the gallon on level ground, the back seat burned to the coils by a knucklehead friend who left a cigarette to smolder. When it died, just short of 140,000 miles, everything went. Sold it for scrap and $50 — with the tow.

Today, I’d trade that dog on wheels in a New York minute for the upgrade, some smart mileage car that is one of the autos zooming off my neighborhood lot as part of the Cash for Clunkers program.

But according to a barnacled cluster of senators, this program must be sunk, now. It’s been far too successful — dealers have been swamped, people are lining up to buy cars that burn less gas and bring instant cash to crippled local economies.

This is old fashioned stimulus of a sort that Republicans have always advocated, using financial incentives to change behavior. Representative Candice Miller, a G.O.P. lawmaker — albeit from the car-dependent state of Michigan — called it “the best $1 billion of economic stimulus the government has ever spent.”

But look where the rest of Miller’s party is. Last week, Senator John McCain threatened to lead a filibuster rather than let Cash for Clunkers continue to September, as the House has agreed to do with an additional $2 billion from money already approved in the stimulus law.

He backed off this week, though he and other critics continued to treat Cash for Clunkers like swine flu with a steering wheel.

They hate it, many of these Republicans, because it’s a huge hit. It’s working as planned, and this cannot stand. America must fail in order for President Obama to fail. Don’t be surprised if the tea party goons now being dispatched to shout down town hall forums on health care start showing up at your car dealers, megaphones in hand.

But there’s another reason, less spoken of, for why some people get so incensed over little old Cash for Clunkers: it helps average people, and it’s easily understood — a rare combination in a town where the big money deals usually go down with packaged obfuscation.

The overall amount of money is paltry, to the government. But to a typical family, a $4,500 break on a new car with greater gas mileage is a big deal. Consider the extraordinary giveaways of your tax dollars that happened without serious filibuster threats by the protectors of free enterprise.

The granddaddy of them all, of course, was President George W. Bush’s $700 billion bailout of banks, insurance companies and Wall Street miscreants who helped to run the economy into the ground. As presented initially, remember, the bailout had to pass in a day or two, with minimal debate. Or else.

“The goal isn’t to control markets, but to revive them,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized at the time, backing perhaps the greatest reward for bad behavior in the history of capitalism.

Yet, when a tiny fraction of that amount went to strapped consumers this summer for their revival, The Journal jumped back on their Adam Smith pedestal, calling Cash for Clunkers “crackpot economics.”

Then there is the American International Group, the pariah A.I.G., now being kept afloat by the taxpayers to the tune of nearly $180 billion. This money from us to them didn’t sell any cars. It didn’t improve gas mileage. It didn’t help neighborhood businesses. It went to fortify an insurance giant that made terrible bets on complex securities and then threatened to bring us all down with them. McCain was there for A.I.G., no filibuster in his quiver.

And when it came out that some of those same corporate welfare titans would still be giving each other bonuses, former Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani rode to the rescue. Bonuses, he argued, trickle down to waiters, limo drivers, cafes that sell donuts to cops — cash for dunkers.

But try to give struggling families a one-time boost to buy a more fuel-efficient car, with an amount that wouldn’t pay for paper clips at A.I.G., and it’s … outrageous!

Reports from car dealers show that clunker stimulus has boosted show room traffic up to 200 percent. The most common vehicles being traded in, they said, are pickups and S.U.V.’s; the most popular replacements will save drivers more than $1,000 a year in gas costs.

Those who oppose this program on principle argue that government should not be choosing winners and losers in the marketplace, even in a down economy. But both parties have long used federal money for precisely that, intending to change society, in ways big and small. What was the G.I. Bill but the greatest escalator to the middle class for returning war veterans? Home mortgage subsidies allow millions of families to own their own house, benefiting realtors, drywallers, roofers and assorted contractors.

I don’t like that big agriculture gets rewarded for monopolizing rural economies while stuffing nearly every processed food with the dreaded high-fructose corn syrup. I was against giving $35 billion in federal help for oil and gas companies over the next five years, as Republicans advocated during last year’s campaign.

For that matter, I hate to see small independent book stores disappear from the landscape.

But Cash for Clunkers is a bare slight against free market chastity. It’s simple stimulus, caught up in a much larger system that’s always been there for the big money players, but holds a much higher standard for anyone else.

New Breakthroughs from Birthers

East Jesus, Alabama, August 4, 2009

FOX News reports that J. C. "Jugs" Scruggs, leader of the Birther Movement has uncovered incontrovertible evidence that not only was Barack Obama not born in the United States, but that all black people residing here were born in Kenya. Scruggs and his researchers have obtained copies of the birth certificates of all 36,000,000 African-Americans which prove that they were all born on foreign soil, entered the U.S. illegally and are hence subject to immediate deportation. Many of the documents were written in crayon on the backs of Walmart receipts, but, Scruggs explained, "that's the way they do stuff in Africa".

The Birthers are also currently putting the finishing touches on...strike that... assembling additional evidence that apparently proves that all Jews in the U.S. were born in Israel, all Hispanics in Mexico, and all Muslims in Baghdad. In fact, Scruggs asserts that everyone except for white Christian southerners was born elsewhere and should be deported immediately. The only two exceptions admitted by the Birthers were, on the one hand, ostensible southern white-trasher Bill Clinton, whose real name turned out to be Vasily Clintonovich and who was born in Moscow and is therefore subject to deportation, and, on the other, some Italian guy in NJ who they recommended be allowed to stay owing to the fact that "he has the right attitude and is a pretty good guy for a Pope loving dago".

Scruggs went on, "We ain't got nothin' against nigras, spics, hebes, wops, chinks, rag-heads or nobody else. We're Christian people and we love ever'body. But this is a nation of laws and these people entered this great country of ours illegally. Hell, my daddy coulda died defending this country and its laws and he maybe woulda died if'n he had been in the military, and I'm goldurned if I'm gonna stand by and see the sacrifice he mighta made go fer nothin. That's what this is about; upholding the goldurn law. The fact that lots of them smell bad or killed Christ or whatever ain't got nothin' to do with it."

Scruggs was immediately declared the front runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination by main stream media publications across the political spectrum, including the august NY Times. As to Scruggs's claims regarding the non-citizen status of 85% of the country's population, the Times, hewing to its longstanding policy of objectivity and even-handedness, characterized the assertion as "disputed by some", and offered Scruggs a weekly column on the op ed page.

Another Scary but True Tale from Dumbfukistan

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare!” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

Any guesses as to whence the citizen gets his "News"?

Tricorythodes stygiatus

Come the Fourth of July attention around here turns to the spring creeks and the Trico hatch which comes off -- to a greater or lesser degree -- every morning until the first frost.

The hatches have been mostly quite good this year and I've burned a lot of gasoline and pissed away more than my fair share of mornings getting out of bed well before dawn and heading west to Pennsylvania for three hours of technical, intense, focused fishing followed by the long drive back.

I've been doing this for quite a number of years and caught my share of fish, but it is in the nature of fishing the Trico hatch that one never feels one has done as well as one ought to have. Fish are rising everywhere -- on some especially good days feeding as if they were baleen whales harvesting krill -- and you catch, say, three or four or five fish, not including the ones you merely prick and ones you break off. Occasionally you do a bit better; sometimes worse. It looks for all the world like it ought to be barrel shooting...but it ain't.

Not for me, at any rate. Honesty compels me to admit that I've frequently watched friends and strangers, upstream and down, do better than I. While the obvious conclusion might be that I'm just not all that good at it, I prefer to attribute my relative lack of success on those occasions to either an inferior location or the fact that none of the roughly two hundred flies in my trico box; purchased and home-tied; in sizes ranging from #22-#26; in an enormous array of pattern types, materials, and subtly differing colors...none of them are as good for that precise time and place as what the fellow out-fishing me is using. Fortunately -- like a duffer who hits the green with a long iron now and then -- I have just enough good days to allow me to cling to my illusions.

As an aside, people who have never fished with such small flies and the gossamer-fine 7x-9x tippets they require in order to allow them to drift properly (to say nothing of the virtual impossibility of threading 5x tippet through the eye of a #26 fly), wonder at the acuity of vision and exquisite touch they assume such fishing must require.

Tempted though I am to claim possession of such rarefied faculties, the simple truth is that the same conditions that make such fine terminal tackle necessary make its use feasible. The water is so smooth and slack that you are, in fact, able to see and track your tiny fly, assuming you cast well enough to know where it landed in the first place, and so clear that you can see the fish rise up, open its mouth and take. It does so deliberately and without haste, having all the time in the world as the fly drifts ever-so-slowly overhead, thus not triggering your startle reflex and allowing you to tighten up with the requisite gentleness.

There is a kind of rough rule of thumb for pattern selection. The males tend to emerge at/over night or very early in the morning and the females just after sun-up, so at 7:30, with the fish just beginning to rise and the spinner swarms just starting to form, a black bodied (or very dark brown; I've convinced myself that such minutiae matter sometimes) parachute with dun-length tails in #24 or #26 seems to be the choice. It's very likely to be the wrong choice, but one has to start somewhere.

By no later than 9:00 the spinners are starting to fall and with any luck at all the fish are steadily on the feed. Sometimes the fish seem more keyed in on males, in which case a spent-wing, black bodied (or very dark brown), long tailed pattern in #24 or #26 may work best. Sometimes, they seem to prefer the females, which calls for a #22 or #24 spent wing pattern with a white body (or green to mimic a pre-oviposting appearance; lots of controversy regarding whether the green version is either necessary or effective) with long tails and a robust black (or very dark brown) thorax.

The spinner wings are tied with antron, zelon, organza, hackle tips, CDC, Krystal Flash, "wonder wings" (a fairly fussy concoction made with hen hackle, created by Chauncy Lively and championed by Bob Miller), snow shoe hare foot fur...you name it. Sometimes they all seem to work. Sometimes one much better than another. Sometimes none of them do.

Typically, whatever you tie on, the first good cast and drift over a rising fish will result in anything from a good long look, to a skittish, slashing, short-strike, to a confident take. It goes downhill from there. The next cast over that fish -- assuming he didn't take the first time -- will be met with a brief, skeptical inspection. The next; complete indifference or a contemptuous little wriggle out of your fly's path. And by some mysterious process worthy of study by a more capable mind than my own, the fraudulence of your offering has been communicated to all the other trout in the area, so the promising reaction you received from the first fish on the first cast is not replicated should you turn your attention to another, notwithstanding that no fish conversation was observed taking place, and the second fish is distant enough from the first and at such a different angle that it hasn't yet seen either your line or fly.

Which of course raises the age-old conundrum of whether and when to change flies. It is easy to become convinced that your current offering is futile, but the fish are avidly feeding, the clock is ticking, and it takes time to change flies; sometimes a fair bit of time if the eye of your #24 fly is partially thread-obstructed and your eyes ain't what they used to be. Have any of you noticed, by the way, that the light conditions (shade versus sun, background, etc.) optimal for seeing the eye of your fly clearly are precisely the opposite of those that allow you to see the end of your tippet...and vice versa?

All too quickly, almost abruptly, you realize that it's over. The fish, so numerous minutes before, have -- sated -- seemingly vanished. So you wander the stream, looking for some last few stray risers or casting blind, trying to tempt them with Griffith's Gnats or ants or beetles before reluctantly concluding that you and the fish are done for the day and it's time to head home.

Michael Jackson Update

Still dead.

Happy Bastille Day!

In honor of the holiday, the first reader to correctly identify the above famous French people will win a free (!) year's subscription to Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes.

Catholicism as Antidote to Turbo-Capitalism

ETHICS IN ECONOMICS Benedict XVI signing his encyclical last week.


One can't help but wonder whether Catholic "conservatives" will embrace this aspect of the church's teachings with as much uncompromisting vigor as they embrace its anti-abortion stance.




By CARTER DOUGHERTY
Published: July 11, 2009

"...The message in both is that global capitalism has raced off the moral rails and that Roman Catholic teachings can help set Western economics right by encouraging them to focus more on justice for the weak and closely regulating the market..."

"...he offers a vision of a world governed by cooperation among nations, with a vibrant welfare state as the core of a market economy that reflects the love-thy-neighbor imperatives of Catholic social thought..."


MUNICH — The collapse of Communism in the East two decades ago did not provide much of an opening for the Catholic Church to influence economic policy, but perhaps the near-collapse of Western capitalism will. Two German authors — one named Marx, the other his patron in Rome — are certainly hoping so.

The first is Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Freising, who has written a best seller in Germany that he cheekily titled “Das Kapital” (and in which he addresses that other Marx — Karl — as “dear namesake”). The second is Pope Benedict XVI, who last week published his first papal encyclical on economic and social matters. It has a more gentle title, “Charity in Truth,” but is based on the same essential line of thinking. Indeed, Archbishop Marx had a hand in advising the pope on it, and a reading of the archbishop’s book helps explain the intellectual context in which the encyclical was composed.

The message in both is that global capitalism has raced off the moral rails and that Roman Catholic teachings can help set Western economics right by encouraging them to focus more on justice for the weak and closely regulating the market.

Unlike the 19th-century Marx, who thought organized religion was a trick played on the impoverished in order to control them, Archbishop Marx and other Catholics yearn for reform, not class warfare. In that, they are following a long and fundamental line of church teaching. What is different now is that some of them see this economic crisis as a moment when the church’s economic thinking just may attract serious attention.

Archbishop Marx has already drawn a following in Germany by arguing that capitalism needs, in a grave way, the ethical underpinnings of Catholicism. The alternative, he argues, is that the post-crisis world will fall back into furious turbo-capitalism, or, alternatively, experience a renaissance of Marxist ideology based on atheism and class divisions.

“There is no way back into an old world,” Archbishop Marx said in a recent interview, before the encyclical was issued. “We have to affirm this world, but critically.”

Catholic voices have long had influence on the debate in the West about social justice, but never as much as the church would have wished. That reflected the enduring challenge of devising alternative policies, rather than simply criticizing secular authorities.

Pope John Paul II, a Pole with an intuitive feel for Communism’s injustices, was an important voice in bringing that system down. But he had to watch in the 1990s as Eastern Europe embraced Communism’s polar opposite — a rather pure form of secular capitalism, instead of any Catholic-influenced middle way.

“John Paul II was often very clear what he was against: He was against unbridled capitalism and the kind of socialism of the Soviet sphere,” said John Allen, the National Catholic Reporter Vatican watcher. “What he was for was less clear.”

Now Archbishop Marx, who at 55 occupies an ecclesiastical perch once held by Benedict, is trying to wriggle out of that intellectual straitjacket.

With his talent for turning a provocative phrase, he has more in common stylistically with the evangelist St. Paul or the philosophes, who popularized Enlightenment thought, than with Karl, who ground out his dense texts from exile in London. After beginning his book puckishly by addressing Karl Marx personally, the archbishop races through 200 years of Western economic history in a way that pays tribute to Karl’s core analytical conclusion — that capitalism embodies contradictions that threaten the system itself.

But he also makes it clear he is no Communist. He admires Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, a 19th-century writer who put Catholic theory into practice as a member of Germany’s first national Parliament in 1848, and later became a bishop and a fervent critic of Karl Marx.

The gregarious Archbishop Marx has cut a profile in the German business community for his willingness to walk into a roomful of executives and raise the roof. (“Are you marionettes?” he once asked a manager who protested that markets sometimes dictate unethical actions.)

In his book, which was published last fall, he offers a vision of a world governed by cooperation among nations, with a vibrant welfare state as the core of a market economy that reflects the love-thy-neighbor imperatives of Catholic social thought.

On the first point, Archbishop Marx is in good, cosmopolitan company; many officials, from New York to London to Beijing, are calling these days for a world in greater regulatory harmony, though the specifics may be hard to agree upon. He sounds considerably more German when exhorting the world to create, or recast, the welfare state. People need the welfare state before they “can give themselves over to the very strenuous and sometimes very risky games of the market economy,” Archbishop Marx said. The burdens of aging, illness or unemployment “need to be borne collectively,” he added.

In support of his argument, the archbishop calls for a “global social market economy,” based on a concept familiar to Germans as the model for their own postwar system.

Of course, the archbishop says he realizes that a European’s ideal of welfare states and border-straddling institutions might not have universal appeal. At the end of his book, he quotes Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, who has said, “I approve of the notion that Europe sees itself, unpretentiously, as a model for the world, but the consequence of that is that we would have to constantly change that model because we are not the world.”

Neither, he might have added, is the Roman Catholic church.