Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes

Honest Abe

2011-11-21T08:15:00.002-05:00

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed."
--Abraham Lincoln

In Advance of the President's Speech

2011-09-07T10:44:00.003-04:00

"But what will Republicans agree to? That’s easy: nothing. They will oppose anything Mr. Obama proposes, even if it would clearly help the economy — or maybe I should say, especially if it would help the economy, since high unemployment helps them politically."

The following is by Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman.

Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, “My God, what have we done?”

One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, almost as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these numbers almost scream that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has been worrying about the wrong things, and inflicting grievous harm as a result.

Ever since the acute phase of the financial crisis ended, policy discussion in Washington has been dominated not by unemployment, but by the alleged dangers posed by budget deficits. Pundits and media organizations insisted that the biggest risk facing America was the threat that investors would pull the plug on U.S. debt. For example, in May 2009 The Wall Street Journal declared that the “bond vigilantes” were “returning with a vengeance,” telling readers that the Obama administration’s “epic spending spree” would send interest rates soaring.

The interest rate when that editorial was published was 3.7 percent. As of Friday, as I’ve already mentioned, it was only 2 percent.

I don’t mean to dismiss concerns about the long-run U.S. budget picture. If you look at fiscal prospects over, say, the next 20 years, they are indeed deeply worrying, largely because of rising health-care costs. But the experience of the past two years has overwhelmingly confirmed what some of us tried to argue from the beginning: The deficits we’re running right now — deficits we should be running, because deficit spending helps support a depressed economy — are no threat at all.

And by obsessing over a nonexistent threat, Washington has been making the real problem — mass unemployment, which is eating away at the foundations of our nation — much worse.

Although you’d never know it listening to the ranters, the past year has actually been a pretty good test of the theory that slashing government spending actually creates jobs. The deficit obsession has blocked a much-needed second round of federal stimulus, and with stimulus spending, such as it was, fading out, we’re experiencing de facto fiscal austerity. State and local governments, in particular, faced with the loss of federal aid, have been sharply cutting many programs and have been laying off a lot of workers, mostly schoolteachers.

And somehow the private sector hasn’t responded to these layoffs by rejoicing at the sight of a shrinking government and embarking on a hiring spree.

O.K., I know what the usual suspects will say — namely, that fears of regulation and higher taxes are holding businesses back. But this is just a right-wing fantasy. Multiple surveys have shown that lack of demand — a lack that is being exacerbated by government cutbacks — is the overwhelming problem businesses face, with regulation and taxes barely even in the picture.

For example, when McClatchy Newspapers recently canvassed a random selection of small-business owners to find out what was hurting them, not a single one complained about regulation of his or her industry, and few complained much about taxes. And did I mention that profits after taxes, as a share of national income, are at record levels?

So short-run deficits aren’t a problem; lack of demand is, and spending cuts are making things much worse. Maybe it’s time to change course?

Which brings me to President Obama’s planned speech on the economy.

I find it useful to think in terms of three questions: What should we be doing to create jobs? What will Republicans in Congress agree to? And given that political reality, what should the president propose?

The answer to the first question is that we should have a lot of job-creating spending on the part of the federal government, largely in the form of much-needed spending to repair and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure. Oh, and we need more aid to state and local governments, so that they can stop laying off schoolteachers.

But what will Republicans agree to? That’s easy: nothing. They will oppose anything Mr. Obama proposes, even if it would clearly help the economy — or maybe I should say, especially if it would help the economy, since high unemployment helps them politically.

This reality makes the third question — what the president should propose — hard to answer, since nothing he proposes will actually happen anytime soon. So I’m personally prepared to cut Mr. Obama a lot of slack on the specifics of his proposal, as long as it’s big and bold. For what he mostly needs to do now is to change the conversation — to get Washington talking again about jobs and how the government can help create them.

For the sake of the nation, and especially for millions of unemployed Americans who see little prospect of finding another job, I hope he pulls it off.

Endless Disgrace

2011-08-31T10:45:00.002-04:00

NY Times
8/31/11

In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party’s most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course.

These Republican leaders, who think nothing of widening tax loopholes for corporations and multimillion-dollar estates, are offended by the idea that people making less than $40,000 might benefit from the progressive tax code. They are infuriated by the earned income tax credit (the pride of Ronald Reagan), which has become the biggest and most effective antipoverty program by giving working families thousands of dollars a year in tax refunds. They scoff at continuing President Obama’s payroll tax cut, which is tilted toward low- and middle-income workers and expires in December.

Until fairly recently, Republicans, at least, have been fairly consistent in their position that tax cuts should benefit everyone. Though the Bush tax cuts were primarily for the rich, they did lower rates for almost all taxpayers, providing a veneer of egalitarianism. Then the recession pushed down incomes severely, many below the minimum income tax level, and the stimulus act lowered that level further with new tax cuts. The number of families not paying income tax has risen from about 30 percent before the recession to about half, and, suddenly, Republicans have a new tool to stoke class resentment.

Representative Michele Bachmann noted recently that 47 percent of Americans do not pay federal income tax; all of them, she said, should pay something because they benefit from parks, roads and national security. (Interesting that she acknowledged government has a purpose.) Gov. Rick Perry, in the announcement of his candidacy, said he was dismayed at the “injustice” that nearly half of Americans do not pay income tax. Jon Huntsman Jr., up to now the most reasonable in the Republican presidential field, said not enough Americans pay tax.

Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and several senators have made similar arguments, variations of the idea expressed earlier by Senator Dan Coats of Indiana that “everyone needs to have some skin in the game.”

This is factually wrong, economically wrong and morally wrong. First, the facts: a vast majority of Americans have skin in the tax game. Even if they earn too little to qualify for the income tax, they pay payroll taxes (which Republicans want to raise), gasoline excise taxes and state and local taxes. Only 14 percent of households pay neither income nor payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution. The poorest fifth paid an average of 16.3 percent of income in taxes in 2010.

Economically, reducing the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit — which would be required if everyone paid income taxes — makes no sense at a time of high unemployment. The credits, which only go to working people, have always been a strong incentive to work, as even some conservative economists say, and have increased the labor force while reducing the welfare rolls.

The moral argument would have been obvious before this polarized year. Nearly 90 percent of the families that paid no income tax make less than $40,000, most much less. The real problem is that so many Americans are struggling on such a small income, not whether they pay taxes. The two tax credits lifted 7.2 million people out of poverty in 2009, including four million children. At a time when high-income households are paying their lowest share of federal taxes in decades, when corporations frequently avoid paying any tax, it is clear who should bear a larger burden and who should not.

Know-nothings

2011-08-30T05:43:00.003-04:00

Republicans Against Science
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

To see what Mr. Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the G.O.P. nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”

The second part of Mr. Perry’s statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97 percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilization-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.

But never mind that, Mr. Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, “manipulating data” to create a fake threat. In his book “Fed Up,” he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”

I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away. In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!

Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

Dr. King Weeps From His Grave

2011-08-26T09:23:00.002-04:00

By CORNEL WEST

THE Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was to be dedicated on the National Mall on Sunday — exactly 56 years after the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and 48 years after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Because of Hurricane Irene, the ceremony has been postponed.)

These events constitute major milestones in the turbulent history of race and democracy in America, and the undeniable success of the civil rights movement — culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008 — warrants our attention and elation. Yet the prophetic words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel still haunt us: “The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

Rabbi Heschel spoke those words during the last years of King’s life, when 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. King’s dream of a more democratic America had become, in his words, “a nightmare,” owing to the persistence of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.” He called America a “sick society.” On the Sunday after his assassination, in 1968, he was to have preached a sermon titled “Why America May Go to Hell.”

King did not think that America ought to go to hell, but rather that it might go to hell owing to its economic injustice, cultural decay and political paralysis. He was not an American Gibbon, chronicling the decline and fall of the American empire, but a courageous and visionary Christian blues man, fighting with style and love in the face of the four catastrophes he identified.

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.

King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

Cornel West, a philosopher, is a professor at Princeton.

G.O.P. FITNESS TRAINING AT THE FOX NEWS GYM

2011-08-17T11:59:00.002-04:00

Last night’s two-hour Republican debate from Ames, Iowa, was an entertaining exercise in The Survival of the Fittest, Herbert Spencer’s proto-libertarian take on Darwin—the only form of Darwinism that today’s Republicans can safely embrace.

The goal of the exercise, it seemed to me, was to cull the herd, so as to eliminate the weak and the stragglers and thereby ensure that the ultimate survivor will be the one best able to destroy the common enemy of everyone on the stage (eight candidates, four questioners) and, judging from the whooping and hollering, everyone in the audience, too: the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

That goal is a joint project of the Republican Party and the debate’s sponsor, organizer, and broadcaster, the Fox News Network. The unwary might therefore have reasonably expected the questions to be softballs calculated to help the candidates preen and prance, putting on a happy face for one another and directing their scowls and growls exclusively at the archfiend in the White House.

But no. The questions were tough—surprisingly tough, I thought. But, for the most part, they were tough only in a particular way. They were not so tough in matters of what one might laughingly call substance—that is, in matters of policy outside the ideological cocoon of current Party orthodoxy. For example, no questioner challenged the assumption that, in a time of mass unemployment, it is a good idea to pump money into the economy by cutting rich people’s taxes (and deficits be damned) while simultaneously sucking money out of the economy by gutting infrastructure projects and cutting poor and middle-class people’s benefits. Substance-wise, this was like watching Vladimir Putin debate himself on Russian state television.

The only apparent exceptions last night to the rule of substantive orthodoxy were military spending, abortion, and gays. But they aren’t really exceptions. With inward-looking isolationism making a comeback on the right, endless wars are no longer the consensus Republican position they were back when Ron Paul was the sole dissenter and neocon imperial triumphalism reigned supreme. It’s just as O.K. to say that Pentagon spending has to be “on the table” or “part of the conversation” as it is to say that cutting said spending would be tantamount to surrender.

On abortion, the “pro-life” orthodoxy—i.e., that a woman has no right to choose whether or not to end an unwanted pregnancy—remains in place. But a few Republican politicians (and a substantial number of Republican voters) still have qualms about treating a young girl who gets an abortion after being raped by her father as a criminal. The discussion produced the otherwise hapless Rick Santorum’s only eloquent (if politically suicidal) moment, when he passionately defended the maximalist position. (Needless to say, though, he was incapable of recognizing the cruelty of that position, blithely maintaining that forcing a raped woman to carry a fetus to term would be an act of kindness, as it would spare her “a second trauma.”)

Same-sex marriage, too, remains a no-no. But Jon Huntsman, the other Mormon in the race, defended (or at least acknowledged) his support for civil unions. He even went so far as to say, “I believe our nation can do a better job with equality.” Far out! Everybody is against gay marriage as a matter of personal opinion, but there is a genuine difference between those who want it banned at the federal level (like Michele Bachmann) and those who worry that such a ban would infringe on “states’ rights.” Tonally, too, there are further cracks in the Republican ice. Rick (“man on dog”) Santorum actually faulted the Iranian regime on the grounds that it “tramples the rights of gays.”

So what were the “tough” questions? Newt Gingrich nailed it: almost without exception, they were “gotcha” questions, confronting the candidates with past embarrassments (such as the mass exodus of Gingrich’s campaign staffers) or past statements or actions at variance with the orthodoxy (such as countenancing tax hikes or supporting cap-and-trade). As such, they served the ultimate goal of the Party and its Fox News auxiliary by testing the candidates’ ability to handle the kind of questions preferred by the political press corps.

So who were the fittest, the ones that might survive? Well, there were three who, it seemed to me, demonstrated that they might have a chance at the nomination. There was Michele Bachmann. Expectations were high for her—in the only previous debate, she had surprised everybody by vaulting over the absent Sarah Palin and quickly making herself the Iowa frontrunner—and she fulfilled them, even surpassed them. She was never rattled, and she serenely reeled off one extremist bromide after another. There was Romney, who went into the debate as the national frontrunner and probably came out of it the same way. He “looked Presidential,” doncha know. And there was Rick Perry, who, not yet being an officially declared candidate, wasn’t in the room.

What about the rest? Tim Pawlenty continued his slide toward oblivion. Going after Bachmann, not for being wrong or an extremist but for being “ineffective,” T-Paw came across as querulous and a trifle desperate. Gingrich pulled off a good, angry performance, showcasing his trademark patronizing contempt, but his attacks on the press and its gotcha questions felt weird, given that the journalists asking those questions were representatives of the conservative, not the “liberal,” media. Anyway, there is probably nothing Newt Gingrich can say that would overcome his greatest liability, which is that he is Newt Gingrich. Santorum was mostly just sad, wanly complaining that he wasn’t getting as much time as the big kids. Herman Cain and Ron Paul were, as always, charming. Nobody wants to give either of them a hard time. Cain offers Republicans the comfort of imagining that theirs is not a white man’s (and woman’s, to be fair) party. Paul’s delightful heresies—his denunciations of “militarism,” even his suggestion that Iran might have understandable reasons for wanting nukes and it might not be so terrible if they got one—are tolerated as the lovable eccentricities of a cranky but harmless uncle.

I was most curious about Huntsman, whom I hadn’t before seen in action. I’ve assumed all along that he knows he has no chance in 2012 and is actually auditioning for the 2016 race, figuring that if Obama is reelected the G.O.P. might be open to nominating a relative moderate. I was a little shocked at how poorly he performed last night. He had an unexpectedly (to me) prissy air about him, notwithstanding all the motorcycle riding. He looked and sounded unhappy and unsure of himself. If indeed 2016 is to be his Carnegie Hall, he’d better practice, practice, practice. And then practice some more.

However reluctant I am to say anything nice about the Fox News message machine, I have to tip my hat to Byron York and Bret Baier for orchestrating the most revealing moment of the evening. They held a kind of auction. York, who was questioning Santorum, asked, “Is there any ratio of cuts to taxes that you would accept? Three to one? Four to one? Or even ten to one?” “No,” came the reply. Baier put the question to the rest: “Who on this stage would walk away from that deal? Can you raise your hand if you feel so strongly about not raising taxes you’d walk away on the ten-to-one deal?”

Obediently, humiliatingly, disgustingly, all eight raised their hands.

~Hendrik Hertzberg

What Happened to Obama?

2011-08-08T13:03:00.003-04:00

By DREW WESTEN

Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

IT was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.

The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.

Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out “the facts of the case.”

When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.

In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes, was a story something like this:

“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again.” A story isn’t a policy. But that simple narrative — and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it — would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars

And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.

But there was no story — and there has been none since.

In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, “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.”

When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That’s what we saw in 1928, and that’s what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues — and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation’s food supply, and protect America’s land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.

Those were the shoes — that was the historic role — that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.

When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.

IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.

The truly decisive move that broke the arc of history was his handling of the stimulus. The public was desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led. Yet instead of indicting the economic policies and principles that had just eliminated eight million jobs, in the most damaging of the tic-like gestures of compromise that have become the hallmark of his presidency — and against the advice of multiple Nobel-Prize-winning economists — he backed away from his advisers who proposed a big stimulus, and then diluted it with tax cuts that had already been shown to be inert. The result, as predicted in advance, was a half-stimulus that half-stimulated the economy. That, in turn, led the White House to feel rightly unappreciated for having saved the country from another Great Depression but in the unenviable position of having to argue a counterfactual — that something terrible might have happened had it not half-acted.

To the average American, who was still staring into the abyss, the half-stimulus did nothing but prove that Ronald Reagan was right, that government is the problem. In fact, the average American had no idea what Democrats were trying to accomplish by deficit spending because no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, “stick.” Nor did anyone explain what health care reform was supposed to accomplish (other than the unbelievable and even more uninspiring claim that it would “bend the cost curve”), or why “credit card reform” had led to an increase in the interest rates they were already struggling to pay. Nor did anyone explain why saving the banks was such a priority, when saving the homes the banks were foreclosing didn’t seem to be. All Americans knew, and all they know today, is that they’re still unemployed, they’re still worried about how they’re going to pay their bills at the end of the month and their kids still can’t get a job. And now the Republicans are chipping away at unemployment insurance, and the president is making his usual impotent verbal exhortations after bargaining it away.

What makes the “deficit debate” we just experienced seem so surreal is how divorced the conversation in Washington has been from conversations around the kitchen table everywhere else in America. Although I am a scientist by training, over the last several years, as a messaging consultant to nonprofit groups and Democratic leaders, I have studied the way voters think and feel, talking to them in plain language. At this point, I have interacted in person or virtually with more than 50,000 Americans on a range of issues, from taxes and deficits to abortion and immigration.

The average voter is far more worried about jobs than about the deficit, which few were talking about while Bush and the Republican Congress were running it up. The conventional wisdom is that Americans hate government, and if you ask the question in the abstract, people will certainly give you an earful about what government does wrong. But if you give them the choice between cutting the deficit and putting Americans back to work, it isn’t even close. But it’s not just jobs. Americans don’t share the priorities of either party on taxes, budgets or any of the things Congress and the president have just agreed to slash — or failed to slash, like subsidies to oil companies. When it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy, Americans are united across the political spectrum, supporting a message that says, “In times like these, millionaires ought to be giving to charity, not getting it.”

When pitted against a tough budget-cutting message straight from the mouth of its strongest advocates, swing voters vastly preferred a message that began, “The best way to reduce the deficit is to put Americans back to work.” This statement is far more consistent with what many economists are saying publicly — and what investors apparently believe, as evident in the nosedive the stock market took after the president and Congress “saved” the economy.

So where does that leave us?

Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production — two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day. He gives a major speech on immigration reform after deporting around 800,000 immigrants in two years, a pace faster than nearly any other period in American history.

THE real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit. That a large section of the country views him as a socialist while many in his own party are concluding that he does not share their values speaks volumes — but not the volumes his advisers are selling: that if you make both the right and left mad, you must be doing something right.

As a practicing psychologist with more than 25 years of experience, I will resist the temptation to diagnose at a distance, but as a scientist and strategic consultant I will venture some hypotheses.

The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems. A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

Or perhaps, like so many politicians who come to Washington, he has already been consciously or unconsciously corrupted by a system that tests the souls even of people of tremendous integrity, by forcing them to dial for dollars — in the case of the modern presidency, for hundreds of millions of dollars. When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability. Whether that reflects his aversion to conflict, an aversion to conflict with potential campaign donors that today cripples both parties’ ability to govern and threatens our democracy, or both, is unclear.

A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.

But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks.

2011-07-21T08:01:00.002-04:00

Bonuses for Billionaires
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The first few times I heard House Republicans talk about our budget mess, I worried that they had plunged off the deep end. But as I kept on listening, a buzzer went off in my mind, and I came to understand how much sense the Tea Party caucus makes.

Why would we impose “job-crushing taxes” on wealthy Americans just to pay for luxuries like federal prisons? Why end the “carried interest” tax loophole for financiers, just to pay for unemployment benefits — especially when those same selfless tycoons are buying yachts and thus creating jobs for all the rest of us?

Hmmm. The truth is that House Republicans don’t actually go far enough. They should follow the logic of their more visionary members with steps like these:

BONUSES FOR BILLIONAIRES Republicans won’t extend unemployment benefits, even in the worst downturn in 70 years, because that makes people lazy about finding jobs. They’re right: We should be creating incentives for Americans to rise up the food chain by sending hefty checks to every new billionaire. This could be paid for with a tax surcharge on regular working folks. It’s the least we can do.

Likewise, the government should take sterner measures against the persistent jobless. Don’t just let their unemployment benefits expire. Take their homes!

Oh, never mind! Silly me! The banks are already doing that.

LET JOBS TRICKLE DOWN Leftist pundits say that House Republicans don’t have a jobs plan. That’s unfair! Granted, the Republican-sponsored Cut, Cap and Balance Act would eliminate 700,000 jobs in just its first year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, but those analysts are no doubt liberals. America’s richest 400 people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans, and the affluent would feel renewed confidence if the Republican plan passed. We’d see a hiring bonanza. Each of those wealthy people might hire an extra pool attendant. That’s 400 jobs right there!

Cut, Cap and Balance would go even further than the Ryan budget plan in starving the beast of government. Sure, that’ll mean cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other programs, but so what? Who needs food safety? How do we know we really need air traffic control unless we try a day without it?

ROOT OUT SOCIALISM Republicans have been working to end Medicare as we know it but need to examine other reckless entitlements, such as our socialized education system, in which public schools fritter resources on classes like economics and foreign languages. As a former Texas governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, is said to have declared when she opposed the teaching of foreign languages: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”

For that matter, who needs socialized police and fire services? We could slash job-crushing taxes at the local level and simply let the free market take over:

“9-1-1, may I help you?” “Yes, help! My house is burning down!” “Very good, sir. I can offer you one fire engine for $5,995, or two for just $10,000.” “Help! My family’s inside. Send three fire engines! Just hurry!” “Yes, sir. Let me just run your credit card first. And if you require the fire trucks immediately, there’s a 50 percent ‘rush’ surcharge.”

CHILL OUT ABOUT THE DEBT CEILING House Republicans like Michele Bachmann are right: If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, some solution will turn up. As Representative Austin Scott, a Republican from Georgia, observes: “In the end, the sun is going to come up tomorrow.”

We got through the Great Depression, didn’t we? It looked pretty hopeless in 1929, but in just a dozen years World War II bailed us out with an economic stimulus. Something like that’ll come along for us, too. Ya gotta have faith.

CONSIDER ASSET SALES While Democrats are harrumphing about “default,” Republicans have sagely noted that there are alternatives in front of our noses. For example, why raise taxes on hard-pressed managers of hedge funds when the government can sell assets?

Fort Knox alone has 4,600 tons of gold, which I figure is worth around $235 billion. That’s enough to pay our military budget for four months! And selling Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon would buy us time as well.

RENT OUT CONGRESS If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we could also auction members of Congress for day jobs: Are you a financier who wants someone to flip burgers (steaks?) at your child’s birthday party? Why, here’s Eric Cantor! Many members of Congress already work on behalf of tycoons, and this way the revenue would flow to the Treasury.

Finally, if we risk default, let’s rent out the Capitol for weddings to raise money for the public good. Wouldn’t it be nice to see something positive emerge from the House?

Lost

2011-03-26T06:45:00.002-04:00

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

~Bob Herbert

Eat The Future

2011-02-14T07:24:00.003-05:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 13, 2011
NYTimes

On Friday, House Republicans unveiled their proposal for immediate cuts in federal spending. Uncharacteristically, they failed to accompany the release with a catchy slogan. So I’d like to propose one: Eat the Future.

I’ll explain in a minute. First, let’s talk about the dilemma the G.O.P. faces.

Republican leaders like to claim that the midterms gave them a mandate for sharp cuts in government spending. Some of us believe that the elections were less about spending than they were about persistent high unemployment, but whatever. The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.

That’s the lesson from a new survey by the Pew Research Center, in which Americans were asked whether they favored higher or lower spending in a variety of areas. It turns out that they want more, not less, spending on most things, including education and Medicare. They’re evenly divided about spending on aid to the unemployed and — surprise — defense.

The only thing they clearly want to cut is foreign aid, which most Americans believe, wrongly, accounts for a large share of the federal budget.

Pew also asked people how they would like to see states close their budget deficits. Do they favor cuts in either education or health care, the main expenses states face? No. Do they favor tax increases? No. The only deficit-reduction measure with significant support was cuts in public-employee pensions — and even there the public was evenly divided.

The moral is clear. Republicans don’t have a mandate to cut spending; they have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic.

How can voters be so ill informed? In their defense, bear in mind that they have jobs, children to raise, parents to take care of. They don’t have the time or the incentive to study the federal budget, let alone state budgets (which are by and large incomprehensible). So they rely on what they hear from seemingly authoritative figures.

And what they’ve been hearing ever since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending) and welfare queens driving Cadillacs. How can we expect voters to appreciate fiscal reality when politicians consistently misrepresent that reality?

Which brings me back to the Republican dilemma. The new House majority promised to deliver $100 billion in spending cuts — and its members face the prospect of Tea Party primary challenges if they fail to deliver big cuts. Yet the public opposes cuts in programs it likes — and it likes almost everything. What’s a politician to do?

The answer, once you think about it, is obvious: sacrifice the future. Focus the cuts on programs whose benefits aren’t immediate; basically, eat America’s seed corn. There will be a huge price to pay, eventually — but for now, you can keep the base happy.

If you didn’t understand that logic, you might be puzzled by many items in the House G.O.P. proposal. Why cut a billion dollars from a highly successful program that provides supplemental nutrition to pregnant mothers, infants, and young children? Why cut $648 million from nuclear nonproliferation activities? (One terrorist nuke, assembled from stray ex-Soviet fissile material, can ruin your whole day.) Why cut $578 million from the I.R.S. enforcement budget? (Letting tax cheats run wild doesn’t exactly serve the cause of deficit reduction.)

Once you understand the imperatives Republicans face, however, it all makes sense. By slashing future-oriented programs, they can deliver the instant spending cuts Tea Partiers demand, without imposing too much immediate pain on voters. And as for the future costs — a population damaged by childhood malnutrition, an increased chance of terrorist attacks, a revenue system undermined by widespread tax evasion — well, tomorrow is another day.

In a better world, politicians would talk to voters as if they were adults. They would explain that discretionary spending has little to do with the long-run imbalance between spending and revenues. They would then explain that solving that long-run problem requires two main things: reining in health-care costs and, realistically, increasing taxes to pay for the programs that Americans really want.

But Republican leaders can’t do that, of course: they refuse to admit that taxes ever need to rise, and they spent much of the last two years screaming “death panels!” in response to even the most modest, sensible efforts to ensure that Medicare dollars are well spent.

And so they had to produce something like Friday’s proposal, a plan that would save remarkably little money but would do a remarkably large amount of harm.

From a Smart Friend Responding to Paul Krugman

2011-01-17T15:37:00.004-05:00

Thanks, Professor, for the great explanation of why the Republicans' attack on the budget deficit reducing value of health care reform is so illogical. Their actions make more sense, however, when you keep in mind that the entire goal of today's Republican Party is not to reduce the deficit, but rather is to increase it in order to politically strengthen the argument in favor of eliminating government programs that benefit the middle class, working class, and poor in America.

When Republicans attain power, they do two things. They cut taxes for the rich and for large corporations. And they increase spending on the military and programs that benefit large corporations (such as the subsidies to private insurance companies under Medicare Advantage or that used to be made to banks as part of the student loan program or enormous subsidies to agribusiness giants such as ADM). They do this in primarily because it benefits their political benefactors. But they also do it because their ultimate goal of dismantling Social Security, Medicare, and the social safety net --thus freeing up ever more funds for the ruling class-- is politically unpopular, and the Republicans have figured out that the way to make it politically more palatable is to drive the deficits up so people will feel that we have to cut spending.

So, the Republicans' cooking of the books about the budgetary impacts of health care reform is based not simply on an attack on logic. It is also based on the fact that they are lying to us when they claim they care about the deficit.

You Might Be A Republican If...

2010-04-23T10:20:00.007-04:00

You think "proletariat" is a type of cheese.

You've ever referred to someone as "my (insert racial or ethnic minority here) friend"

You've ever tried to prove Jesus was a capitalist and opposed to welfare.

You think Huey Newton is a cookie.

You've ever uttered the phrase, "Why don't we just bomb the sons of bitches."

You fax the FBI a list of "Commies in my Neighborhood."

You argue that you need 300 handguns, in case a bear ever attacks your home.

You've ever said "Clean air? Looks clean to me."

You own a vehicle with an "Ollie North: American Hero" sticker.

You ever told a child that Oscar the Grouch "lives in a trash can because he is lazy and doesn't want to contribute to society."

You understand that getting people to vote on abortion issues will keep you in office and let you pass tax cuts for the upper class.

You think that the best way to protect people from illegal drugs is to put them in prison.

You think "compassionate conservatism" is when you feel sorry for the homeless guy sleeping in the gutter as you step over him on your way to a $1000 a plate fundraiser for Tom Delay.

You are opposed to increasing the minimum wage and in favor of repealing taxes on inherited wealth.

You are opposed to Affirmative Action in college admissions and attended a private university as a "legacy."

You really believe that cutting taxes increases government revenues.

You dodged the draft during Viet Nam (with Daddy's help) and now you question the courage and patriotism of men who came back with medals (and scars) and understand wars are bad.

You think that a president lying about getting a blowjob is far more serious than a president lying about the reasons for starting a war.

You don't know that if it weren't for the French, we'd have lost the American Revolution.

You're against abortion but don't give a damn about those babies once they're born.

You think that a whiskey-guzzling, coke-sniffing, draft-dodging loser is the cream of the American crop and the best this country could offer up for President.

You think the USA is the only 'free' country in the world.

You spout talking points that have been proven false, hoping they'll stick anyway.

You firmly believe that the poor folks that got stuck in New Orleans are to blame for their own plight for not having the good sense to have high paying jobs that would have allowed them to purchase SUVs to get out of town and afford hotels in safe areas. (Or having the even better sense to be born into money.)

You're a "good Christian" but you hate more people than you love.

You think fighting in Iraq is like a computer game, and that troops should have to complete level one to get their body armor.

You think Vietnam vets who supported Kerry should be booed on the 4th of July.

You think Tom Delay has class

You think Universal Health Care is bad but Corporate Welfare is
good

You believe less ozone is better for a quicker tan.

You think acid rain helps cleans your driveway.

Your Glock 9mm gets more fondling than your wife.

You think no child left behind is a new bus service to the KKK rally.

You are against gay marriage but have no problem marrying your cousin.

You think mercury in your fish adds flavor.

You thought an AWOL national guardsman alfred e. neuman look-a-like was more patriotic and qualified to be President in 2004 than a former NATO commander four star general rhodes scholar like Wesley Clark

You think George W. Bush is a regular guy even though he was born rich in Connecticut to an old money, politically powerful WASP family just because he moved to Texas and is as stupid as you are.

You have no problem with our bombs finding Afghanistan or Iraq even though most of our citizens can't find either country on the map.

When someone asks you your name you've got to pull your head out of your ass and read it off your belt.

Mitt Romney, Liberal Icon

2010-04-01T08:51:00.003-04:00

I need to apologize to Mitt Romney.

Here I was thinking of him as a failed politician with no discernible core values, who had once driven to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

But it’s now becoming clear that he’s the man we have to thank for our new national health care law.

“I mean, a lot of commentators have said this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts,” President Obama told Matt Lauer recently on the “Today” show.

Good work leading the way, Mitt!

We did not actually hear a whole lot about how Obama’s health care bill was similar to Romney’s during its long, torturous struggle through Congress. Particularly not during the parts that involved placating the Democratic left wing. Do you think Obama mentioned it during his Air Force One courtship of Dennis Kucinich? Possibly not.

But it really does seem as though the two plans are a whole lot alike, and Romney deserves credit for working with the Massachusetts Democrats to get such an ambitious, sweeping reform enacted. However, since most of his party is currently crouched in the basement, waiting for the health care apocalypse to split the earth into smithereens, they’re probably not going to be all that impressed.

The Republicans are dying for a disaster, and to be honest, even people who like the new law a lot have been worried that something really strange might be hidden in 2,000 pages of verbiage. (Did you know somebody stuck financing for abstinence education in there?)

This week there was an alarming report that AT&T was going to have to reduce its long-term profit estimates by about $1 billion because of the new law — or, as the House minority leader, John Boehner, put it, the newly enacted “job-killing tax increases.” The AT&T charge was for accounting purposes, which is not as much real money as currency-based theology. But still, it did sound bad.

It turned out that the $1 billion goes back to the famous 2003 Medicare prescription drug entitlement passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and paid for through their innovative pretend-it’s-not-there financing system.

In order to keep businesses from ending their drug coverage and dumping their retirees on the federal system, Congress provided a 28 percent reimbursement for the benefits. And, the companies got to deduct the entire cost of the drug plans from their taxes. Including the government subsidy.

Yes! The job-killing tax increase in the new law involves no longer allowing big corporations to take a tax deduction for spending money we gave them. Somehow, this doesn’t seem to have the makings of a Tea Party rally.

But there’s always the insurance mandate. When it comes to roiling right-wing hysteria, nothing whips up a crowd like the law’s requirement that everybody get health coverage.

Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter of Idaho, who is definitely the winner of the Most Fun Name for a Governor Award, kicked off the rebellion this week by signing a law requiring the state to sue the federal government over this provision. “If it is the proper role for government to mandate that citizens buy certain products, then I’m going to get potatoes in line for them just as quick as I can,” Otter announced.

Idaho, you should not let your elected officials push the potato thing so hard. The state has a lot more to talk about — lovely scenery, great people, the world’s largest factory for barrel cheese, the smallest number of doctors per capita in the country. And what about your state fruit, the huckleberry?

About that insurance requirement. Americans pay an estimated $42.7 billion a year in taxes and higher health care premiums because of the cost of medical treatment for the uninsured. So you would think that conservatives in particular would believe that everybody ought to be held responsible for having their own coverage. Unless they’re starting a new cutting-edge Let Them Die in a Ditch Movement.

“No more free-riders,” Romney said frequently, back when he was a little more vocal about defending the Massachusetts plan. Lately, he’s been vaguer on the subject, and when it comes to the new federal law, he’s jumped on the repeal bandwagon. When someone from the liberal blog ThinkProgress asked Romney whether he thought the new federal insurance mandate — so very much like the Massachusetts one — was constitutional, he muttered something about it being “a big topic” and ducked into an elevator.

It’s possible that he hadn’t looked so uncomfortable since the time he was chased by a reporter who wanted to know if he thought Seamus the Irish setter had enjoyed driving to Canada on top of the family car.

~Gail Collins

A Continued Disgrace

2010-03-23T06:09:00.004-04:00

For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done to the country. The greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age was followed by a near-total collapse of the overall economy. As a country, we have a monumental mess on our hands and still the Republicans have nothing to offer in the way of a remedy except more tax cuts for the rich.

Some of the images from the run-up to Sunday’s landmark health care vote in the House of Representatives should be seared into the nation’s consciousness. We are so far, in so many ways, from being a class act.

A group of lowlifes at a Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, last week taunted and humiliated a man who was sitting on the ground with a sign that said he had Parkinson’s disease. The disgusting behavior was captured on a widely circulated videotape. One of the Tea Party protesters leaned over the man and sneered: “If you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong end of town.”

Another threw money at the man, first one bill and then another, and said contemptuously, “I’ll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot.”

In Washington on Saturday, opponents of the health care legislation spit on a black congressman and shouted racial slurs at two others, including John Lewis, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was taunted because he is gay.

At some point, we have to decide as a country that we just can’t have this: We can’t allow ourselves to remain silent as foaming-at-the-mouth protesters scream the vilest of epithets at members of Congress — epithets that The Times will not allow me to repeat here.

It is 2010, which means it is way past time for decent Americans to rise up against this kind of garbage, to fight it aggressively wherever it appears. And it is time for every American of good will to hold the Republican Party accountable for its role in tolerating, shielding and encouraging foul, mean-spirited and bigoted behavior in its ranks and among its strongest supporters.

For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done to the country. The greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age was followed by a near-total collapse of the overall economy. As a country, we have a monumental mess on our hands and still the Republicans have nothing to offer in the way of a remedy except more tax cuts for the rich.

This is the party of trickle down and weapons of mass destruction, the party of birthers and death-panel lunatics. This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry.

Glenn Beck of Fox News has called President Obama a “racist” and asserted that he “has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

Mike Huckabee, a former Republican presidential candidate, has said of Mr. Obama’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship.

The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country. If people are arguing over immigrants or abortion or whether gays should be allowed to marry, they’re not calling the G.O.P. to account for (to take just one example) the horribly destructive policy of cutting taxes while the nation was fighting two wars.

If you’re all fired up about Republican-inspired tales of Democrats planning to send grandma to some death chamber, you’ll never get to the G.O.P.’s war against the right of ordinary workers to organize and negotiate in their own best interests — a war that has diminished living standards for working people for decades.

With a freer hand, the Republicans would have done more damage. George W. Bush tried to undermine Social Security. John McCain was willing to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and thought Phil Gramm would have made a crackerjack Treasury secretary. (For those who may not remember, Mr. Gramm was a deregulation zealot who told us during the presidential campaign that we were suffering from a “mental recession.”)

A party that promotes ignorance (“Just say no to global warming”) and provides a safe house for bigotry cannot serve the best interests of our country. Back in the 1960s, John Lewis risked his life and endured savage beatings to secure fundamental rights for black Americans while right-wing Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were lining up with segregationist Democrats to oppose landmark civil rights legislation.

Since then, the right-wingers have taken over the G.O.P. and Mr. Lewis, now a congressman, must still endure the garbage they have wrought.

~Bob Herbert

The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality

2010-03-14T05:28:00.005-04:00

The opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)

Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.

Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.

But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.

There’s a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,” not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is repackaged with an alibi. The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce.

Rove’s overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security. Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.”

Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.

This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.

This is hardly the only recent example of Republicans’ distancing themselves from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey, doesn’t even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on “key issues” as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform. Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” a euphemism for “aggressive” and “unconstitutional” war. Paul’s son, Rand, who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is leading the polls in Kentucky’s G.O.P. Senate primary and has been endorsed by Sarah Palin.

In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still must be challenged. As we’ve learned the hard way, little fictions, whether about “death panels” or “uranium from Africa,” can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney’s unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news.

What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an Iraq election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome; the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier Iran. If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in the Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin their own failings on their successors.

Obama may well make — or is already making — his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the “blinking red” alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove’s propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about Saddam’s imminent “mushroom clouds.” The ensuing Iraq war allowed those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond — and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.

The Iran piece of the back story doesn’t end there. As The Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidies until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of the more egregious “intelligence” on Saddam’s W.M.D. used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.

Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq’s election, meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to facilitate Iran’s influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times reported on Chalabi’s ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week, fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire process. It’s no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove’s memoir.

If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.

~Frank Rich

Senator Bunning’s Universe

2010-03-05T03:05:00.002-05:00

...the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.

...the House has...passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough...he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent.

...bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?

So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers.

But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.

Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment. That’s because the economy’s problem right now is lack of sufficient demand, and cash-strapped unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.

But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.

And the difference between the two universes isn’t just intellectual, it’s also moral.

Bill Clinton famously told a suffering constituent, “I feel your pain.” But the thing is, he did and does — while many other politicians clearly don’t. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the parties feel the pain of different people.

During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.

Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.

Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.

So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe.

More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?

The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?

Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.

Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.

~Paul Krugman

The Republicans' Big Lie about Reconciliation

2010-03-04T09:07:00.003-05:00

It is all, I am sorry to say, one big lie -- or, if you're sensitive, an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy.

Republicans...don't want to talk...about the substance of health care. They want to...turn "reconciliation" into a four-letter word and maintain that Democrats are "ramming through" a health bill.

...the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, ...were passed under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion... The 2003 dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney had to break the tie. Talk about "ramming through."

The underlying "principle" here seems to be that it's fine to pass tax cuts for the wealthy on narrow votes but an outrage to use reconciliation to help middle-income and poor people get health insurance.

For those who feared that Barack Obama did not have any Lyndon Johnson in him, the president's determination to press ahead and get health-care reform done in the face of Republican intransigence came as something of a relief.

Obama's critics have regularly accused him of not being as tough or wily or forceful as LBJ was in pushing through civil rights and the social programs of his Great Society. Obama seemed willing to let Congress go its own way and was so anxious to look bipartisan that he wouldn't even take his own side in arguments with Republicans.

Those days are over. On Wednesday, the president made clear what he wants in a health-care bill, and he urged Congress to pass it by the most expeditious means available.

He was also clear on what bipartisanship should mean -- and what it can't mean. Democrats, who happen to be in the majority, have already added Republican ideas to their proposals. Obama said he was open to four more that came up during the health-care summit. What he's (rightly) unwilling to do is give the minority veto power over a bill that has deliberately and painfully worked its way through the regular legislative process.

Republicans, however, don't want to talk much about the substance of health care. They want to discuss process, turn "reconciliation" into a four-letter word and maintain that Democrats are "ramming through" a health bill.

It is all, I am sorry to say, one big lie -- or, if you're sensitive, an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy.

In an op-ed in Tuesday's Post, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) offered an excellent example of this hypocrisy. Right off, the piece was wrong on a core fact. Hatch accused the Democrats of trying to, yes, "ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill."

No. The health-care bill passed the Senate in December with 60 votes under the normal process. The only thing that would pass under a simple majority vote would be a series of amendments that fit comfortably under the "reconciliation" rules established to deal with money issues. Near the end of his column, Hatch conceded that reconciliation would be used for "only parts" of the bill. But why didn't he say that in the first place?

Hatch grandly cited "America's Founders" as wanting the Senate to be about "deliberation." But the Founders said nothing in the Constitution about the filibuster, let alone "reconciliation." Judging from what they put in the actual document, the Founders would be appalled at the idea that every major bill should need the votes of three-fifths of the Senate to pass.

Hatch quoted Sens. Robert Byrd and Kent Conrad, both Democrats, as opposing the use of reconciliation on health care. What he didn't say is that Byrd's comment from a year ago was about passing the entire bill under reconciliation, which no one is proposing. As for Conrad, he made clear to The Post's Ezra Klein this week that it's perfectly appropriate to use reconciliation "to improve or perfect the package," which is the only thing that Democrats have proposed doing through reconciliation.

Hatch said that reconciliation should not be used for "substantive legislation" unless the legislation has "significant bipartisan support." But surely the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which were passed under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion during his presidency, were "substantive legislation." The 2003 dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney had to break the tie. Talk about "ramming through."

The underlying "principle" here seems to be that it's fine to pass tax cuts for the wealthy on narrow votes but an outrage to use reconciliation to help middle-income and poor people get health insurance.

I'm disappointed in Hatch, co-sponsor of two of my favorite bills in recent years. One created the State Children's Health Insurance Program. The other, signed last year by Obama, broadly expanded service opportunities. Hatch worked on both with his dear friend, the late Edward M. Kennedy, after whom the service bill was named.
It was Kennedy, you'll recall, who insisted that health care was "a fundamental right and not a privilege." That's why it's not just legitimate to use reconciliation to complete the work on health reform. It would be immoral to do otherwise and thereby let a phony argument about process get in the way of health coverage for 30 million Americans.

~E.J. Dionne Jr.

The Intellectual Incoherence of the Electorate - What Else is New?

2010-02-14T10:57:00.005-05:00

...the new populism has stitched together incompatible concerns and goals into one “I’m mad as hell” quilt. The people may have spoken. It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.

while voters routinely say that the rising cost of health care is a problem, it is the bills’ cost-control provisions—including a tax on expensive insurance plans and rules to restrain Medicare spending—that have proved especially unpopular.

a survey found that forty-one per cent of those...opposed...weren’t sure whether reform went too far or not far enough. In short, they don’t know why they’re against reform; they just are.

It’s been the political equivalent of an intervention: in recent weeks, Democrats have been bombarded with advice about how they should reinvent their economic agenda. The electorate, we hear, wants Barack Obama to be more of an economic populist but less of an ambitious reformer. He has to aggressively create jobs but also be less spendthrift. This advice may be contradictory, but then so are the economic opinions of the many angry voters who are animating what’s being called the new populism. Whereas the economic populism of the eighteen-nineties and the right-wing cultural populism of recent years represented reasonably coherent ideologies, this new populism has stitched together incompatible concerns and goals into one “I’m mad as hell” quilt. The people may have spoken. It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.

One view of this new populist uprising is that it’s about Main Street versus Wall Street, and is grounded in voters’ fury at the bailout of irresponsible bankers. But that’s too simple. While the banks are public enemy No. 1, there’s a much wider-ranging anger out there, a sense that everyone except the ordinary middle-class person is getting some sort of handout. Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor: voters don’t seem to like any of them. The bailout of the auto industry, after all, was as unpopular as the bailout of the banks, even though it was much tougher on the companies (G.M. and Chrysler went bankrupt; shareholders were wiped out, and C.E.O.s pushed out), and even though the biggest beneficiaries of the deal were ordinary autoworkers. You might have expected a deal that helped workers keep their jobs to play well in a country spooked by ballooning unemployment. Yet most voters hated it.

Similarly, the failure of free markets during the financial crisis might have led people to think that the government should be more involved in the economy. Instead, the percentage of Americans who think government is trying to do too much is higher than it’s been since the late nineties. Health-care reform offers a case study in this. The bills passed by Congress, whatever their flaws, would do things that voters overwhelmingly say they support: extend coverage to the uninsured, ban the worst practices of insurers, and guarantee insurance for people who lose their jobs. Yet more voters now oppose the bills than support them, with many saying that the government is overreaching. And, while voters routinely say that the rising cost of health care is a problem, it is the bills’ cost-control provisions—including a tax on expensive insurance plans and rules to restrain Medicare spending—that have proved especially unpopular. On top of this, many people are just annoyed with the whole process: a survey of voters who supported Obama in 2008 but voted for Scott Brown in the recent Massachusetts Senate race found that forty-one per cent of those who opposed health-care reform weren’t sure whether reform went too far or not far enough. In short, they don’t know why they’re against reform; they just are. It’s a bit like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” Asked what he’s rebelling against, he says, “Whaddya got?”

One thing voters do want is jobs. But even here populist sentiment is at odds with itself. People want the government to help provide jobs, but they also want it to cut the deficit. Of course, one can worry about rising long-term debt and still think that, right now, more deficit spending is crucial to the nascent recovery. But angry voters aren’t that nuanced in their thinking: they want the government to tighten its belt and fight unemployment at the same time. Not that they believe that the government’s efforts will do any good: three-quarters of Americans think that much of the money in the first stimulus program was wasted, perhaps because they can’t see all the jobs that the stimulus saved, only the nearly eight million jobs that the economy has lost.

The anger is understandable, and voters are under no obligation to be consistent. But that doesn’t make the new populism any less of a challenge politically, since, at the moment, voters will find something wrong whatever is done: if Democrats pass a stimulus package, they’ll be lambasted for increasing the deficit; if they don’t pass a stimulus, they’ll be attacked for not caring about jobs. On top of that, both history and theory suggest that tough economic times make people less interested in sharing burdens, not more. One recent study found that people who had been treated unfairly became more selfish. It’s hard to pass reform programs that depend on a sense of solidarity—like health-care reform or cap-and-trade—when voters are trying desperately to protect what they already have.

The temptation, then, is simply to abandon ambitious plans in an attempt to annoy no one. But a better approach would be to recognize that voters’ anger is less ideological than pragmatic: at heart, it’s the product of the weak economy and the poor job market. (The movement that today’s populism most closely resembles is Ross Perot’s, which arose, similarly, during a downturn.) And while that means that there’s no way to make voters happy without improving the economy, it also means that, if you start creating jobs, people will start to feel better. Obviously, small initiatives that nod to people’s concerns (like the deficit commission) can help. But what matters most is getting the economy moving again—even if doing so means handing out tax credits to businesses or magnifying voters’ frustration with government spending. It may bring some short-term political pain, but the only way out is through. ♦

James Surowiecki

It's Official: Being White Destroys Brain Cells

2010-01-16T12:51:00.002-05:00

A Quinnipiac University poll, released on Wednesday, found that a plurality of whites said that Obama has been a worse president than George W. Bush.

Screw Job - How Obama Became the Fall Guy

2010-01-03T10:47:00.006-05:00

...So, while the positive effect of the stimulus is necessarily a guess, it’s a guess shared by nonpartisan government agencies like the Congressional Budget Office as well as all the leading macroeconomic forecasters.

If you look at a graph of jobs lost by month, it resembles a pyramid, with the stack building through 2008, peaking in January 2009, then dropping down around zero over the course of this year. No serious person could dispute that the rise in unemployment reflects anything but the aftershocks of an economic collapse that predate the Obama presidency.

...This likewise holds true of the rising budget deficit: CBO numbers show that approximately 100 percent of the long-term deficit increase results from Bush policies and the effects of the slowdown...

“The American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think,". If the administration is dumb enough to actually believe that, it would help explain how they’ve let Republicans win the political argument over the economy.

President Obama is like a pilot who took the controls of the plane in mid-flight after the engines fell out. It’s obvious that he didn’t cause the problem. But the passengers are going to focus on the fact that the plane was still airborne before he took over, and now, he’s crash-landing in the ocean.

That’s Obama’s problem in the debate over the economy. His arguments are true. The trouble is, they don’t feel true, and they feel less and less true as time goes by.

Republicans focus relentlessly on the simple fact that the economy is in worse shape now than it was before Obama took office. The trajectory may have improved, but the level has worsened--more people are out of work now than on January 20.

The Obama administration predicted in January that, if its stimulus package passed, unemployment would stay below 8 percent, yet it has crossed 10 percent. You have probably heard this statistic if you have heard any Republican in elected or unelected office open his mouth at any point over the last half-dozen months. The implication of this statistic--sometimes made explicit--is that the stimulus failed to alleviate, or even caused, rising unemployment.

The more plausible interpretation is that the Obama administration’s January forecast, along with most private forecasts at the time, underestimated the depth of the recession. One bit of evidence for that view is that unemployment hit 8 percent by February, which was about the same time that the stimulus passed and long before it could take effect.

What level unemployment would have reached without a stimulus is, of course, a total guess. Republicans have ridiculed the administration’s efforts to tabulate the jobs that the stimulus saved. The implication here is that, because you can’t count something, it doesn’t exist. It’s true that there’s no way to actually count the number of jobs saved by the stimulus. Even if you could accurately tabulate the workers hired by federal grants, you’d be missing all the jobs saved by the money those workers are spending. Not to mention the impact of the tax cuts, which account for two-fifths of the cost of the stimulus. So, while the positive effect of the stimulus is necessarily a guess, it’s a guess shared by nonpartisan government agencies like the Congressional Budget Office as well as all the leading macroeconomic forecasters.

If you look at a graph of jobs lost by month, it resembles a pyramid, with the stack building through 2008, peaking in January 2009, then dropping down around zero over the course of this year. No serious person could dispute that the rise in unemployment reflects anything but the aftershocks of an economic collapse that predate the Obama presidency. (This likewise holds true of the rising budget deficit: CBO numbers show that approximately 100 percent of the long-term deficit increase results from Bush policies and the effects of the slowdown.)

The Republican strategy here consists of two nifty steps. Step one consists of affixing Obama with the blame for rising unemployment. Step two is, when Obama points out that the economic collapse occurred before he took office, pummel him as a classless blame-shirker. Columns by National Review editor Rich Lowry (“Obama the graceless”), Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn (“The post-gracious president”), and numerous other conservative worthies have harped upon this theme. Obama must accede to the Republican campaign to blame him for the consequences of the 2008 economic collapse because to do otherwise would violate social etiquette. Obama’s pointing out that he inherited the recession is “graceless, whiny, and tin-eared,” complains Lowry.

At first, in a fit of naïveté, I assumed that the conservative belief in the impropriety of a president blaming his predecessor must be a deeply held principle unrelated to the partisan identity of the presidents in question. Sadly, after a quick search of the recent historical record, the scales fell from before my eyes. President Bush repeatedly asserted that he “inherited a recession”--the one that began in March of 2001--from Bill Clinton. He also charged that Clinton’s weakness in the face of terrorism emboldened Al Qaeda to strike on September 11, which I would argue is even ruder than anything Obama has said about Bush. That particular theme also features prominently in Lowry’s 2003 book, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

Obama’s trickiest dilemma is that the public does not agree with--or, to put it less charitably, understand--the basis for his anti-recession strategy. Whatever your view of deficits, they clearly make more sense during a recession than during an expansion, when deficit spending can help fuel overheated growth. The trouble is, public opinion tends to get loose with the purse strings during boom times and tight during recessions, which is the opposite of what you want. During the 1990s boom, the public favored expanded social spending and tax cuts over paying down the national debt. Today, by overwhelming margins, they favor an immediate balanced budget, even in the face of economic catastrophe.

That is, of course, insane. But Republicans have taken full advantage of the public’s fiscal insanity. President Bush used to scoff at proposals to pay down the national debt, saying, “The surplus means the government has more money than it needs.” Nowadays, Republicans like John Boehner say things like, “American families are tightening their belts,” and, therefore, Washington should “lead by example and show the American people that the government can go on a diet as well.”

What sounds to the American people like simple common sense is economic malpractice, and vice versa. Thus the Democrats’ predicament: High unemployment is making them unpopular, but the only steps they can take to reduce unemployment are themselves unpopular. If the Democrats actually gave the people what they say they want--$1.4 trillion in spending cuts and/or tax hikes to eliminate the 2010 deficit--Republicans would capture approximately 100 percent of Congress in the next election.

“The American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said. “They understand we have to deal with jobs and deficits in a coordinated strategy.” If the administration is dumb enough to actually believe that, it would help explain how they’ve let Republicans win the political argument over the economy.

~Jonathan Chait

Bad Choices

2009-12-08T07:25:00.003-05:00

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

2009-12-01T11:32:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-29T08:57:00.003-04:00

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

2009-09-23T06:31:00.005-04:00

"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

2009-09-18T12:15:00.005-04:00

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

2009-09-13T07:37:00.011-04:00

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

2009-09-12T08:44:00.017-04:00

"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

2009-09-11T11:07:00.026-04:00

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...

2009-09-08T09:56:00.030-04:00

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

2009-09-08T05:36:00.024-04:00

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

2009-09-03T07:47:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-18T04:19:00.004-04:00

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

2009-08-17T10:07:00.003-04:00

Punked?

2009-08-10T08:40:00.005-04:00

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

2009-08-08T19:46:00.008-04:00

"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

2009-08-08T14:40:00.007-04:00

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

2009-08-06T04:24:00.012-04:00

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

2009-08-04T09:41:00.018-04:00

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

2009-07-31T12:15:00.005-04:00

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

2009-07-29T06:42:00.024-04:00

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

2009-07-16T10:02:00.001-04:00

Still dead.

Happy Bastille Day!

2009-07-14T08:39:00.006-04:00

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

2009-07-12T08:17:00.006-04:00

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.

The Pissed-Off Red Necks' Avatar

2009-07-12T06:16:00.008-04:00

The following piece by Frank Rich gets it about right. The only question is how much uglier things will become.

"...No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party...It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it..."

"...Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind..."

"...wrote one fan. 'I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?' Another called for a new American revolution, promising 'there will be blood.'..."

"...She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her..."

By FRANK RICH
Published: July 11, 2009

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.
The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)
The latest flashpoint for this kind of animus is the near-certain elevation to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings arrive this week. Prominent Palinists were fast to demean Sotomayor as a dim-witted affirmative-action baby. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the Palinist hymnal, labeled Sotomayor “not the smartest” and suggested that Princeton awards academic honors on a curve. Karl Rove said, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” Those maligning the long and accomplished career of an Ivy League-educated judge do believe in affirmative-action — but only for white people like Palin, whom they boosted for vice president despite her minimal achievements and knowledge of policy, the written word or even geography.

The politics of resentment are impervious to facts. Palinists regard their star as an icon of working-class America even though the Palins’ combined reported income ($211,000) puts them in the top 3.6 percent of American households. They see her as a champion of conservative fiscal principles even though she said yes to the Bridge to Nowhere and presided over a state that ranks No.1 in federal pork.

Nowhere is the power of resentment to trump reason more flagrantly illustrated than in the incessant complaint by Palin and her troops that she is victimized by a double standard in the “mainstream media.” In truth, the commentators at ABC, NBC and CNN — often the same ones who judged Michelle Obama a drag on her husband — all tried to outdo each other in praise for Palin when she emerged at the Republican convention 10 months ago. Even now, the so-called mainstream media can grade Palin on a curve: at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, Palin’s self-proclaimed representation of the “real America” was accepted as a given, as if white rural America actually still was the nation’s baseline.

The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”

Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade.

Those Republicans who have not drunk the Palin Kool-Aid are apocalyptic for good reason. She could well be their last presidential candidate standing. Such would-be competitors as Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Newt Gingrich are too carnally compromised for the un-Clinton party. Mike Huckabee is Palin-lite. Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal — really? That leaves the charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, precisely the kind of card-carrying Ivy League elitist Palinists loathe, no matter how hard he tries to cosmetically alter his history as a socially liberal fat-cat banker. Palin would crush him like a bug. She has the Teflon-coated stature among Republicans that Romney can only fantasize about.

Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes “last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.
Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

For a week now, critics in both parties have had a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start her lucrative afterlife.

Breaking news!!

2009-07-11T14:14:00.002-04:00

Michael Jackson still dead.

Further Adventures of President Small Cute Dog

2009-07-10T08:55:00.002-04:00

President Small Cute Dog - Part II

2009-07-09T05:48:00.002-04:00

Ahh! Them was the days!!

2009-07-08T10:11:00.001-04:00

Dumbfuckistan Lives On ~or~ Fuck the South, Part II

2009-07-07T20:16:00.006-04:00

These maps are from the post election period in 2004 when it seemed the country might be lost for good and every sane person I knew was seriously considering emigrating. Since Obama's election many are cautiously optimistic, but it still feels like Dumbfuckistan to me.

As recently as 2004, more than half the voters in this country thought Bush had done a bang-up job in his first term and in 2008, after four more nightmare years and the worst economic times in the better part of a century, almost half the people in this country still voted for McCain/Palin (!) and a continuation of Bush's policies. This was after he: turned a record surplus into a record deficit; lied us into a war that's projected to cost about 2 trillion dollars and counting, has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraquis, and has proved to be a jihadi recruiter's dream; prosecuted said war with mind-boggling ineptitude; gutted environmental regulations, usually in secret, sometimes literally in the middle of the night; presided over a massive, unprecedented upward transference of wealth; declared war on science, data and intellectualism; tortured people who turned out to be guilty of absolutely nothing; enabled the banks to engage in a massively leveraged Ponzi scheme; and claimed he got his marching orders from God--which should seriously offend anyone who believes in Him.

And after all that, do you know when -- and only when -- the tipping point was finally reached and our enlightened populace finally turned on Boy George in significant enough numbers to make the election of a rational, sentient being a possibility? When gas prices went up toward the very end of his term.

"Bankrupt the country? Hey; math's hard and shit happens. Steal from the poor and give to the rich? As long's ah get mah $12 a year tax cut ah'm happy. No weapons of mass destruction? Hell, they'll turn up anyday. Slaughter innocents, destroy the planet? No problemo. But mess with mah god-given-right to drive mah Saudi Utility Vehicle to the mall for cheap and by-god you've gone too far, son".

Truly a nation of moral and intellectual giants.

Fuck the South

2009-07-06T17:33:00.022-04:00

Note: I did not write the following extremely funny, obscene, hyperbolic rant (I'd love to take credit for it) but rather it was written by an author whose identity is unknown to me. It was making the rounds shortly after one of the most shameful episodes in recent history; the re-election of George W. Bush. I mean, you had to be pretty damn obtuse to vote for him the first time...but the second?! A fucking moron.

To my suthrin friends: I'm well aware that not everyone in the south is an imbecile nor everyone in the north enlightened. If the attitudes lampooned don't apply, this ain't aimed at you. If they do; it is.

Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep.

And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence? Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?

No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier. Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately "Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years" dickheads. Fuck off.

Arrogant? You wanna talk about us Northeasterners being fucking arrogant? What's more American than arrogance? Hmmm? Maybe horsies? I don't think so. Arrogance is the fucking cornerstone of what it means to be American. And I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.

All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

The next dickwad who says, "It’s your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs.

Let’s talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It’s fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of the gay marriage universe. Yes, that’s right, the state you love to tie around the neck of anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond has the lowest divorce rate in the fucking nation. Think that’s just some aberration? How about this: 9 of the 10 lowest divorce rates are fucking blue states, asshole, and most are in the Northeast, where our values suck so bad. And where are the highest divorce rates? Care to fucking guess? 10 of the top 10 are fucking red-ass we're-so-fucking-moral states. And while Nevada is the worst, the Bible Belt is doing its fucking part.

But two guys making out is going to fucking ruin marriage for you? Yeah? Seems like you're ruining it pretty well on your own, you little bastards. Oh, but that's ok because you go to church, right? I mean you do, right? Cause we fucking get to hear about it every goddamn year at election time. Yes, we're fascinated by how you get up every Sunday morning and sing, and then you're fucking towers of moral superiority. Yeah, that's a workable formula. Maybe us fucking Northerners don't talk about religion as much as you because we're not so busy sinning, hmmm? Ever think of that, you self-righteous assholes? No, you're too busy erecting giant stone tablets of the Ten Commandments in buildings paid for by the fucking Northeast Liberal Elite. And who has the highest murder rates in the nation? It ain't us up here in the North, assholes.

Well this gravy train is fucking over. Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leaching, confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.

And no, you can't have your fucking convention in New York next time. Fuck off.

Sarah’s Straight Talk

2009-07-04T08:20:00.004-04:00

Truly, Sarah Palin has come a long way. When she ran for vice president, she frequently became disjointed and garbled when she departed from her prepared remarks. Now the prepared remarks are incoherent, too.

“And a problem in our country today is apathy,” she said on Friday as she announced that she would resign as governor of Alaska at the end of the month. “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish ‘go with the flow.’ No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time ... to BUILD UP.”

Basically, the point was that Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter. Or a deceased salmon.

Sarah Barracuda made her big announcement Friday afternoon on the lawn of her home to an audience that appeared to include only Todd, the kids and the next-door neighbors. Smiling manically, she looked like a parody of the woman who knocked the Republicans dead at their convention. She babbled about her parents’ refrigerator magnet, which apparently had a lot of wise advice. And she recalled her visit with the troops in Kosovo, whose dedication and determination inspired her to ... resign.

“Life is about choices!” declared the nation’s most anti-choice politician.

People, what is going on with governors in this country? Are we doomed to see them go bonkers one by one, state by state?

The timing of Palin’s announcement was extremely peculiar. Not only did she interrupt the plans of TV newscasters to spend the entire weekend pointing out that Michael Jackson is still dead, she delivered her big news just as the nation was settling into Fourth of July celebrations. You’d have thought she didn’t want us to notice.

“I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity,” she said in a fairly typical moment. “I choose not to tear down and waste precious time, but to build up this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic free people!”

Palin has a year and a half left to go in her term of office. The political world had been wondering whether she’d run for re-election. The answer is no. And furthermore, it turns out that Palin believes that the only way her administration can “continue without interruption” is for her to end it.

Anyhow, no point in wasting precious time.

One underlying theme in Palin’s remarks was that many ethics complaints have been filed against her on issues ranging from her alleged attempts to get her former brother-in-law fired from the state troopers to charging Alaska for her children’s travel expenses.

Perhaps there is some new and interesting scandal that Palin has yet to let us in on. (If so, I hope it involves a soul mate.) Otherwise, it would appear that this is all about her desire to start raising money and setting up operations for a presidential run in 2012. Her fans immediately interpreted the resignation as a canny move to get her back down to the lower 48, with as much time on her hands as Mitt Romney. (Mary Matalin called it “brilliant.”)

Palin was the subject of a devastating article in this month’s Vanity Fair by Todd Purdum, who wrote that McCain campaign aides found it almost impossible to get Palin to prepare for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric. And there is no sign, Purdum reported, that Palin has made any attempt to bone up on the issues so that next time around, she could run as a candidate who actually had some grasp of the intricacies of foreign and domestic policy.

So if she’s starting to run, it will be as the same reporter-avoiding, generalization-spouting underachiever that she was last time around.
Now we know she not only doesn’t have the concentration to read a policy paper, she can’t focus long enough to finish the job she was hired to do.

On Friday, Palin said that finishing out her term would be just too easy. “Many just accept that lame-duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck and ‘milk it.’ I’m not putting Alaska through that,” she said.

Apparently, she’s going to put the rest of us through it instead.

~Gail Collins

R.I.P. Bernie Madoff - or - You Can't Cheat an Honest Man

2009-06-30T07:10:00.005-04:00

When I was a boy, a shady-looking character sidled up to my father on a midtown street, whispered a few words, and slunk away when my father shook his head sternly at him.

I asked my father what the guy wanted, and he told me he had tried to sell him a cheap, knock-off watch and that the trick was to behave furtively so that the potential buyer would infer the watch was stolen and hence worth much more than was being asked for it. Pop went on to say that the scam couldn't work on him in any event, even if he wasn't wise to it, since "I don't buy stolen goods".

Clearly most if not all of Madoff's victims assumed that he had insider contacts and information -- illegal to trade on, of course -- that all but guaranteed his past and ongoing outsized success. And instead of behaving like the apparently archaic, stiff-backed moralist who was my dad, they smiled, winked and eagerly bought the watch.

21st Century Republican Glossary

2009-06-03T08:58:00.013-04:00

Socialism - An unalloyedly evil system of government utilizing progressive taxation as proposed by Adam Smith in the eighteenth century wherein the highest marginal tax rates for the top 1 % of earners are ever so slightly higher than they were under George W. Bush but significantly lower than they were under George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Racist - Any non-white person.

Meritocracy - A system wherein the son accrues social and economic benefits and opportunities in direct proportion to the merits and achievements of the father.

Treason - Any disagreement with or questioning of the policies of a Republican administration.

Patriotism - Any disagreement with or questioning of the policies of a Democratic administration.

Democrat Party - The Democratic Party. See: Socialism

Tyranny - Any proposed legislation limiting in even the slightest way the private ownership of automatic weapons, mortars, anti-tank guns, Teflon jacketed bullets, etc.

Freedom - My God-given right to dictate your behavior and religious practices according to my fundamentalist Christian beliefs.

Wealth Distribution, Equitable - An elusive but approaching Republican goal wherein the top 1% of the population (see: The worthy; The elect) owns/controls 99% of the wealth and the bottom 99% (see: Losers) owns/controls 1%. For an example of Equitable Wealth Distribution as it exists in the current world, see: Haiti

Global Warming - A myth promulgated by socialists in order to limit the ability of the righteous to make money.

Bug Week in the Catskills

2009-06-01T09:00:00.012-04:00

I've just returned from three days in the Catskills where I met up with friends Cwfly and Bambooboy as well as local denizens Kmgunn, Upstate Trout, Ken, and Mikec.

The last week of May is known as bug week due to the profusion of hatches that occur at that time. Alas, a surfeit of recent rain had both the Beaverkill and Willowemoc -- as well as the east and west branches of the Delaware -- too high and discolored to allow for much in the way of productive fishing.

But fish we did nonetheless, mostly up in the headwaters of the Willow, where the currents were not quite so fearsome and the water at least translucent if not precisely clear. The odd small brookie and wild brown were the best any of us could conjure up and late Friday afternoon a torrential downpour further muddied the waters and left us as wet as if we were completely submerged as opposed to standing in the river merely up to our thighs.

However, dinner at Kmgunn's old farmhouse high up in the hills was alone worth the trip, with the delightful Mrs. Kmgunn, the equally charming Mrs. Upstate Trout, and the two little Kmgunns -- Caroline and Stella -- providing a much needed seasoning of yin to the salty yang of the stew. Good friends, good victuals, good liquor. The special award for stamina goes to Cwfly who had left his home in Connecticut at three AM and showed no diminution in energy, good spirits or intelligibility as midnight approached despite the rigors of the day and his imbibing his equitable share of alcoholic refreshment.

Saturday morning's fishing was no more productive so we spent the afternoon hanging around at the Catskill flyfishing center having coffee and "friendship cake" with Agnes (friendship cake takes three weeks to make and is a "pain in the neck" according to Agnes) before repairing to the lawn to cast various rods and swap lies in the belated -- but quite welcome -- warm May sun. This was followed by a trip next door to Mikey's house to see if we could help him reduce his beer stock, after which we paid a visit to Ed Van Put across the street.

The Bambooboy and I decided to give the Beaverkill a try Saturday evening, and although armed with local knowledge of secret spots and notwithstanding my heroic forays down and back up various scree or mud covered 60 degree inclines to virtually inaccessible spots we caught no fish and only spotted a few sporadic risers. But we worked it conscientiously until after dark before hieing us off to the bar at the Rockland House after which we retired to the understated elegance of our quarters, there to sleep the sleep of the just and dream of singing reels.

O tempora! O mores!

2009-05-27T20:15:00.002-04:00

"You should hear them down town. This morning the Baptist minister took him for a text. Not only as a murderer, but as an adulterer; a polluter of the free Democratico-Protestant atmosphere of Yoknapatawpha county. I gathered that his idea was that Goodwin and the woman should both be burned as a sole example to that child; the child to be reared and taught the English language for the sole end of being taught that it was begot in sin by two people who suffered by fire for having begot it. Good God, can a man, a civilised man, seriously..."

"They're just Baptists," Miss Jenny said.

From the Archives - UP Road Trip, Part VI

2009-03-31T09:04:00.003-04:00

Part VI – We meet the Amazing Woody and the lovely Grace

Bill and I had directions to an old trailer at a dirt crossroads where Woody was to meet us and escort us the rest of the way to the camp on Frenchmen’s Pond. We were to be joined by Woody’s wife, Gracie, and his pal, board member Pmag, for drinks, a steak cookout, some rod casting, a little fishing, some lie-swapping and story telling… it promised to be an all around delightful evening.

So off we went, back up 510 to the 502. It was a lovely late afternoon in May, the sun was shining, the temperature in the seventies, and I was filled with anticipation and thoroughly enjoying the ride through unfamiliar country.

We made our way to the trailer landmark at the crossroads and there, across the railroad tracks, was the Amazing One himself, standing next to some sort of all-terrain vehicle festooned with a Confederate Battle Flag, a prodigious plug of tobacco in his jaw.

“Waalll, howdy fellers!” (he spat tobacco juice; most of it dribbling down his chin) “Hell fahr, it shore is mahty fahn to meet y’all!”

He then apparently swallowed some of his chaw as he was racked with a spasm of uncontrollable coughing.

“You ok, Woody?”

Red faced, unable to speak, the only response was more hacking and hiccupping accompanied by a nonchalant wave of his hand meant, I assumed, to dismiss our concerns.

Woody, at this point, seemed to be in severe distress, but waved off all attempts to thump him on the back and – still unable to speak – hopped onto his ATV and motioned for us to follow.

It was a short drive across a scrubby, recently cut section of jack pine forest, down a hill and around a bend, and there we were at the legendary Voelker’s pond.

The camp was every bit as homey, pretty and redolent of past good times as pictures I’d seen and my imagination had led me to think it would be.

Woody hopped off his little car, having composed himself by this time, and seemed none the worse for wear other than a slightly detectable greenish tinge, and began to introduce us to his wife, Grace.

“Fellers”, he said - although it came out more like “Ferrers” owing to the chaw - “Ferrers, ‘is is ma w…”

“Woody! Why are you talking like that?”

“Aw, Gracie”

“And spit out that disgusting tobacco”

“Ye…(patooie) Yes’m”

“And stop saying, ‘Yes’m’”

“Yes’m…I mean OK, Gracie”

Grace turned to Bill and me with a smile and said “You’ll have to excuse Woody. He’s been doing this redneck routine ever since we moved here. Trying to fit in, I guess. Drives me nuts”

“But people around here don’t speak with a southern accent”, I said.

“I keep telling him the same thing, but he just goes on watching these stupid Hee-Haw tapes…”

“Aw, Gracie; yore embarrassin’ me in front of the fellers…”

“Woody! Stop it!!”

“Awww…”

We managed to persuade Woody that he needn’t be a redneck on our account, and he actually seemed somewhat relieved – likely at the prospect of not having to chew Red Man for the duration of our visit. I don’t know if he would have survived.

Bill and I had brought gifts. Knowing that the traditional camp cocktail was an Old Fashioned, I had picked up a bottle of green crème de menthe, it being the oldest fashioned liquor I could think of. I had also brought one of my custom made, collector’s edition Formerly Clark’s Moderator t-shirts; one of my most popular designs, “The Ralphie”, unworn and still in its original plastic bag.

On the back, of course, was emblazoned the Formerly Clark’s Moderator Maxim, “Power Corrupts…Trivial Power Corrupts Trivially” and the Formerly Clark’s logo. A great shirt.

To my disappointment, Woody seemed not much interested in either the crème de menthe – which he didn’t even use when he made the Old Fashioneds, substituting bourbon - or the t-shirt, and instead made a big fuss over Bill’s gift which was just an old, used English fly reel. It didn’t even come in a plastic bag. Nonetheless, Woody and Bill seemed to bond at that point and were inseparable for the remainder of the trip.

My feelings were kind of hurt, to tell you the truth, but I got over it.

Next: Part VII - We are joined by the only-slightly-less-Amazing Pmag

From the Archives - UP Road Trip, Part V

2009-03-27T15:35:00.008-04:00

Having told his tale, BHB offered to show me around.

The cabin was quite nice and beautifully located on what looked for all the world like a small lake, but which Woody insisted was actually the Dead River after the Hoist Dam burst in March of 2003. Whichever, it was really nice.

For those of you who know the area, the cabin is just off the 502 in Negaunee Township. The 502 is, in turn, off 510 – not the 510; just 510. Distinctions like that matter in the UP. It’s not as bad as in France, though, where if you called the 502 just 502 they’d pretend to not know what you were talking about. On the UP they will just correct you.

We had a wood fired Sauna by the lake/river front.

The inside of the cabin consisted of a living room, dining area, kitchen sleeping loft and small bedroom on the main floor. One floor below was a master suite with a private deck overlooking the lake/river.

“Having gotten here first, I just threw my stuff in the room downstairs. I thought it would be more comfortable for you near the kitchen.” Said Doctor Bill. It came as no surprise to me that my friend would exhibit that kind of consideration and unselfishness.

Above is a picture of my modest but comfortable room and one of Bill's slightly more opulent suite.

After a couple of Two Hearted Ales, chosen to honor the location, and some conversation liberally laced with numerous poetical quotes and allusions that were absolutely mystifying as to their appositeness or indeed even their meaning, it was finally time to head out to the legendary camp at Frenchman’s pond where we were to meet the only slightly less legendary Amazing Woody for a cookout and some fishing.

From the Archives - UP Road Trip, Part IV

2009-03-26T07:23:00.005-04:00

“I can see by the look on your face, my faux-Gallic friend, that you are nonplused by my accent”

“Well, uh, yeah, Bill, I…”

"Doctor Bill, please!”

“…Doctor Bill. I was under the impression that you were from the Black Hills of South Dakota – indeed I’m pretty certain that you’ve claimed as much - yet you sound like Henry Miller”

“Ah, CI,

In the long journey out of the self, There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places Where the shale slides dangerously And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning. Better to hug close…”

“Bi…Doctor Bill, I don’t mean to be rude and interrupt, but how about an explanation that doesn’t rely on warmed over Roethke of dubious relevance?”

“You don’t like Roethke?”

“I like Roethke fine, that’s not…”

“…Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones, The upland of alder and birchtrees…”

“Doctor Bill!”

“Sorry! As Wallace Stevens said…”

“Bill!!”

“Doctor Bill!!!”

“Doctor Bill!! Stop it!!!”

“OK, OK. Jeez, you’re as testy in person as you are on the forum, aren’t you? Ah well, no matter.

I was indeed born in the town of Deadwood in the Black Hills of South Dakota, but at the age of five we pulled up stakes and headed east to NY where my father had been offered a position as a fish-scaler at the Fulton Market. This promised to be a significant step upward economically for the family, as in Deadwood my father was a self-ordained minister and we were dependent on the charity of the local Lutherans who – in common with Lutherans everywhere - did not have a charitable bone in their respective bodies.

We settled in Brooklyn, in East New York, and as I grew up I assumed a position of leadership on the streets, due as much to my quick fists as my nimble wits. My pals and I became known as “The Black Hills Bunch”, partly in homage to the place of my birth, but also due to the slightly higher elevation of East New York relative to our rivals in neighboring Brownsville. We were a wild crew, we were; feared and admired in equal measure.

Although my father and mother half-heartedly tried to rein me in, at this point I had become the primary source of support for the family which had grown to include my thirteen brothers and sisters as well as my great uncle, Black Hills Paul, a notorious drunk and ne’er-do-well.

I was surely headed for prison or worse, when in my nineteenth year a serendipitous occurrence led to an epiphany that changed my life.

Having mugged a local burgher and stolen, among other things, his brief case, I was ensconced behind a building housing a kosher slaughterhouse perusing its contents which consisted primarily of papers of neither interest nor value. I was about to toss the whole thing aside when I came upon a small leather-bound volume entitled “The Collected Poetry of William Morris”. Desultorily flipping the pages, my attention was arrested by the following:

Wearily, drearily,
Half the day long,
Flap the great bannersHigh
over the stone;
Strangely and eerily
Sounds the wind's song,
Bending the banner-poles.

While, all alone,
Watching the loophole's spark,
Lie I, with life all dark,
Feet tether'd, hands fetter'd
Fast to the stone,
The grim walls, square-letter'd
With prison'd men's groan.Still strain the banner-poles

Through the wind's song,
Westward the banner rolls
Over my wrong.

I was stunned! Clearly this was the voice of providence speaking directly to me! Eagerly I began to read another poem:

I am the handmaid of the earth,
I broider fair her glorious gown,
And deck her on her days of mirth
With many a garland of renown.

And while Earth's little ones are fain
And play about the
Mother's hem,
I scatter every gift I gain
From sun and wind to gladden them.

I had never read such beautiful words in my life! There and then I vowed to put aside my life of crime and wantonness and devote myself to courting the muse of poetry - and such I did."

"That’s quite a story, B…Doctor Bill (although the Morris poetry is worse than three-day old tripe) -- is any of it true?”

“Weeeeelllll, CI, I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘true’. As Plato said, “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history”.

“In other words it’s bullshit?”

“Every word of it, my friend…every word”.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

2009-03-25T16:11:00.002-04:00

A Cloozoe Supervised Investigation yields, at long last, the unvarnished truth. But another in what will be a long, maybe too long, series of crack investigative reports to lay before you the essential facts needed before placing any orders with your Tackle Commodities Futures Dealer.

Dear Reader, as promised by Himself, no stone will be left unturned to bring to you (plural or singular) the very best that our investigative skills might produce. Toward that end, we were tasked with seeking to find the true maker of all those silly reels stamped with a “D”. You know, the ones that have had their value artificially and rapidly inflated by a bit of chatter.
So, we sent out feelers to our operatives and confidential informants (“C.I. in warrantspeak), questioning whether the man born in Coventry, England in September 1860 could have possibly produced what is claimed.
Tips started coming in and were quickly discarded. Some suggested the reels were made by the Devil, thus stamped “D,” but this was soon rejected. Others spoke of Dante or his cohort Beatrice, but the reels seem newer than that, and likely not of Italian manufacture.
Then we struck gold. A meeting was arranged with a completely unreliable C.I.. At the meeting held in a Sunoco Station in the Catskills, the C.I. spoke softly, eyes darting back and forth to maintain security as taught by the Chief Inspector himself (a completely different type of C.I.), and he told a tale of a secret hollow in Joisey that might hold the answer. At first, thinking he was speaking of the Jersey Islands, we immediately assumed our British-speak role and responded, “Beautiful! Spot on, Sir!” disrupting all other diners within 1/4 mile. Advised the informant was referring to New Jersey, we reverted to the normal Sunoco-site language and the hushed tones required of all such investigators.
The location of the hollow in question was written in white ink, carefully scripted on the flat of a Taylor Quad to avoid the slightest chance of detection. The C.I. was paid with the usual payment received by any participant in an investigation performed on behalf of you, Dear Reader, and we parted our ways. He back to Formerly Clark’s, and yours truly over to Mikey’s for a touch of coffee.
Days later, and with all proper surveillance equipment in place, we headed off in the night to the location in question having carefully de-scarfed the rod section holding the vital information. The clue was now pocket-sized.
Three days later, two of them spent in traffic in New Jersey, we arrived. We awaited the fall of night, or nightfall should you prefer one word when four can easily do the descriptive job, then watching shooting stars, space trash and worried by a forecast for acid rain, we slid down a slick mud and skin piercing gravel embankment into the very den of the “D”. And “D” could well have stood for total darkness, Dear Reader, since during the whole of the night we could see nothing, save a strange fire that would glow, dim, glow, dim and so forth. You get the picture. Occasionally sparks would fly off and we feared that Beelzebub himself was in charge. Sidebar for a moment. I just realized that I have been using the editorial “we,” that some of you may find to smack of talking of myself in the third person. Tough – get over it.
Now back to our modest adventure.
As rosy fingered dawn approached (I am not referring to Dangerous Dawn from Paterson, but adopting a literary image), we could finally see a small creature across the hollow. Muscular and covered in hair, we momentarily speculated that we were beholding a Yeti, in troll-like form. But then, as the sun began to rise our vision cleared. There the creature was, resplendent in a Pink (yup, we using that word again) Tutu, bent over an anvil, Vulcan’s very hammer in hand, banging away. From time to time, he, or perhaps it, would grunt, pick up a small object with tongs and place it over the glowing embers of a charcoal fire, and then back to the anvil with more work to be done.
Having been up all of four days, mostly stuck in traffic, we grew weary, leaned back against a tree and dozed off. I assure you this well deserved rest was not caused by medicinal nips from the nickel silver flask always carried with the Cloozoe surveillance kit. Speaking of nickel silver flasks, I have been able to collect eight of them, all bench made by Flaggon of Pewksberry who started his career as an arbor pin maker for Heaton. They are stamped “FOP” on their bottoms and are simply the most beautiful bench made flasks ever made. One, and only one in my collection, features the famous and rare red agate screw top and is, believe it or not, left hand wind. Keep an eye out for these and if a couple of us discuss them back and forth who knows what will happen to the value. Sorry. I hope you’re still with me since the end, the truth, is in sight from what we next saw at the site and will shortly reveal to you.
We awoke to the croaking of a two-headed toad that had apparently emerged from the small stream running nearby having finished its feast on Luna moths. It was a strange land we were in. I said to myself, here’s a maze trod indeed through forthrights and meanders, by your patience I needs must rest me. (I ain’t going to look it up but I think that’s a rough statement uttered by Gonzago, a member of the Genoa Bar in The Tempest. I simply, because of my responsibilities to you, Dear Reader, had to throw in something of legal nature. It’s part of the job description.
Looking about, the strange Specie Tutuman had vanished, the embers had died to the flat color [colour for our international readers] of a properly oxidized non-swiss ferrule and all was silent, save the alternating hiccups from the toad’s two mouths.
Across the hollow stood the evil black anvil with a small object perched on top. We extracted photographic equipment necessary to capture the evidence and approached cautiously. Through the sparse and toxic weeds we spied vast numbers of bent, rusted and unfinished horseshoes, all bearing a stamped “D”. Odd we thought, but took careful note of the evidence. Scattered here and there were hand-forged fishing spoons with names engraved upon them. “Hendrikson beater,” “Creative Cahill,” and one, with a small hinged compartment labeled “real cow dung.”
An object stood upon the anvil, a hammer at the ready, and we carefully took the above photograph submitted for you, Dear Reader, to preserve the scene and provide you with demonstrative evidence.
We previously, using gifted intuitive skills, had thought long and hard on the fact that many of these “D” marked reels were held together by what is known as the “Horsehoe Latch.” The clues were coming together.
The object upon the anvil, as you may see, is a hand-crafted fishing reel, the inside stamped boldly with the infamous “D.” Cleverly disguised, it has a latch made to look like a 19th Century telephone. Not the giveaway Horseshoe latch.
The final proof. A loud fart from the rim of the hill above us startled us and drew our attention to a modest shack, teetering on the brink. A scream pierced the silence of the glade. “Free me, free me!!!” a female voice proclaimed. In response an inhuman grunt was heard with words believed to be, “screw you Roberta, bring me more breakfast, I’ve been hammering out more stinking reels all night long.”
Out came our telescope, and when extended and placed to the eye, one could see over the door, hanging loosely by a single hinge, a worn and decrepit sign of no welcome that said, “Defazio’s Domain – Keep Out – Right Wing Central.”
So we finally have the answer and have now given it you, Dear Reader, for all time. It is Dezazio the Farrier himself, and his infamous “D” that is imbedded in these very reels as it is upon the shoes he fashions for the feet of animals. Before word should get out, we advocate that the three of you who may have come across this news unload quickly any such reels on the closed market, before the crash in value takes place and you’re wiped out.
This small piece is just another contribution to help you, Dear Reader, in your quest for the best.

In Defense of Bamboo Rods As An Investment Strategy

2009-03-24T10:09:00.005-04:00

This is the second in a series of hard-hitting and incisive analyses of some of the major developments in the sport today. These detailed whitepapers are designed to provoke thought and stimulate debate… or, maybe it’s stimulate thought and provoke debate… well, maybe it’s just provoke… among you, the recognized cognoscenti and, as noted earlier, the final authorities on all things bamboo.

...................................................................................................

In Defense of Bamboo Rods As An Investment Strategy

Well, let’s see… there’s uhhh… hmmmm.

I, uhhhh… lemme see… I, uhhhh… well… hmmmm. Wellll…

Anyone? Anyone?

From the Archives - UP Road Trip, Part III

2009-03-23T09:36:00.013-04:00

Upon crossing the Mackinac Bridge onto the UP, one enters the picturesque village of St. Ignace, where seemingly every other ramshackle store featured a hand-painted sign advertising in large letters, “PASTIES”. I couldn’t help but wonder how many strip clubs there could possibly be in the UP to support all the pasty establishments. But after a diligent, extended search failed to turn up a single such club – and I looked hard, selflessly willing to delay arrival at my ultimate destination in the spirit of rigorous academic inquiry – I decided that perhaps the UP was home to a huge pasties manufactory and wholesale distribution center, much the way Castroville in California supplies the world with artichokes.

It further occurred to me that perhaps the various pasty establishments had photographs of their offerings being worn? Perhaps even live models! I veered back onto the road – still possessed of the aforementioned spirit of disinterested inquiry - and decided to pose as the owner of a chain of strip joints in need of lots of pasties, and go check out the wares.

Imagine my surprise to learn that in Yooper parlance pasties are not like those in the first picture but rather foodstuffs as in the second one. They were created to be eaten for lunch by Cornish miners but their appeal has apparently spread, since I didn't meet a single Cornish miner during my entire stay on the UP.

Having - with some admitted disappointment - gotten to the bottom of the pasty puzzle, I continued on. The initial part of my trip across and upward through the UP took me along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. It was a warm, sunny day (the last such day I would see) and the lake was almost as blue as the Caribbean.

The Driggs River crosses route 28 somewhere between Seney and Shingleton and I intended to stop and commune, or perhaps even do a little pre-arrival fishing there. My host-to-be, the Amazing Woody, had assured me that it was marked with a sign. But although I reëxamined the map quite a few times, and drove back and forth along a ten mile stretch of route 28, I never did find a sign identifying it. This was mystifying since I slowed at every small bridge and saw signs for, among other notable bodies of water, “Duffy’s Creek”, “Ya, Sure, Brook”, “Busta’s Trickle”, and “Clyde’s Mud Puddle”…but no Driggs. Perhaps the explanation is that anyone but a “troll” (Yooper-humor-speak for anyone who lives “below the bridge” – get it?) could find the Driggs without assistance, but Clyde’s Mud Puddle would be otherwise easily missed by even the most astute cognoscenti of UP high-lights. At one point I came upon a decent size, if somewhat muddy stream about where I reckoned the Driggs ought to be and followed a logging road along it for a way until I found myself axle deep in good, wet, clingy UP clay and figured I’d better try and get out of there, so my only lasting reminder of the Driggs, if such indeed it was, was the drying clay thickly caked on the wheels and undercarriage of my car, large hunks of which would break off every few miles for the rest of the trip.

Arriving at last at our rented cabin on the shore of a small lake which Amazing Woody insists is a river, I was pleased to see that Black Hills Bill had already arrived and was coming out of the door to greet me.

He looked much as I had imagined he would – vigorous and distinguished. The last picture is a close-up taken of him upon the occasion of his being granted a long-delayed doctorate in post-structural deconstruction and obfuscation from the Millard Fillmore Academy of Literature and the Tonsorial Arts, a correspondence school with accreditation pending in three southern states.

But although Black Hills Bill’s (or Doctor Black Hills Bill, as he insists on being called) appearance jibed with my preconception, nothing could have prepared me for the effect his opening remarks were to have:

“Chief Inspectuh! It coitainly is a pleazhuh to meetcha! In da woids of da Belle a’ Amhoist,

SOFTENED by Time’s consummate plush,
How sleek da woe appeahs
Dat t’reatened childhood’s citadel
And unduhmined da yeauhs

From the Archives - Road Trip to the UP - Part II

2009-03-22T13:12:00.006-04:00

It was with great relief and a sense of having made substantial progress toward my destination that I bid adieu to Ohio and crossed into Michigan, although five hundred miles remained from that point to Negaunee in the northwestern Upper Peninsula. To put that in perspective, Wyoming – which I’ve driven across more than once and think of as a big western state – is 364 miles across from east to west. (And by astonishing coincidence measures exactly the same from west to east!)

I immediately encountered much more fodder for contemplation than in the entire state of Ohio. One is first struck by the complete and utter absence of foreign cars. I had anticipated this, but it still proved to be somewhat jarring to behold as I live in an upscale town in NJ where the automobile breakdown by make goes: Lexus – 36%; Mercedes – 23%; Others (BMW, Jaguar, Range Rover, Humvee, Infiniti, Porsche, Volvo, etc) - 40.999999999%; Toyota - 0.000000001%. The Toyota is mine.

It was as if a space ship owned jointly by the Big Three and the UAW zapped them all with a super-destructo ray leaving nothing behind but a few particles of imported leather, a handful of melted GPS devices, and a stray Starbucks cup and I was relieved every morning I spent in the state that no one had spray painted graffiti on my car during the night.

The speed limit went up to 70 mph, which made sense for a state in which the automobile plays such a prominent role, so I immediately upped my pace to a comfortable 85. One noticeable discordant note, though, was that gas prices immediately increased fifty cents a gallon as soon as you crossed the border. This surprised me greatly, as I assumed any state relying so heavily on automobile manufacture would do everything in its power to encourage their use including maximizing the efficiency of gas distribution and minimizing the tax on same, but such was not the case.

Michigan is expensive in another way as well. At every construction stretch along the highway there are signs reading “Kill or injure a worker - $7500 and 15 years”. Here in NJ you can kill a worker for $5000 and injure one for only $1500 – less, if you know the right people – although admittedly they don’t give you fifteen years to pay it off; it’s strictly cash on the barrel-head, delivered in a paper bag to a guy with a crooked nose.

I refueled just off the highway in a tiny crossroads town a little north of Saginaw at a gas station/general store which sported a large sign boasting “Second Largest Selection of Beef Jerky in the Country”. This suggested, of course, an obvious question and being the preternaturally curious guy I am I asked it of the clerk: “Where can I find the First Largest Selection of Beef Jerky in the Country?” He merely looked puzzled - clearly the sign in front had been there so long it had become as invisible to him as wallpaper. So I explained helpfully, “You have a sign out front claiming to have the Second Largest Selection of Beef Jerky in the Country. I was wondering who had the First Largest”. He paused, looked thoughtful, rubbed his chin and replied “Must be the place in Alger”. Hearing this impressed me mightily given the unlikely but now confirmed fact that both the first and second largest selections of beef jerky in the country were not only both to be found in Michigan, but in little towns within 50 miles of each other.

My thirst for arcane knowledge thus slaked, and my appreciation for the state growing by the minute, I thanked him and continued my journey. A little farther north, my radar detector burped. I had drifted up to a nice, steady 90 mph so I backed off a bit while scanning the road and woods ahead for any signs of the constabulary. I rounded a curve, and there he was, still a few hundred yards in front of me and busy with another customer that he had pulled over. I might have been a bit blasé about slowing down quickly, but did have it down to 70 by the time I drew abreast of him and passed him. Did you know the sheriff’s deputies in Michigan have double-barreled radar units that point forward and backward? I didn’t. As soon as I had passed him he pulled out, fired up the flashers, and pulled me over.

There are lots of kinds of cops and you can usually tell which kind you’re dealing with by their eyes. Maybe it’s not really their eyes, but the lines around their eyes. Of course if they are wearing mirrored sunglasses, you can’t see their eyes or the lines around them, but any cop who wears mirrored sunglasses is a hard-ass and you already know everything you need to. This particular sheriff’s deputy was of the decent sort: weathered, late middle-aged, with eyes that had seen everything from whole families mangled in wrecks, to the remnants of drunken domestic brawls at ramshackle trailers in the woods. He had eyes that would never be surprised by anything they saw ever again, but you could tell that the things he had seen had bothered him and always would. He called me sir, wished me a good morning, and without any tricky cop crap told me straightforwardly that he “had me at 82 mph back there”. I called him sir and wished him a good morning in return and apologized. When he returned to my car with the ticket he told me that although he “had me at 82 mph” he had written the ticket for 75 and that as such it wouldn’t impose any points on my license. I thanked him. He looked at me with those sad, wry, cop’s eyes of his and the merest hint of a smile and said, “Don’t thank me too much – it still carries a $110 fine”, wished me a safe journey, and we both went our ways. It was worth the $110 to meet him.

The rest of the trip through lower Michigan was uneventful. Nice country, and increasingly full of those unmistakable aspects of light, land and flora that let you know you are “up north”. I arrived soon enough at the Mackinac Bridge (which I’m told is pronounced “mackinaw” and is sometimes spelled that way, too) and headed across the straits to the Upper Peninsula. I got a kick out of being able to see both Lake Huron – the redheaded step child of the Great Lakes – and Lake Michigan simultaneously as illustrated in the two pictures at the top taken from mid-span.

From the Archives - The "Best" of Cloozoe

2009-03-21T06:06:00.005-04:00

Being too lazy to write new stuff, from time to time we will re-publish some of Cloozoe's Greatest Hits. At the request of an overwhelming fifty percent of our readers (Zen Cane) we''ll kick things off with Part One of the longest story never completely told; Cloozoe's report on his May 2007 fishing trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula with Black Hills Bills, Amazing Woody, and featuring a cameo appearance by Pmag.

Picture of Ohio, one of the top 46 most beautiful states in America

Trip to the UP, Part I

Apologies to all of you who understandably have no interest in hearing about someone else’s fishing trip. My companions insisted I produce this report since they apparently very much like to read about themselves. I warned them – sternly - that my version would contain truth of the un-shellacked variety, as I owed no less to both the historical record and my well-earned, unchallenged, and rigorously guarded reputation for exacting veracity. I further warned them that they might not even recognize themselves since they clearly share the rest of the human race’s capacity for self-deception and both harbor delusions of adequacy. They professed to be unconcerned: “Hell, there’s no such thing as bad publicity; just make sure you spell our names right”.

So, Emazzing Wouldie and Blak Hils Bil, here it is – you asked for it.

My journey began a week ago, last Thursday morning, with a drive northwest to Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania and – three hundred miles later – into Ohio. Only three things about Ohio piqued my interest:

1. They have the audacity to charge a toll on interstate 80 and they've renamed the section within their borders “The Ohio Turnpike”. I assume the reason they get away with it is because one doesn’t have to pony up until getting off the turnpike at one end of the state or the other and most people would gladly pay any fee within reason to leave.

2. In Ohio all the signs for roads with one or two digit designations indicate the route number inside an outline map of the state showing its proportions to be roughly square, whereas the roads designated with three digits show the proportions of the state as a pronounced rectangle, with the result that it is now much wider than it is tall. Apparently no one could figure out any other way to squeeze in the extra digit other than to distort the map.

3. Fulfilling a boyhood dream, I passed by the birthplace of Rutherford B. Hayes, near Sandusky. I didn’t visit it, since I had dreamt only of passing by.

Hayes, a Republican, was the nineteenth president of the United States and there are a couple of things you should know about him. He was the first and - until recently - only president to take office despite losing the popular vote which tallied 4,300,000 for Tilden to 4,036,000 for Hayes. Hayes's ultimate election depended upon contested electoral votes in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. If all the disputed electoral votes went to Hayes, he would win; a single electoral vote would elect Tilden. Months of uncertainty followed. In January 1877 Congress established an Electoral Commission to decide the dispute. The commission, comprised of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, (can you guess, dear readers, what happened next?) determined all the contests in favor of Hayes by – surprise! - a vote of eight to seven along party lines. The final electoral vote: 185 to 184. Then - as now - the big money was solidly behind the Republican party. Some things never change.

Hayes’s other notable achievement was his decision to withdraw federal troops from the south in the name of restoring "wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government", thus effectively ending the Reconstruction era. The "wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government" in turn paved the way for the Ku Klux Klan, wholesale lynching and other acts of terror, and ushered in nine decades of state sanctioned apartheid and disenfranchisement of black people. In the south, those nine decades are referred to as "the good old days". Hayes’s withdrawal of the troops was a manifestly political maneuver intended to bring southern voters into the Republican fold. But the Republican party at the time was too closely identified in the southern mind with the devil, Lincoln, and Hayes’s stratagem went for naught: the south remained solidly Democratic until 1964 and the passage of the civil rights act which was supported overwhelmingly by non-southern Democrats, 94%-6% (and to be fair, almost as overwhelmingly by non-southern Republicans, 85%-15%) at which point the always fragile coalition of northern liberals and southern Dixiecrats began to crumble and all them Yaller Dawg Democrats started jumping ship. Note: Only 7 southern Democratic Congressmen and 1 southern Democratic Senator (Ralph Yarborough of Texas) voted for the measure. Not a single southern Republican did so, further laying the groundwork for the seismic political shift of the south to the staunchly Republican region it remains to this day.

Ohio does, though, rank among the forty six most beautiful states in the country, albeit toward the bottom of that group.

Advice Requested

2009-03-20T09:26:00.002-04:00

I know we have our own advice columnist, the inimitable DeFazio, but this seems a bit outside his areas of expertise.

I've started looking into various services that would allow me to re-configure Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes as a regular forum/bulletin board; with categories, search features, private messaging, the ability for all members to start their own topics...you know, kind of like Formerly Clark's but without the sanctimony, limitations, Pat Garner or Bulldog.

I quickly learned that there is a dizzying array of options available at prices ranging from free to cheap. Does anyone out there have any experience/expertise in this area? Anyone capable/willing to help with the graphic design? I'd be glad for your input. Post here under comments or email me at cloozoe@optonline.net

Breaking News! Pittsnogle Located! Named 'Country Living' Editor!

2009-03-18T17:06:00.003-04:00

Legendary Primitive, Melvin Pittsnogle, Joins Editorial Staff of Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes

March 18, 2009. Ponchatoula, LA

After an exhaustive search, the famed recluse and eccentric was found living under the I-10 bridge just outside Ponchatoula. Once sufficiently sober to speak, he agreed to sign on as Country Living Editor for Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes, the internet's pre-eminent epicurean-literary-anarcho-contrarian-flyfishing-grooming-tips website.

"We're truly thrilled to have Melvin on board", said J.A. Cloozoe, Editor-in-chief. "I think anyone familiar with his work would agree that there is absolutely no one like him. Plus he works cheap."

"Howdy fellers", said Pittsnogle. "I don't know what a editor is, but ain't nobody knows more about livin' in the country than me, I reckon. That Cloozoe feller tole me he ain't never even skinned a possum!"

###

No embargo - For immediate release

Dear DeFazio - Answers to your most Intimate Questions on Love, Life & Grooming

2009-03-18T10:13:00.013-04:00

Dear DeFazio,

With spring almost upon us, I’ll soon be wearing more spaghetti straps, low-backed tops and strapless gowns. The problem is, my back and shoulders are quite hairy and I find the extensive waxing required too painful. Any suggestions?

Sincerely,

Hairy in Harrisburg

Dear Hairy,

Vigorous body hair growth is a sign of a healthy supply of testosterone and nothing to be ashamed of, regardless of your gender. In fact, many members of the opposite sex are actually quite attracted to the hirsute, natural look. I think I look terrific in a strapless ball gown, and I got more hair than an orangutan. When you got it, flaunt it!

Regards,

DeFazio

Dear DeFazio,

Maybe you could help settle a little disagreement between my wife and myself. We’ve been happily married for thirteen years, and I’ve always been scrupulous about doing my share of the housework, driving the children to soccer games, attending parent teacher conferences, etc. Just recently, one of the neighbors invited me to join his regular Thursday evening poker game. It’s a friendly game for very low stakes and it sounds like fun, but my wife likes to relax in front of the TV at night and expects me to keep the kids occupied so that they don’t disturb her. She says I can’t go. I’ve never done anything like this before, but I’m so upset I may actually work up the nerve to ask her to reconsider. Any thoughts?

Nervously,

Wannabe Poker Player

Dear Wannabe,

Yeah, I got a thought: I think you should unbutton your pants, look down and see if you still got a pair. What the hell’s wrong with you?! What your wife needs (and secretly wants) is a good, swift kick in the slats. Tell her you will be going to the poker game, and - oh yeah – you’re probably going to be hungry when you get home, so she should wait up and make you a little snack. You might be horny, too, so tell her after she’s done doing the snack dishes, you’ll expect her to set aside another five minutes to attend to her wifely duties. Then she can watch TV or whatever else she wants to do, as long as she keeps her trap shut and doesn’t bother you.

Got that, pussy?

Disgustedly,

DeFazio

.......................................................................................................

Got a problem with love, life, or grooming? Dear DeFazio is here to help! Send your questions along with $5.00 in cash to:

Dear DeFazio
c/o Cloozoe’s International House of Pancakes
237 Easy Street
Truth or Consequences, NM 87901

If your question is chosen for publication, you will be billed an additional $5.00

In Defense of the 000-weight Rod

2009-03-18T09:43:00.009-04:00

This is the first in a series of hard-hitting and incisive analyses of some of the major developments in the sport today. These detailed whitepapers are designed to provoke thought and stimulate debate… or, maybe it’s stimulate thought and provoke debate… well, maybe it’s just provoke… among you, the recognized cognoscenti and, as noted earlier, the final authorities on all things bamboo.
...................................................................................................

In Defense of the 000-weight Rod

Well, let’s see… there’s uhhh… hmmmm.

I, uhhhh… lemme see… I, uhhhh… well… hmmmm. Wellll…

Anyone? Anyone?

News Flash – Henry Parkhurst Wells had Worms!

2009-03-17T08:52:00.000-04:00

The first in our continuing series on Fly-fishing patent attorneys, submitted by Contributing Editor, Cwfly.

As Cloozoe well knows, my starting point with Patent Lawyers must begin with Henry Parkhurst [call me “Parky”] Wells of Brooklyn, New York. But then he might have been called “Park,” reminding the well-read reader of the short lived debate on Formerly Clark’s over whether Harold Steele Gillum was called “Pink” or “Pinkie.” Certainly by the time of Mr. Gillum’s death he was called Pinkie since that is how the New York Times referred to him.

But I delay too long, wondering what to write next, so it’s back to our subject. Parky was a member of the New York bar, perhaps Bar, who had the guts to play with guts. As far as is known (to me and with only minutes of research), Parkhurst, as he was probably called at Amherst, lived alone in Brooklyn in his later years – his sister but a few city blocks away. He was born in Providence, the son of Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Wells (Parky the Elder). I am uncertain if lawyer Parky had a Juris Doctor degree; if so, then no doubt father and son were known as Dr. Parky the Elder and Dr. Parky the Younger. It really doesn’t matter anymore. What does matter is our Parky’s contribution to fly fishing – no pancake patents here – through his advocacy for Julius Vom Hofe and his own reel designs.

Although few read anymore, and one can hardly rely on the accuracy of what is written, I commend Parky’s Fly-Rods and Fly-Tackle. After all, the review in The New York Sun noted, “The value of the author’s instructions and suggestions is signally enhanced by their minuteness and lucidity.” It doesn’t get any better than that. It is within the green cloth binding of this book that one will find Parky’s detailed description of lonely nights spent in the Borough of Brooklyn with his collection of worms. Here the reader can find the proper way to disembowel a silk worm so no time is wasted on your own pet project. Furthermore, one might be drawn to The American Salmon Fisherman. The Atlantic Monthly noted, “The author is alert and companionable.” Sounds like Cloozoe to me. Both those quotes are actually, believe it or not, accurate. They may be found at the back of a modest book, Practical Lawn Tennis, 1893, written by one Dr. James Dwight (another sporting-physician). Makes one wonder if the 19th Century physicians and lawyers were doing anything other than playing tennis and fishing. Coupled with the adverts for Parky’s books, one will find such interesting publications noted as, How to Get Strong and How to Stay So, by William Blakie, How Women Should Ride, by De Hurst, and another Blakie favorite, Sound Bodies for Our Boys and Girls. Quite a library there!

A Warm Welcome to Our Contributing Editors

2009-03-16T22:06:00.002-04:00

It is with great pleasure that Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes (we're regretting the name more with each time we have to type it) presents its editorial staff. Without undue modesty but -- at the same time -- with a profound lack of humility, we may fairly state that no expense was either spared or underwent; that each of the editors was chosen for their splendid erudition and sterling character; and that the selections were made only after the most exhaustive search among the first few people who came to our mind.

Drake - Executive Editor, Sergeant-at-arms

Black Hills Bill - Poetry Editor; Sage; Crank; Director, Outreach to Mormons Program (Emeritus); Resident Expert on Snow.

Cwfly - Legal Affairs; Historical Oddities; Squid

Ted Golden - Economics; Antiquities; Stewart Granger Fly Rods

DeFazio - Host: Dear DeFazio - Answers to your intimate questions on relationships, dating and marriage; Grooming Tips

Amazing Woody - Jack Pines

Melvin Pittsnogle - Country Living; Pathos

Tina Brown - We really have nothing for her to do, we just felt sorry for her so we put her on the masthead

Owing to the fact that the contributing editors have each generously agreed to work for a sum toward, or indeed at or below, the lower end of the conventional compensation range and that in a few instances they perhaps haven't actually in so many words even agreed to accept the position, we felt it only fair; nay necessary, to be relatively liberal in terms of our requirements of them. We have none. We require nothing. In fact they don't have to contribute a damn thing if they don't want to. Wouldn't surprise us in the least. Virtually worthless bastards. Fuck 'm.

Greetings!

2009-03-15T07:58:00.003-04:00

Greetings to all Formerly Clark's Forumians. Although henceforth Cloozoe's IHOP -- in keeping with our wide ranging interests, oil-slick deep expertise and the specific strengths of the Contributing Editors -- will deal with a veritable cornucopia of topics... as a special welcome gift to our old mates, we've made use of our unparalleled investigatory skills to uncover startling information about the soon-to-be ruling troika of Formerly Clark's Classic Fly Rod Forum. Remember...you read it here first.

Formerly Clark's New Owners...Dangerous Communist Conspirators or Merely Pretentious Bumblers? You Be the Judge!

Did you know…

That “Doctor” Todd Larson not only displays an inordinate fondness for adverbs but that his supposed PhD was actually purchased from a fraudulent diploma mill run by Bernie Madoff?

That Pat Garner ran afoul of the Humane Society when it was learned he sternly addresses his cat as “Sir” and forces it to sit through interminable, officious, error-riddled lectures on the finer points of mouse-catching and yarn-tangling before feeding it?

That Jeff Hatton’s penchant for referring to himself in the third person almost cost him his life when -- struck by a cramp while swimming -- his frantic cries of “Save the Gnome! Save the Gnome!” sent potential rescuers rushing off into the woods in search of a wee person being menaced by a unicorn?

The foregoing is a Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes exclusive.