This is a delightful little book I picked up at the thrift store in Midfield for $1. Serendipity is a wonderful thing for book lovers.
The book features an introduction by John Updike, and is composed of pictures of famous writers at their writing desks with a short blub by each writer describing their writing habits. Included are John Irving, Philip Roth, and Richard Ford.
The book was published in 1996, but the content goes back to the early 70's.
My favorite is Eudora Welty, sitting ramrod straight at her writing desk in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1972. I met Ms. Welty once in Jackson in 1980. She was a wonderful Southern lady and great writer.
This is a book that I will flip through again and again from now on.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Why I am a Democrat (3)
One reason I am a Democrat is that as a Democrat I do not have to believe the ridiculous things that Republicans pass around on the internet. This is from one our Republican friends, a normal and intelligent person, but who, nontheless, can believe some of the most outrageous things about Democrats. I like to think that Democrats know how to think critically; I do wonder about these type of fundamentalist right-wing Republicans. We do not have such people under our tent.
The content of the email below is an obvious hoax. Google this would-be Washington Post reporter and you will see that he doesn't exist. How can normally sensible people believe stuff like this?
P.S. I am tempted to start an email which says that Obama eats the body parts of unborn infants for breakfast every morning. My guess is that a healthy percentage of Republicans (Palin's base) would believe it.
THE EMAIL
I have heard parts of Obama's "defense" for his lack of patriotism, but not everything that is contained in this email, esp., about the flag burning ! People are so enraptured with his promise of "change", that they simply don't pay enough attention about WHAT KIND of change he has in mind. Needless to say, "Our hope is in God".......!!!!
----- Original Message -----
From: Liisa Small
To: RFISCUS@ur.com ; Christine ; Diane Felt ; Donna Bell ; lgnelson4@hotmail.com ; fuldaone@juno.com ; kf@innovativescientific.com ; Kimberly Randall ; Lisa ; gilbo7@yahoo.com ; londabear@comcast.net ; marsha.walling ; mike fiscus ; Ruthie Fairbanks ; steveranker@sbcglobal.net ; generalinfo@stensource.com ; Curtis Roth III
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 9:45 AM
Subject: FW: Obama if this does not scare the hell out of you then nothing will...
At this point, I think it’s a moot point, however, we as conservative normal people need to know what we will be dealing with…I am serious when I say, be afraid, because the “change” that everyone is excited about isn’t good
Subject: Obama if this does not scare the hell out of you then nothing will...
The following is a narrative taken from Sunday Morning's televised "Meet The Press'. and the author is employed by none other than the Washington Post!! Yeah......the Washington Post of New York and Los Angeles Times fame!! Must say that I'm duly impressed..................
From Sunday's Televised "Meet the Press" Senator Obama was asked about his stance on the American Flag.
Obama Explains National Anthem Stance Sun, 07 Sept. 2008 11:48:04 EST, General Bill Ginn' USAF (ret.) asked Obama to explain why he doesn't follow protocol when the National Anthem is played.
The General also stated to the Senator that according to the United States Code, Title 36, Chapter 10, Sec. 171... During rendition of the national anthem when the flag is displayed, all present except those in uniform are expected to stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart. At the very least, "Stand and Face It".
Senator Obama Live on Sunday states, "As I've said about the flag pin, I don't want to be perceived as taking sides, Obama said. 'There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression. And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, the bombs bursting in air and all. It should be swapped for something less parochial and less bellicose. I like the song 'I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing.' If that were our anthem, then I might salute it. "We should consider to reinvent our National Anthem as well as to redesign our Flag to better offer our enemies hope and love.
It's my intention, if elected, to disarm America to the level of acceptance to our Middle East Brethren. If we as a Nation of warring people, should conduct ourselves as the nations of Islam, whereas peace prevails. Perhaps a state or period of mutual concord between our governments. When I become President, I will seek a pact or agreement to end hostilities between those who have been at war or in a state of enmity, and a freedom from disquieting oppressive thoughts. We as a Nation have placed upon the nations of Islam an unfair injustice.
My wife disrespects the Flag for many personal reasons. Together she and I have attended several flag burning ceremonies in the past, many years ago. She has her views and I have mine". Of course now, I have found myself about to become the President of the United States and I have put aside my hatred. I will use my power to bring CHANGE to this Nation, and offer the people a new path of hope. My wife and I look forward to becoming our Country's First Family. Indeed, CHANGE is about to overwhelm the United States of America . WHAAAAAAAT the Hell !!! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you heard it right. This could possibly be our next President. I, for one, am speechless. Dale Lindsborg , Washington Post
The content of the email below is an obvious hoax. Google this would-be Washington Post reporter and you will see that he doesn't exist. How can normally sensible people believe stuff like this?
P.S. I am tempted to start an email which says that Obama eats the body parts of unborn infants for breakfast every morning. My guess is that a healthy percentage of Republicans (Palin's base) would believe it.
THE EMAIL
I have heard parts of Obama's "defense" for his lack of patriotism, but not everything that is contained in this email, esp., about the flag burning ! People are so enraptured with his promise of "change", that they simply don't pay enough attention about WHAT KIND of change he has in mind. Needless to say, "Our hope is in God".......!!!!
----- Original Message -----
From: Liisa Small
To: RFISCUS@ur.com ; Christine ; Diane Felt ; Donna Bell ; lgnelson4@hotmail.com ; fuldaone@juno.com ; kf@innovativescientific.com ; Kimberly Randall ; Lisa ; gilbo7@yahoo.com ; londabear@comcast.net ; marsha.walling ; mike fiscus ; Ruthie Fairbanks ; steveranker@sbcglobal.net ; generalinfo@stensource.com ; Curtis Roth III
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 9:45 AM
Subject: FW: Obama if this does not scare the hell out of you then nothing will...
At this point, I think it’s a moot point, however, we as conservative normal people need to know what we will be dealing with…I am serious when I say, be afraid, because the “change” that everyone is excited about isn’t good
Subject: Obama if this does not scare the hell out of you then nothing will...
The following is a narrative taken from Sunday Morning's televised "Meet The Press'. and the author is employed by none other than the Washington Post!! Yeah......the Washington Post of New York and Los Angeles Times fame!! Must say that I'm duly impressed..................
From Sunday's Televised "Meet the Press" Senator Obama was asked about his stance on the American Flag.
Obama Explains National Anthem Stance Sun, 07 Sept. 2008 11:48:04 EST, General Bill Ginn' USAF (ret.) asked Obama to explain why he doesn't follow protocol when the National Anthem is played.
The General also stated to the Senator that according to the United States Code, Title 36, Chapter 10, Sec. 171... During rendition of the national anthem when the flag is displayed, all present except those in uniform are expected to stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart. At the very least, "Stand and Face It".
Senator Obama Live on Sunday states, "As I've said about the flag pin, I don't want to be perceived as taking sides, Obama said. 'There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression. And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, the bombs bursting in air and all. It should be swapped for something less parochial and less bellicose. I like the song 'I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing.' If that were our anthem, then I might salute it. "We should consider to reinvent our National Anthem as well as to redesign our Flag to better offer our enemies hope and love.
It's my intention, if elected, to disarm America to the level of acceptance to our Middle East Brethren. If we as a Nation of warring people, should conduct ourselves as the nations of Islam, whereas peace prevails. Perhaps a state or period of mutual concord between our governments. When I become President, I will seek a pact or agreement to end hostilities between those who have been at war or in a state of enmity, and a freedom from disquieting oppressive thoughts. We as a Nation have placed upon the nations of Islam an unfair injustice.
My wife disrespects the Flag for many personal reasons. Together she and I have attended several flag burning ceremonies in the past, many years ago. She has her views and I have mine". Of course now, I have found myself about to become the President of the United States and I have put aside my hatred. I will use my power to bring CHANGE to this Nation, and offer the people a new path of hope. My wife and I look forward to becoming our Country's First Family. Indeed, CHANGE is about to overwhelm the United States of America . WHAAAAAAAT the Hell !!! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you heard it right. This could possibly be our next President. I, for one, am speechless. Dale Lindsborg , Washington Post
Palin Believes in Witches
Go to the Newsweek website at http://www.newsweek.com/. There you will see a video of Palin being "saved from witchcraft." Do we want a VP and potential President who believes in witches? You may, dear reader, but not me.
CAMPAIGN 2008
Jesus And Witches
Video clips of Sarah Palin attending Alaska church services have raised questions about her views on Christianity and government.
By Lisa Miller and Andrew Murr Newsweek Web Exclusive
Oct 28, 2008 Updated: 8:47 p.m. ET Oct 28, 2008
CAMPAIGN 2008
Jesus And Witches
Video clips of Sarah Palin attending Alaska church services have raised questions about her views on Christianity and government.
By Lisa Miller and Andrew Murr Newsweek Web Exclusive
Oct 28, 2008 Updated: 8:47 p.m. ET Oct 28, 2008
The Forward March of Digital over Print
The Christian Science Monitor becomes the first national newspaper to discontinue its print edition. Where are we headed in the battle of digital vs. print?
By deciding this week to end its daily print edition and publish only online, the distinguished but struggling—The Christian Science Monitor has simultaneously become the newspaper industry's worst fear and its model for salvation. Beginning next April, the Monitor will become the first national newspaper to switch from daily print to online—though, perhaps to hedge its bets, it will launch a weekly print edition.
Even in the face of Wednesday's announcement, which followed a jarring report earlier in the week that newspaper circulation is declining more quickly than anticipated, several top newspaper executives and analysts were quick to rebuff the prediction that print is dead. "Daily newspapers are rooted in an economic model dependent on the print side of the business," says John Morton, the veteran newspaper analyst. "So far, the advertising revenue that [the Internet editions] pull in isn't nearly enough to replace what they get from the print side." The sentiment is echoed by the Newspaper Association of America, one of the $55-billion industry's main trade groups. "The print newspaper product will be around for a long time," says Randy Bennett, senior vice president, business development. "The focus may change. It may be a tighter product, and it may not be delivered seven days a week. But print still has a strong audience that likes it." Robert Thompson, editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, says the fate of The Christian Science Monitor, "is not indicative at all of all newspapers and certainly not of the opportunity that awaits The Wall Street Journal."
Celebrating its centennial next month, The Christian Science Monitor was launched by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, which continues to be the newspaper's benefactor. Covering national and international affairs, the paper, based in Boston, isn't a tool for evangelizing and has won seven Pulitzer Prizes. For the past four decades, however, it has endured steadily declining circulation—dropping to 52,000 from 220,000 in 1970. The Monitor expects to post a loss of almost $19 million in the current fiscal year ending next April, with the church kicking in a subsidy of $12 million, and other sources the rest, to cover the deficit.
placeAd2(commercialNode,'bigbox',false,'')
The Monitor's financial woes mirror those of the industry. On Monday, the Audit Bureau of Circulation reported an accelerating shrinkage of sales for much of this year. For the six months ending Sept. 30, the bureau measured a nearly 5 percent decline in weekly and Sunday circulation among the more than 500 newspapers that report their numbers to the bureau (until last year, circulation overall was declining at a rate of around 2 percent). The nation's largest metropolitan newspapers suffered declines ranging from almost 2 percent for The Washington Post (whose parent company also owns NEWSWEEK), to 13.6 percent for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Compounding the industry' problems, print advertising has been dropping as more companies chose to hawk their wares on the Web. The sputtering economy will probably only compound matters.
Over the past several years, the industry has aggressively embraced the Internet as a survival strategy, though so far, not as the panacea the Monitor hopes it will be. The shrinking print business still accounts for some 90 percent of industry revenues, and the rate of growth in online revenues is dramatically slowing from the double-digit annual gains of the past several years. One bright spot, notes analyst Morton, is that "you get the same amount of profit from 50-cents of online ads as you do from a dollar of print ads. You don't have to replace print ads dollar-for-dollar to stay even."
For now, most of the industry continues to pursue a hybrid strategy, in part because print still has a strong appeal with readers 35 and older. "The endgame for the print product," says Bennett of the Newspaper Association, "is to create niche publications." Similarly, many local papers are launching online products designed to appeal to different segments of local markets. For example, he notes, the Minneapolis Star Tribune launched vita.mn, an entertainment-focused site, aimed at a younger audience, that includes social networking features. It also has a print version.
In some quarters of the Internet, the Monitor is winning kudos for its decision. "I think it is a very courageous move," says Chris Tolles, chief executive of Topix.com, a Website that is a forum for what is popularly known as "citizen journalism." While Tolles says most publishers have stopped at merely studying the idea of abandoning print, Topix represents a dipping-of-the-toe in the digital waters for several print newspaper giants. It's largely owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune Co., the nation's three largest owners of local newspapers. You can be certain they will be monitoring the Monitor.
© 2008
By deciding this week to end its daily print edition and publish only online, the distinguished but struggling—The Christian Science Monitor has simultaneously become the newspaper industry's worst fear and its model for salvation. Beginning next April, the Monitor will become the first national newspaper to switch from daily print to online—though, perhaps to hedge its bets, it will launch a weekly print edition.
Even in the face of Wednesday's announcement, which followed a jarring report earlier in the week that newspaper circulation is declining more quickly than anticipated, several top newspaper executives and analysts were quick to rebuff the prediction that print is dead. "Daily newspapers are rooted in an economic model dependent on the print side of the business," says John Morton, the veteran newspaper analyst. "So far, the advertising revenue that [the Internet editions] pull in isn't nearly enough to replace what they get from the print side." The sentiment is echoed by the Newspaper Association of America, one of the $55-billion industry's main trade groups. "The print newspaper product will be around for a long time," says Randy Bennett, senior vice president, business development. "The focus may change. It may be a tighter product, and it may not be delivered seven days a week. But print still has a strong audience that likes it." Robert Thompson, editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, says the fate of The Christian Science Monitor, "is not indicative at all of all newspapers and certainly not of the opportunity that awaits The Wall Street Journal."
Celebrating its centennial next month, The Christian Science Monitor was launched by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, which continues to be the newspaper's benefactor. Covering national and international affairs, the paper, based in Boston, isn't a tool for evangelizing and has won seven Pulitzer Prizes. For the past four decades, however, it has endured steadily declining circulation—dropping to 52,000 from 220,000 in 1970. The Monitor expects to post a loss of almost $19 million in the current fiscal year ending next April, with the church kicking in a subsidy of $12 million, and other sources the rest, to cover the deficit.
placeAd2(commercialNode,'bigbox',false,'')
The Monitor's financial woes mirror those of the industry. On Monday, the Audit Bureau of Circulation reported an accelerating shrinkage of sales for much of this year. For the six months ending Sept. 30, the bureau measured a nearly 5 percent decline in weekly and Sunday circulation among the more than 500 newspapers that report their numbers to the bureau (until last year, circulation overall was declining at a rate of around 2 percent). The nation's largest metropolitan newspapers suffered declines ranging from almost 2 percent for The Washington Post (whose parent company also owns NEWSWEEK), to 13.6 percent for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Compounding the industry' problems, print advertising has been dropping as more companies chose to hawk their wares on the Web. The sputtering economy will probably only compound matters.
Over the past several years, the industry has aggressively embraced the Internet as a survival strategy, though so far, not as the panacea the Monitor hopes it will be. The shrinking print business still accounts for some 90 percent of industry revenues, and the rate of growth in online revenues is dramatically slowing from the double-digit annual gains of the past several years. One bright spot, notes analyst Morton, is that "you get the same amount of profit from 50-cents of online ads as you do from a dollar of print ads. You don't have to replace print ads dollar-for-dollar to stay even."
For now, most of the industry continues to pursue a hybrid strategy, in part because print still has a strong appeal with readers 35 and older. "The endgame for the print product," says Bennett of the Newspaper Association, "is to create niche publications." Similarly, many local papers are launching online products designed to appeal to different segments of local markets. For example, he notes, the Minneapolis Star Tribune launched vita.mn, an entertainment-focused site, aimed at a younger audience, that includes social networking features. It also has a print version.
In some quarters of the Internet, the Monitor is winning kudos for its decision. "I think it is a very courageous move," says Chris Tolles, chief executive of Topix.com, a Website that is a forum for what is popularly known as "citizen journalism." While Tolles says most publishers have stopped at merely studying the idea of abandoning print, Topix represents a dipping-of-the-toe in the digital waters for several print newspaper giants. It's largely owned by Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune Co., the nation's three largest owners of local newspapers. You can be certain they will be monitoring the Monitor.
© 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
A Response
In response to the discussion concerning Sarah Palin and the attacks on her qualifications, some say by a "liberal media," here are a few of my thoughts:
I am not informed enough to comment on whether the media has a bias. But, I will say that I abhor the media. Not only do I despise it because of this presidential election, but also I just generally have immense contempt for the media. This is not the post to explain why I hold this opinion, but let it suffice that I think the media prefers superficial journalism to probing the presidential candidates about their positions with depth.
However, with regard to Democrats questioning Palin's experience and qualifications, there are a few things that might be worth considering. First, I think it is simply part of how presidential elections operate. Republicans would do the same thing if the situation were reversed. Second, it could be because, in part, her pro-life stance.
More importantly, however, it is because of how she communicates. Does she have the experience to be Vice-President? Of course not. Is she qualified to be Vice-President? Again, of course not. But, I think people's perceptions of whether a candidate is qualified for the Presidency or Vice-Presidency is based a great deal on how that person communicates. Comparing Obama to Palin, yes Obama also lacks enough experience, and it is thus legitimate to question his qualifications. However, when he speaks, he seems inquisitive, knowledgeable, intelligent, and scholarly. He seems to have some grasp of the issues. Now, that does not mean he will be a great president, but at least there is evidently some substance.
However, when Palin speaks, she comes across as incurious, disinterested, unintelligent, and unknowledgeable. If she seemed to have a grasp of the issues (or, in her case, at least some basic civics or Constitutional law), then I think she would not seem as ignorant. Perception is key. Alas, but that is the rub with the Republican Party: this trend towards identity politics, of trying to appeal to ordinary Joe, to the point of disdain towards intelligence and substance. You cannot be a Republican today and be a policy wonk; you cannot be a Republican today and have a vision for the country. Instead, Republican politics is about criticizing those who do not agree with you, focusing on trivialities while ignoring those things really affecting the country, looking back not looking forward, and dividing the country between those who are with you and those who are against you. The Republican Party, as typified in their warped brand of patriotism, sees the world as a 6 year old does: in a simplistic worldview, as black and white, as good guys versus bad guys, seemingly incognizant of the true complexities. Like any 6 year old, let us hope that one day the Republican Party will grow up and see the world more as it really is.
Additionally, Republicans within the McCain campaign have referred to Palin as a diva. So even Republicans are sexist towards her as well.
With regard to Palin being some sort of representation of feminism, I think that is an insult to women everywhere. If Palin is now a symbol of feminism, then the feminist movement has gone backwards several years. How can an unqualified, incoherent, seemingly ignorant woman embody the benefits and characteristics of feminism? I have no doubt that there are better women out there than Palin, even some McCain could have chosen as his running mate.
I am not informed enough to comment on whether the media has a bias. But, I will say that I abhor the media. Not only do I despise it because of this presidential election, but also I just generally have immense contempt for the media. This is not the post to explain why I hold this opinion, but let it suffice that I think the media prefers superficial journalism to probing the presidential candidates about their positions with depth.
However, with regard to Democrats questioning Palin's experience and qualifications, there are a few things that might be worth considering. First, I think it is simply part of how presidential elections operate. Republicans would do the same thing if the situation were reversed. Second, it could be because, in part, her pro-life stance.
More importantly, however, it is because of how she communicates. Does she have the experience to be Vice-President? Of course not. Is she qualified to be Vice-President? Again, of course not. But, I think people's perceptions of whether a candidate is qualified for the Presidency or Vice-Presidency is based a great deal on how that person communicates. Comparing Obama to Palin, yes Obama also lacks enough experience, and it is thus legitimate to question his qualifications. However, when he speaks, he seems inquisitive, knowledgeable, intelligent, and scholarly. He seems to have some grasp of the issues. Now, that does not mean he will be a great president, but at least there is evidently some substance.
However, when Palin speaks, she comes across as incurious, disinterested, unintelligent, and unknowledgeable. If she seemed to have a grasp of the issues (or, in her case, at least some basic civics or Constitutional law), then I think she would not seem as ignorant. Perception is key. Alas, but that is the rub with the Republican Party: this trend towards identity politics, of trying to appeal to ordinary Joe, to the point of disdain towards intelligence and substance. You cannot be a Republican today and be a policy wonk; you cannot be a Republican today and have a vision for the country. Instead, Republican politics is about criticizing those who do not agree with you, focusing on trivialities while ignoring those things really affecting the country, looking back not looking forward, and dividing the country between those who are with you and those who are against you. The Republican Party, as typified in their warped brand of patriotism, sees the world as a 6 year old does: in a simplistic worldview, as black and white, as good guys versus bad guys, seemingly incognizant of the true complexities. Like any 6 year old, let us hope that one day the Republican Party will grow up and see the world more as it really is.
Additionally, Republicans within the McCain campaign have referred to Palin as a diva. So even Republicans are sexist towards her as well.
With regard to Palin being some sort of representation of feminism, I think that is an insult to women everywhere. If Palin is now a symbol of feminism, then the feminist movement has gone backwards several years. How can an unqualified, incoherent, seemingly ignorant woman embody the benefits and characteristics of feminism? I have no doubt that there are better women out there than Palin, even some McCain could have chosen as his running mate.
Why I am a Democrat (2)
I was at the Hoover Library Sunday afternoon. I go there occasionally to visit their bookstore where you can purchase discards real cheap. There was a book I wanted, but I forget to bring money, and so I didn't have the $2 I needed. The lady at the desk said she'd hold it for me.
She asked my name so she could place it in the book to hold it for me. When I told her "Fred Hudson" she said with a silly grin on her face, "Oh, are you related to Jennifer Hudson?"
The racial joke was evident. I've heard this kind of stupid, juvenile kind of remark before. Haven't you?
"Yes," I said. "She's my sister." The tone in my voice was unmistakeable.
I turned around and walked out. I have the satisfaction of wiping that smile off her face.
Oh, by the way. Did I mention that she had on a big McCAIN/PALIN button?
She asked my name so she could place it in the book to hold it for me. When I told her "Fred Hudson" she said with a silly grin on her face, "Oh, are you related to Jennifer Hudson?"
The racial joke was evident. I've heard this kind of stupid, juvenile kind of remark before. Haven't you?
"Yes," I said. "She's my sister." The tone in my voice was unmistakeable.
I turned around and walked out. I have the satisfaction of wiping that smile off her face.
Oh, by the way. Did I mention that she had on a big McCAIN/PALIN button?
Monday, October 27, 2008
Why I am a Democrat
First of all, I am a Democrat because of my study of American history. I do not claim to be an American history scholar, but I do point out that I have a double major in American history and I have continued my reading in American history for the last 35 years. My claim to be what I call an historic and traditional Democrat is rooted in the history of this country. To be continued.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Republicans are so STUPID
I understand that this story was all over the Republican airwaves and blogs. Hannity and Limbaugh and their fellow idiots were having a field day. A "big black man" carved a "B" on the side of the McCain worker's face! How could Republicans resist that racial incident. Willie Horton rides again! Wow! Of course, it's false. The "B" was done backwards. It would be immediately obvious to any thinking person that it was probably self-inflicted. Republicans are so STUPID.
(CNN) -- A Republican campaign worker who told police she was assaulted by a man angered by a John McCain sticker on her car admitted she made up the report, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, assistant police chief said Friday.
Police say Ashley Todd, 20, admitted making up the report she was attacked because of a McCain sticker.
Ashley Todd, 20, of College Park, Texas, will be charged with filing a false police report, a misdemeanor, and may face more charges, said police spokeswoman Diane Richard at a news conference.
"This has wasted so much time. ... It's just a lot of wasted man hours," Assistant Police Chief Maurita Bryant said at the same briefing.
The woman told investigators a man approached her Wednesday night at an ATM in Pittsburgh's East End, put a blade to her neck and demanded money, Richard said.
Police said they found "several inconsistencies" in Todd's statement and she was not seen in surveillance videos taken at the ATM. She was asked to take a polygraph test Friday morning, Richard said. The results were not made public.
Later, Todd came to the police station to help work on a composite sketch of the alleged attacker. When she arrived, Todd "told them she just wanted to tell the truth" -- that she was not robbed, and there was no attacker, Bryant said.
Todd originally told police a man "punched her in the back of the head, knocking her to the ground, and he continued to punch and kick her while threatening to teach her a lesson for being a McCain supporter," according to a police statement.
The woman also told police her attacker "called her a lot of names and stated that 'You are going to be a Barack supporter,' at which time she states he sat on her chest, pinning both her hands down with his knees, and scratched into her face a backward letter 'B' on the right side of her face using what she believed to be a very dull knife."
Bryant described Todd as "very cordial, polite, cooperating," and said the woman was surprised by all the media attention. Asked whether the false report was politically motivated, Bryant replied, "It's difficult to say."
"She is stating that she was in her vehicle driving around, and she came up with this idea," she said. "She said she has prior mental problems and doesn't know how the backward letter 'B' got on her face."
However, Todd was the only one in the vehicle, and "when she saw the 'B' she thought she must have been the one who did it," Bryant said.
"We're talking with the district attorney's office and conferring on just how we're going to handle it," she said. "It's been different stories through the night and this morning."
She said there was no indication that anyone else was involved.
Richard said the woman had described her alleged attacker as an African-American, 6 feet 4 inches tall with a medium build and short dark hair, wearing dark clothing and shiny shoes.
Before the revelation that the report was false, McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said that McCain and running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin "spoke to the victim and her family after learning about the incident."
The Obama campaign also had issued a statement wishing the woman a "speedy recovery."
(CNN) -- A Republican campaign worker who told police she was assaulted by a man angered by a John McCain sticker on her car admitted she made up the report, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, assistant police chief said Friday.
Police say Ashley Todd, 20, admitted making up the report she was attacked because of a McCain sticker.
Ashley Todd, 20, of College Park, Texas, will be charged with filing a false police report, a misdemeanor, and may face more charges, said police spokeswoman Diane Richard at a news conference.
"This has wasted so much time. ... It's just a lot of wasted man hours," Assistant Police Chief Maurita Bryant said at the same briefing.
The woman told investigators a man approached her Wednesday night at an ATM in Pittsburgh's East End, put a blade to her neck and demanded money, Richard said.
Police said they found "several inconsistencies" in Todd's statement and she was not seen in surveillance videos taken at the ATM. She was asked to take a polygraph test Friday morning, Richard said. The results were not made public.
Later, Todd came to the police station to help work on a composite sketch of the alleged attacker. When she arrived, Todd "told them she just wanted to tell the truth" -- that she was not robbed, and there was no attacker, Bryant said.
Todd originally told police a man "punched her in the back of the head, knocking her to the ground, and he continued to punch and kick her while threatening to teach her a lesson for being a McCain supporter," according to a police statement.
The woman also told police her attacker "called her a lot of names and stated that 'You are going to be a Barack supporter,' at which time she states he sat on her chest, pinning both her hands down with his knees, and scratched into her face a backward letter 'B' on the right side of her face using what she believed to be a very dull knife."
Bryant described Todd as "very cordial, polite, cooperating," and said the woman was surprised by all the media attention. Asked whether the false report was politically motivated, Bryant replied, "It's difficult to say."
"She is stating that she was in her vehicle driving around, and she came up with this idea," she said. "She said she has prior mental problems and doesn't know how the backward letter 'B' got on her face."
However, Todd was the only one in the vehicle, and "when she saw the 'B' she thought she must have been the one who did it," Bryant said.
"We're talking with the district attorney's office and conferring on just how we're going to handle it," she said. "It's been different stories through the night and this morning."
She said there was no indication that anyone else was involved.
Richard said the woman had described her alleged attacker as an African-American, 6 feet 4 inches tall with a medium build and short dark hair, wearing dark clothing and shiny shoes.
Before the revelation that the report was false, McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said that McCain and running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin "spoke to the victim and her family after learning about the incident."
The Obama campaign also had issued a statement wishing the woman a "speedy recovery."
Disarray in Conservative Ranks
The article below discusses the disarray in conservative ranks and points out the disaffection within the ranks over the GOP ticket, pointing out some some of the conservatives who have admitted that Palin is a mistake, including George Will, Kathleen Parker, and David Brooks.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 18, 2008
In recent weeks some prominent conservative intellectuals seem to have discovered they have two hands after all. In column after column, these writers have alternately praised the virtues of John McCain and Sarah Palin and lamented their shortcomings.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Free to Be His Own Buckley (October 19, 2008)
Straying From the Fold?
Articles by conservative commentators criticizing John McCain and Sarah Palin:
Kathleen Parker: 'Palin Problem' (nationalreview.com)
Charles Krauthammer: 'Hail Mary vs. Cool Barry' (washingtonpost.com)
George F. Will: 'McCain's Closing Argument' (washingtonpost.com)
Christopher Buckley: 'Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama' (thedailybeast.com)
David Brooks: 'The Class War Before Palin' (nytimes.com)
The syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, for example, wrote in National Review on Sept. 26 that Governor Palin is “clearly out of her league” and should bow out of the campaign. (The conservative biweekly chose not to run a subsequent column in which Ms. Parker offered advice to Senator Barack Obama on how to win votes in Appalachia.)
On Oct. 4, one of the most influential conservative pundits, the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, rapped Senator McCain for his “frenetic improvisation” and, in what some interpreted as an endorsement of Senator Obama, praised his “first-class intellect and a first-class temperament,” adding that these strengths “will likely be enough to make him president.”
This came after another conservative beacon, George F. Will, compared the “Palin bubble” to the irrational exuberance of the deflated high- tech and housing bubbles and said Senator McCain was “behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high” in the way he responded to the financial crisis. He all but pronounced the Republican ticket finished after the final presidential debate last Wednesday night.
And then, to top it off, the novelist and humorist Christopher Buckley endorsed Mr. Obama. This decision, coming from the son of William F. Buckley Jr., one of the intellectual founders of the modern conservative movement, climaxed what seemed to be a mood of growing discomfort on the right.
No doubt these are all significant voices. But it seems fair to ask whether — in an election in which many millions will vote — the assertions of the opinion and chattering class really matter.
One answer is that for more than half a century the conservative movement has insisted that “ideas have consequences,” which implies that writers and thinkers have played a major part in shaping the fortunes of the right.
William Buckley created National Review in 1955 largely because he believed that liberal magazines like The Nation, The New Republic and similar journals had achieved a “monopoly on sophisticated information” and so had been able to set the political agenda.
For this reason, contributors to National Review and other conservative publications have long been careful about reaching agreement on fundamental principles. Of course, total unanimity was an impossibility. But the strength of the movement, as it gained power, rested on discipline. Conservative writers and thinkers might disagree, but usually within limits — and they were
careful to emphasize their points of agreement and also to modulate their differences. Hashing them out in public would only weaken the movement and give ammunition to the other side.
This mindset may be at least partly responsible for the more than 12,000 e-mail messages Ms. Parker said she received after her column appeared, many of them insulting and even threatening. Mr. Buckley also said he had heard from angry readers after he declared his apostasy in The Daily Beast, the Web site edited by Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker and a certified member of the “liberal media elite.”
Of course, it is hardly in the nature of political commentators, whatever their affinities, to keep their views to themselves.
In 1964, for example, well-established conservative publications, including all 10 Hearst newspapers and The Saturday Evening Post, broke with longstanding practice by endorsing Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater.
A decade later Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Richard John Neuhaus, all onetime liberals or leftists, led the charge against the Democratic Party, which they accused of being soft on the Soviet Union and a partner in cultural and moral decline at home.
These neoconservatives — and others like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak and Ben Wattenberg — did not just express opinions. They also helped lay the intellectual groundwork, from supply-side economics to foreign policy, for Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.
This was a classic case of ideas having consequences. While the actual number of neocons was small, they were “intellectually significant,” said Allen Matusow, a professor of American history at Rice University and the author of “The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s.” This was a case of intellectuals being in step with the broader culture. “The neoconservatives were merely a symptom of a widespread feeling that America had lost its edge in the Cold War,” Mr. Matusow said.
The next generation of neoconservatives — including Mr. Krauthammer, writing in The Post, and William Kristol (Irving’s son) and Robert Kagan, writing in the pages of The Weekly Standard — helped lead the campaign for the war in Iraq and championed the idea that America should use its might to press its vision of democracy around the world, an idea that has split both liberals and conservatives.
Today, President Bush’s policies and the collapse of Wall Street have led longtime conservatives to conflicting conclusions about where the Republican Party should be headed. And the disillusioned commentary of credentialed conservatives like Mr. Will, Mr. Buckley and Mr. Krauthammer may be the sound of a movement splintering at its foundation — a movement whose intellectuals have long been uneasy with, for example, the rising power, in the Bush years, of evangelicals, with their categorical faith in creationism and distrust of scientific reason.
The Times’s Op-Ed columnist David Brooks, who recently described Governor Palin as a “cancer on the Republican Party,” explained in an interview that the movement is now embroiled in a debate: “Should it go back to the core principles of Ronald Reagan or should it go on to something else? That’s the core issue.”
Resolving such fundamental questions can take years, Mr. Brooks said, noting that in Britain, the Conservative Party spent a decade and a half reinventing itself after Margaret Thatcher left office. Following Goldwater’s rout in 1964, American conservatives struggled for 16 years before Ronald Reagan finally was elected president.
With the election only two weeks away, it is impossible to say whether the disillusionment of the conservative intelligentsia is evidence of a similarly widespread disaffection on the right or is merely the rumblings of a handful of high-profile critics.
“In every election you’re going to find some people who are opposed to their party’s candidate,” Mr. Matusow said. “The question is, when is it significant?”
Even as some within the Republican camp — including those who support Mr. McCain — have warned of substantial disaffection among party members and seem girded for a disappointing loss on Nov. 4, others insist that the despair is premature. This, in turn, may point to yet another emerging schism on the right — between rank-and-file conservatives and the movement’s own “media elite.”
“The migration or desertion of the intellectuals does not reflect the base,” said Mr. Matusow.
Pundits, after all, tend to travel in packs and form their own constituency. They may be wringing their hands. But, Mr. Matusow said, “The average Republican will turn out” on Election Day.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 18, 2008
In recent weeks some prominent conservative intellectuals seem to have discovered they have two hands after all. In column after column, these writers have alternately praised the virtues of John McCain and Sarah Palin and lamented their shortcomings.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Free to Be His Own Buckley (October 19, 2008)
Straying From the Fold?
Articles by conservative commentators criticizing John McCain and Sarah Palin:
Kathleen Parker: 'Palin Problem' (nationalreview.com)
Charles Krauthammer: 'Hail Mary vs. Cool Barry' (washingtonpost.com)
George F. Will: 'McCain's Closing Argument' (washingtonpost.com)
Christopher Buckley: 'Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama' (thedailybeast.com)
David Brooks: 'The Class War Before Palin' (nytimes.com)
The syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, for example, wrote in National Review on Sept. 26 that Governor Palin is “clearly out of her league” and should bow out of the campaign. (The conservative biweekly chose not to run a subsequent column in which Ms. Parker offered advice to Senator Barack Obama on how to win votes in Appalachia.)
On Oct. 4, one of the most influential conservative pundits, the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, rapped Senator McCain for his “frenetic improvisation” and, in what some interpreted as an endorsement of Senator Obama, praised his “first-class intellect and a first-class temperament,” adding that these strengths “will likely be enough to make him president.”
This came after another conservative beacon, George F. Will, compared the “Palin bubble” to the irrational exuberance of the deflated high- tech and housing bubbles and said Senator McCain was “behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high” in the way he responded to the financial crisis. He all but pronounced the Republican ticket finished after the final presidential debate last Wednesday night.
And then, to top it off, the novelist and humorist Christopher Buckley endorsed Mr. Obama. This decision, coming from the son of William F. Buckley Jr., one of the intellectual founders of the modern conservative movement, climaxed what seemed to be a mood of growing discomfort on the right.
No doubt these are all significant voices. But it seems fair to ask whether — in an election in which many millions will vote — the assertions of the opinion and chattering class really matter.
One answer is that for more than half a century the conservative movement has insisted that “ideas have consequences,” which implies that writers and thinkers have played a major part in shaping the fortunes of the right.
William Buckley created National Review in 1955 largely because he believed that liberal magazines like The Nation, The New Republic and similar journals had achieved a “monopoly on sophisticated information” and so had been able to set the political agenda.
For this reason, contributors to National Review and other conservative publications have long been careful about reaching agreement on fundamental principles. Of course, total unanimity was an impossibility. But the strength of the movement, as it gained power, rested on discipline. Conservative writers and thinkers might disagree, but usually within limits — and they were
careful to emphasize their points of agreement and also to modulate their differences. Hashing them out in public would only weaken the movement and give ammunition to the other side.
This mindset may be at least partly responsible for the more than 12,000 e-mail messages Ms. Parker said she received after her column appeared, many of them insulting and even threatening. Mr. Buckley also said he had heard from angry readers after he declared his apostasy in The Daily Beast, the Web site edited by Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker and a certified member of the “liberal media elite.”
Of course, it is hardly in the nature of political commentators, whatever their affinities, to keep their views to themselves.
In 1964, for example, well-established conservative publications, including all 10 Hearst newspapers and The Saturday Evening Post, broke with longstanding practice by endorsing Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater.
A decade later Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Richard John Neuhaus, all onetime liberals or leftists, led the charge against the Democratic Party, which they accused of being soft on the Soviet Union and a partner in cultural and moral decline at home.
These neoconservatives — and others like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak and Ben Wattenberg — did not just express opinions. They also helped lay the intellectual groundwork, from supply-side economics to foreign policy, for Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.
This was a classic case of ideas having consequences. While the actual number of neocons was small, they were “intellectually significant,” said Allen Matusow, a professor of American history at Rice University and the author of “The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s.” This was a case of intellectuals being in step with the broader culture. “The neoconservatives were merely a symptom of a widespread feeling that America had lost its edge in the Cold War,” Mr. Matusow said.
The next generation of neoconservatives — including Mr. Krauthammer, writing in The Post, and William Kristol (Irving’s son) and Robert Kagan, writing in the pages of The Weekly Standard — helped lead the campaign for the war in Iraq and championed the idea that America should use its might to press its vision of democracy around the world, an idea that has split both liberals and conservatives.
Today, President Bush’s policies and the collapse of Wall Street have led longtime conservatives to conflicting conclusions about where the Republican Party should be headed. And the disillusioned commentary of credentialed conservatives like Mr. Will, Mr. Buckley and Mr. Krauthammer may be the sound of a movement splintering at its foundation — a movement whose intellectuals have long been uneasy with, for example, the rising power, in the Bush years, of evangelicals, with their categorical faith in creationism and distrust of scientific reason.
The Times’s Op-Ed columnist David Brooks, who recently described Governor Palin as a “cancer on the Republican Party,” explained in an interview that the movement is now embroiled in a debate: “Should it go back to the core principles of Ronald Reagan or should it go on to something else? That’s the core issue.”
Resolving such fundamental questions can take years, Mr. Brooks said, noting that in Britain, the Conservative Party spent a decade and a half reinventing itself after Margaret Thatcher left office. Following Goldwater’s rout in 1964, American conservatives struggled for 16 years before Ronald Reagan finally was elected president.
With the election only two weeks away, it is impossible to say whether the disillusionment of the conservative intelligentsia is evidence of a similarly widespread disaffection on the right or is merely the rumblings of a handful of high-profile critics.
“In every election you’re going to find some people who are opposed to their party’s candidate,” Mr. Matusow said. “The question is, when is it significant?”
Even as some within the Republican camp — including those who support Mr. McCain — have warned of substantial disaffection among party members and seem girded for a disappointing loss on Nov. 4, others insist that the despair is premature. This, in turn, may point to yet another emerging schism on the right — between rank-and-file conservatives and the movement’s own “media elite.”
“The migration or desertion of the intellectuals does not reflect the base,” said Mr. Matusow.
Pundits, after all, tend to travel in packs and form their own constituency. They may be wringing their hands. But, Mr. Matusow said, “The average Republican will turn out” on Election Day.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
The Barbarians
The scariest thing about the post below is that the Republican fear-mongering has, indeed, taken on a life of its own. Who knows what some of these idiot people might do one day.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Waiting for the Barbarians
This article explicitly describes the politics of fear mongering that consumes the Republican Party. Along with their creepy, vacuous, cult-like mania of patriotism, little else disturbs me more than the Republican Party's focus on trivialities and their inflicting fear and spreading falsehoods among the American people.
Waiting for the Barbarians
BY Richard Kim, The Nation, 16 October 2008
In case you haven't heard, there's a guy running for president named Barack Hussein Osama Nobama. This Nobama was born outside America and secretly schooled in Islamic terrorism at a Wahhabi madrassa. He then moved to the United States to take up the radical '60s teachings of the Weather Underground's Bill Ayers, while also organizing for ACORN, a subprime-lending, voter fraud-committing collective of affirmative-action welfare queens. All this happened before he became an elitist celebrity advocate of socialism, infanticide, the sexual abuse of children and treason.
Suffice it to say, this caricature stretches even the limits of comic imagination. The real Obama's Christianity, his patriotism, moderation and commitment to capitalism, law and order, and national security are matters of abundant public record--some of which displeases the left wing of his party. But this is of little import to the Republican rank and file. For them, the fallaciousness of the whole counts for less than the suggestive appeal of the parts. All John McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates need to do is raise the insidious question--"Who is the real Barack Obama?"--and the zealots conjure the rest, along with cries of "Treason!" "Kill him!" and "Off with his head!" The virulence of such rhetoric makes even Palin seem thoughtful; she at least inserts whole verb phrases like "palling around with" in between nouns like "Barack Obama" and "terrorists."
Such scenes are alarming not only because of the McCain campaign's willingness to stoke such murderous mania but also because of its apparent inability to control the madness once it has been unleashed. At more than one rally, McCain has been booed by the audience for attempting to interrupt panicked rants about the impending socialist or terrorist takeover of America. The crowd's immediate anger is directed not at Obama and the Democrats but at their own party's standard-bearers, who should be "representing us" but have so far refused to "take the gloves off" and "take it to Obama" and "hit him" in "a soft spot." If the GOP leaders don't give these folks what they want, they had best watch their own soft spots, for there is no shortage of backbenchers ready to seize the helm. Take Jeffrey Frederick, the 33-year-old chair of the Virginia Republican Party, who said that Obama and Osama bin Laden "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon." Denounced by the McCain campaign, Frederick has defiantly refused to apologize for his remark.
Perhaps he knows which way the wind blows: the Republican Party's electoral strategy of sowing resentment and fear--sprung from Nixon and nurtured by admen like Lee Atwater, Floyd Brown and the Swiftboaters--has finally taken on a life of its own. It thrives as a postmodern pastiche of conservative hate speech that no longer requires a master--a Frankenstein monster freed from his creator. What holds this beast together is not the fear and loathing of any particular despised identity so much as the idea that America is under siege, disordered, on the cusp of imminent and total collapse, threatened by terrorists abroad and undermined by enemies at home.
Of course, certain pariahs are useful in certain times. In the old lexicon it was Communists, feminists and gays who peopled the right wing's paranoid imagination, and if the sheer breadth of the slander by association against Obama is any indication, these bugaboos are still of value. But this time around the terror has been most sharply drawn along the lines of xenophobia and racism, a potent combination of hostile drives of which trolls like Andy Martin, the anti-Semite behind the "Obama is a Muslim" e-mails, are but minor instigators. The real enablers are demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck, who have made careers out of inciting frenzied aggression at anyone to the left of Joe McCarthy. Only now it seems that even these right-wing pundits have been outdone by their formerly loyal listeners. Coulter, whose contempt for Muslims ("invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity") is surpassed only by her scorn for liberals ("even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do"), has yet to call for the assassination of Barack Obama. But if she genuinely believes that liberals are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists, she should follow the courage of her convictions and do so.
To pre-empt such embarrassing displays of weakness, softer propagandists like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens--who once brayed on and on about the left's "hatred of the United States" and its role as a "fifth column" "in favor of surrender and defeat"--have declared their support for Obama. But as Hitchens's recent endorsement in Slate amply demonstrates, he is not quite ready to give up the poisoned sword. Obama, he writes, is not a "capitulationist," even if he does "accept the support of the surrender faction."
If the polls are any indication, Obama will endure this smear campaign just fine, with or without the backhanded compliments of apologetic neocons. And if his election is not quite the ringing victory for civil rights and liberties, diplomacy and cosmopolitanism that we might like, it will at least beat back for a while the idea that defaming these values as traitorous constitutes sound electoral strategy. If Obama wins, and the barbarians do not show up to rattle the gates, what will the conservatives do next? For them, the barbarians were a solution, of sorts.
Waiting for the Barbarians
BY Richard Kim, The Nation, 16 October 2008
In case you haven't heard, there's a guy running for president named Barack Hussein Osama Nobama. This Nobama was born outside America and secretly schooled in Islamic terrorism at a Wahhabi madrassa. He then moved to the United States to take up the radical '60s teachings of the Weather Underground's Bill Ayers, while also organizing for ACORN, a subprime-lending, voter fraud-committing collective of affirmative-action welfare queens. All this happened before he became an elitist celebrity advocate of socialism, infanticide, the sexual abuse of children and treason.
Suffice it to say, this caricature stretches even the limits of comic imagination. The real Obama's Christianity, his patriotism, moderation and commitment to capitalism, law and order, and national security are matters of abundant public record--some of which displeases the left wing of his party. But this is of little import to the Republican rank and file. For them, the fallaciousness of the whole counts for less than the suggestive appeal of the parts. All John McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates need to do is raise the insidious question--"Who is the real Barack Obama?"--and the zealots conjure the rest, along with cries of "Treason!" "Kill him!" and "Off with his head!" The virulence of such rhetoric makes even Palin seem thoughtful; she at least inserts whole verb phrases like "palling around with" in between nouns like "Barack Obama" and "terrorists."
Such scenes are alarming not only because of the McCain campaign's willingness to stoke such murderous mania but also because of its apparent inability to control the madness once it has been unleashed. At more than one rally, McCain has been booed by the audience for attempting to interrupt panicked rants about the impending socialist or terrorist takeover of America. The crowd's immediate anger is directed not at Obama and the Democrats but at their own party's standard-bearers, who should be "representing us" but have so far refused to "take the gloves off" and "take it to Obama" and "hit him" in "a soft spot." If the GOP leaders don't give these folks what they want, they had best watch their own soft spots, for there is no shortage of backbenchers ready to seize the helm. Take Jeffrey Frederick, the 33-year-old chair of the Virginia Republican Party, who said that Obama and Osama bin Laden "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon." Denounced by the McCain campaign, Frederick has defiantly refused to apologize for his remark.
Perhaps he knows which way the wind blows: the Republican Party's electoral strategy of sowing resentment and fear--sprung from Nixon and nurtured by admen like Lee Atwater, Floyd Brown and the Swiftboaters--has finally taken on a life of its own. It thrives as a postmodern pastiche of conservative hate speech that no longer requires a master--a Frankenstein monster freed from his creator. What holds this beast together is not the fear and loathing of any particular despised identity so much as the idea that America is under siege, disordered, on the cusp of imminent and total collapse, threatened by terrorists abroad and undermined by enemies at home.
Of course, certain pariahs are useful in certain times. In the old lexicon it was Communists, feminists and gays who peopled the right wing's paranoid imagination, and if the sheer breadth of the slander by association against Obama is any indication, these bugaboos are still of value. But this time around the terror has been most sharply drawn along the lines of xenophobia and racism, a potent combination of hostile drives of which trolls like Andy Martin, the anti-Semite behind the "Obama is a Muslim" e-mails, are but minor instigators. The real enablers are demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck, who have made careers out of inciting frenzied aggression at anyone to the left of Joe McCarthy. Only now it seems that even these right-wing pundits have been outdone by their formerly loyal listeners. Coulter, whose contempt for Muslims ("invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity") is surpassed only by her scorn for liberals ("even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do"), has yet to call for the assassination of Barack Obama. But if she genuinely believes that liberals are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists, she should follow the courage of her convictions and do so.
To pre-empt such embarrassing displays of weakness, softer propagandists like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens--who once brayed on and on about the left's "hatred of the United States" and its role as a "fifth column" "in favor of surrender and defeat"--have declared their support for Obama. But as Hitchens's recent endorsement in Slate amply demonstrates, he is not quite ready to give up the poisoned sword. Obama, he writes, is not a "capitulationist," even if he does "accept the support of the surrender faction."
If the polls are any indication, Obama will endure this smear campaign just fine, with or without the backhanded compliments of apologetic neocons. And if his election is not quite the ringing victory for civil rights and liberties, diplomacy and cosmopolitanism that we might like, it will at least beat back for a while the idea that defaming these values as traitorous constitutes sound electoral strategy. If Obama wins, and the barbarians do not show up to rattle the gates, what will the conservatives do next? For them, the barbarians were a solution, of sorts.
American Catches Up with Palin
We're watching NBC News tonight and their poll reveals that 55% of the American people say that Palin is not qualififed to be VP.
Case closed.
Case closed.
Joe Sixpack Identifies with Palin?
Joe Sixpack, the average American, identifies with a woman whose party provides her and her family with $150,000 in clothing and accessories? Please!
(CBS) Since she's been on the campaign trail, Sarah Palin has received a lot of attention over her wardrobe, her hair, even her glasses. Now, Politico.com is reporting the Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 on clothes and accessories for Palin and her family. Politico says the expenditures began early last month, soon after Palin was picked by John McCain to be his running mate. Palin frequently wears expensive designer clothes on the campaign trail now, points out CBS News correspondent Meg Oliver. Spending records filed with the Federal Election Commission and obtained by Politico show the RNC paid for "campaign accessories" from upscale department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue, where nearly $50,000 was spent, Neiman Marcus, $75,000, and $4,700 for hair and makeup. "The problem with this for the campaign," explains Politico Chief Political Writer Mike Allen, "is it's the kind of thing that can stick in people's minds. At a time when they're cutting back on their own spending, they see a candidate looking extravagant." And that, observes Oliver, could pose a political risk. In 2000, Al Gore was criticized for changing his look by wearing clothes with earth tones. Two years ago, Hillary Clinton got some attention for two hair styling sessions that cost $2,500. And of course there were those $400 haircuts John Edwards got. "This would," Allen says, "make the John Edwards haircut look like a bargain at the same time she's (Palin's) trying to connect with Joe and Jane the Plumber." The McCain campaign released a statement late Tuesday night saying, "With all the important issues facing the country right now, it's remarkable that we're spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses. It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign." Politico told CBS News it hasn't been able to identify any similar expenditures on the Democratic side.
(CBS) Since she's been on the campaign trail, Sarah Palin has received a lot of attention over her wardrobe, her hair, even her glasses. Now, Politico.com is reporting the Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 on clothes and accessories for Palin and her family. Politico says the expenditures began early last month, soon after Palin was picked by John McCain to be his running mate. Palin frequently wears expensive designer clothes on the campaign trail now, points out CBS News correspondent Meg Oliver. Spending records filed with the Federal Election Commission and obtained by Politico show the RNC paid for "campaign accessories" from upscale department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue, where nearly $50,000 was spent, Neiman Marcus, $75,000, and $4,700 for hair and makeup. "The problem with this for the campaign," explains Politico Chief Political Writer Mike Allen, "is it's the kind of thing that can stick in people's minds. At a time when they're cutting back on their own spending, they see a candidate looking extravagant." And that, observes Oliver, could pose a political risk. In 2000, Al Gore was criticized for changing his look by wearing clothes with earth tones. Two years ago, Hillary Clinton got some attention for two hair styling sessions that cost $2,500. And of course there were those $400 haircuts John Edwards got. "This would," Allen says, "make the John Edwards haircut look like a bargain at the same time she's (Palin's) trying to connect with Joe and Jane the Plumber." The McCain campaign released a statement late Tuesday night saying, "With all the important issues facing the country right now, it's remarkable that we're spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses. It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign." Politico told CBS News it hasn't been able to identify any similar expenditures on the Democratic side.
What Peggy Noonan Says
Even Peggy Noonan, one of Reagan's staunchest apologists, a card-carrying conservative, has had it with Palin.
In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism.
In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism.
Another Example of Palin's Ignorance
It's all over the internet how Palin misstated the job of VP. Does this woman's ignorance have any limits?
Palin misstates VP role 1:05
Gov. Sarah Palin stated that the role of the vice president was to be "in charge of the U.S. Senate."
Won't SOMEBODY give this woman a clue???
Palin misstates VP role 1:05
Gov. Sarah Palin stated that the role of the vice president was to be "in charge of the U.S. Senate."
Won't SOMEBODY give this woman a clue???
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Obama will govern as a conservative
The irony of this election is that if Obama is elected, he will likely govern as a conservative. So Jon Meacham says. After all, unlike his opponent, he is a church-going,Christian family man.
The son Bill Buckley spoke of at the Plaza 23 years ago, the writer Christopher Buckley, has had an eventful autumn. After endorsing Obama on the new Web site TheDailyBeast.com, Buckley faced charges of apostasy from his father's old comrades on the right. He offered to resign his duties as the back-page columnist of the magazine his father created, and the incumbent editor accepted with alacrity. Aside from the vague "Hamlet"-like overtones of a son's expulsion from his late father's kingdom—and given the Buckleys' upper-class Catholic ethos, it is more Evelyn Waugh than Shakespeare—the incident is interesting because Buckley chose Obama for largely conservative reasons. The right, he believes, has lost its way, and he thinks "President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves."
I spoke to Buckley briefly last Friday. "My hope is that Obama will govern, in that dolorous phrase, from the center," he said. "I think his instincts are conservative—he is a churchgoing, Christian family man. If his family resembled Sarah Palin's family, can you imagine the howls from the right?" Buckley paused. "He will have to be an artful dodger, for sure. But he knows the country is basically conservative." It is something Obama needs to remember as the trumpets begin to sound—not for a Roosevelt or a Reagan, but for him.
The son Bill Buckley spoke of at the Plaza 23 years ago, the writer Christopher Buckley, has had an eventful autumn. After endorsing Obama on the new Web site TheDailyBeast.com, Buckley faced charges of apostasy from his father's old comrades on the right. He offered to resign his duties as the back-page columnist of the magazine his father created, and the incumbent editor accepted with alacrity. Aside from the vague "Hamlet"-like overtones of a son's expulsion from his late father's kingdom—and given the Buckleys' upper-class Catholic ethos, it is more Evelyn Waugh than Shakespeare—the incident is interesting because Buckley chose Obama for largely conservative reasons. The right, he believes, has lost its way, and he thinks "President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves."
I spoke to Buckley briefly last Friday. "My hope is that Obama will govern, in that dolorous phrase, from the center," he said. "I think his instincts are conservative—he is a churchgoing, Christian family man. If his family resembled Sarah Palin's family, can you imagine the howls from the right?" Buckley paused. "He will have to be an artful dodger, for sure. But he knows the country is basically conservative." It is something Obama needs to remember as the trumpets begin to sound—not for a Roosevelt or a Reagan, but for him.
The Vast Wasteland of the Republican Party
Here is a good summary of the Republican Part from Roger Cohen in the Washington Post. The Republican Party is a party of boiling hate.
» Links to this article
By Richard CohenTuesday, October 21, 2008; Page A17
A column, like a good movie, should have an arc -- start here, end there and somehow connect the two points. So this column will begin with the speech Condi Rice made to the Republican National Convention in 2000 in praise of George W. Bush and end with Colin Powell's appearance Sunday on "Meet the Press" in praise of Barack Obama. Between the first and the second lie the ruins of the GOP, a party gone very, very wrong.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bush and now John McCain have constructed a mean, grumpy, exclusive, narrow-minded and altogether retrograde Republican Party. It has the sharp scent of the old Barry Goldwater GOP -- the angry one of 1964 and not the one perfumed by nostalgia -- that is home, by design or mere dumb luck, to those who think that Obama is "The Madrassian Candidate." Karl Rove, take a bow.
It is worth remembering that both Rice and Powell spoke at that Philadelphia convention. And it is worth recalling, too, that Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative" and had compiled a record as Texas governor to warrant the hope, if not the belief, that he was indeed a different sort of Republican. When he ran for reelection as governor in 1998, he went from 15 percent of the black vote to 27 percent, and from 28 percent of the Hispanic vote to an astounding 49 percent. Here was a coalition-builder of considerable achievement.
Now, all this is rubble. It is not merely that Barack Obama was always going to garner the vast majority of the black vote. It is also that the GOP, under Rove and his disciples in the McCain campaign, has not only driven out ethnic and racial minorities but a vast bloc of voters who, quite bluntly, want nothing to do with Sarah Palin. For moderates everywhere, she remains the single best reason to vote against McCain.
But the GOP's tropism toward its furiously angry base, its tolerance and currying of anti-immigrant sentiment, its flattering of the ignorant on matters of undisputed scientific consensus -- evolution, for instance -- and, from the mouth of Palin, its celebration of drab provincialism, have sharpened the division between red and blue. Red is the color of yesterday.
Ah, I know, the blues are not all virtuous. They are supine before self-serving unions, particularly in education, and they are knee-jerk opponents of offshore drilling, mostly, it seems, because they don't like Big Oil. They cannot face the challenge of the Third World within us -- the ghetto with its appalling social and cultural ills -- lest realism be called racism. Sometimes, too, they seem to criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.
Still, a Democrat can remain a Democrat -- or at least vote as one -- without compromising basic intellectual or cultural values. That, though, is not what Colin Powell was saying Sunday about his own party. "I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years," Powell said. "It has moved more to the right than I would like." He cited McCain's harping on that "washed-out terrorist" Bill Ayers as an effort to exploit fears that Obama is a Muslim (so what if he were? Powell rightly asked) and mentioned how Palin's presence on the ticket raised grave questions about McCain's judgment. In effect -- and at least for the time being -- Powell was out of the GOP. S'long, guys.
Those of us who traveled with Bush in the 2000 campaign could tell that when he spoke of education, of the "soft bigotry of low expectations," he meant it. Education, along with racial and ethnic reconciliation, was going to be his legacy. Then came Sept. 11, Afghanistan and finally the misbegotten war in Iraq. After that, nothing else really mattered. But just as Bush could not manage the wars, he could not manage his own party. His legacy is not merely in tatters. It does not even exist.
In the end, Powell was determined not to be one of the GOP's useful idiots. Those moderates willing to overlook the choice of Palin, those capable of staying in a party where, soon enough, she could be an important or dominant force, retain the intellectual nimbleness that enabled them to persist in championing a war fought for duplicitous reasons and extol cultural values they do not for a minute share. Powell walked away from that, and others will follow -- the second time that a senator from Arizona has led the GOP into the political wilderness.
» Links to this article
By Richard CohenTuesday, October 21, 2008; Page A17
A column, like a good movie, should have an arc -- start here, end there and somehow connect the two points. So this column will begin with the speech Condi Rice made to the Republican National Convention in 2000 in praise of George W. Bush and end with Colin Powell's appearance Sunday on "Meet the Press" in praise of Barack Obama. Between the first and the second lie the ruins of the GOP, a party gone very, very wrong.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bush and now John McCain have constructed a mean, grumpy, exclusive, narrow-minded and altogether retrograde Republican Party. It has the sharp scent of the old Barry Goldwater GOP -- the angry one of 1964 and not the one perfumed by nostalgia -- that is home, by design or mere dumb luck, to those who think that Obama is "The Madrassian Candidate." Karl Rove, take a bow.
It is worth remembering that both Rice and Powell spoke at that Philadelphia convention. And it is worth recalling, too, that Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative" and had compiled a record as Texas governor to warrant the hope, if not the belief, that he was indeed a different sort of Republican. When he ran for reelection as governor in 1998, he went from 15 percent of the black vote to 27 percent, and from 28 percent of the Hispanic vote to an astounding 49 percent. Here was a coalition-builder of considerable achievement.
Now, all this is rubble. It is not merely that Barack Obama was always going to garner the vast majority of the black vote. It is also that the GOP, under Rove and his disciples in the McCain campaign, has not only driven out ethnic and racial minorities but a vast bloc of voters who, quite bluntly, want nothing to do with Sarah Palin. For moderates everywhere, she remains the single best reason to vote against McCain.
But the GOP's tropism toward its furiously angry base, its tolerance and currying of anti-immigrant sentiment, its flattering of the ignorant on matters of undisputed scientific consensus -- evolution, for instance -- and, from the mouth of Palin, its celebration of drab provincialism, have sharpened the division between red and blue. Red is the color of yesterday.
Ah, I know, the blues are not all virtuous. They are supine before self-serving unions, particularly in education, and they are knee-jerk opponents of offshore drilling, mostly, it seems, because they don't like Big Oil. They cannot face the challenge of the Third World within us -- the ghetto with its appalling social and cultural ills -- lest realism be called racism. Sometimes, too, they seem to criticize American foreign policy simply because it is American.
Still, a Democrat can remain a Democrat -- or at least vote as one -- without compromising basic intellectual or cultural values. That, though, is not what Colin Powell was saying Sunday about his own party. "I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years," Powell said. "It has moved more to the right than I would like." He cited McCain's harping on that "washed-out terrorist" Bill Ayers as an effort to exploit fears that Obama is a Muslim (so what if he were? Powell rightly asked) and mentioned how Palin's presence on the ticket raised grave questions about McCain's judgment. In effect -- and at least for the time being -- Powell was out of the GOP. S'long, guys.
Those of us who traveled with Bush in the 2000 campaign could tell that when he spoke of education, of the "soft bigotry of low expectations," he meant it. Education, along with racial and ethnic reconciliation, was going to be his legacy. Then came Sept. 11, Afghanistan and finally the misbegotten war in Iraq. After that, nothing else really mattered. But just as Bush could not manage the wars, he could not manage his own party. His legacy is not merely in tatters. It does not even exist.
In the end, Powell was determined not to be one of the GOP's useful idiots. Those moderates willing to overlook the choice of Palin, those capable of staying in a party where, soon enough, she could be an important or dominant force, retain the intellectual nimbleness that enabled them to persist in championing a war fought for duplicitous reasons and extol cultural values they do not for a minute share. Powell walked away from that, and others will follow -- the second time that a senator from Arizona has led the GOP into the political wilderness.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Historical Context of the Economic Crisis
Prominent historian Sean Wilentz summarizes the current economic situation within its proper historical context.
In his classic study "The Coming of the New Deal," the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. succinctly described FDR's mission: "To save capitalism from the capitalists." That mission had been Theodore Roosevelt's as well. And until the Age of Reagan dawned in the 1970s, the underlying principle of the Rooseveltian mission—that left unchecked, the system could self-destruct—came as second nature to American policymakers. Then, after years of regressive tax cuts and deregulation, followed by the advent of the Newt Gingrich congressional Republicans, those principles began to fade—despite the stupendous costs of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the Enron meltdown of 2001 and other depredations by capitalist buccaneers.
placeAd2(commercialNode,'bigbox',false,'')
The sudden intrusion of reality in 2008 has been politically costly for John McCain. Supposedly chastened by his links to the S&L debacle, McCain had fashioned a reputation for independence and toughness, and proclaimed his admiration for TR. Yet to secure the nomination of a badly fractured Republican Party, McCain embraced Ronald Reagan's political legacy of tax cuts and small government—exactly as the Age of Reagan was coming to an end. Although he has tried to switch gears since the financial crisis hit by denouncing Wall Street greed and proposing government intervention, McCain's outrage is less than Rooseveltian, and his continued recital of Reaganite dogma makes him sound archaic, like a golden-oldies act. His running mate, although youthful and spirited, seems caught in the same time warp.
Last week in Toledo, Ohio, Barack Obama, after more than a year of campaigning, offered a specific plan of action for economic recovery and rescuing the middle class. He has even been willing to embrace proposals, such as Hillary Clinton's moratorium on house foreclosures, which he disdained during the Democratic primaries. It was an encouraging first step.
Yet Obama must adjust swiftly on other fronts as well if he is fully to update the Rooseveltian legacy.
The symbol of change has shown himself to be changeable, and there is plenty he can alter. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, was an unashamed politician from the anti-Tammany wing of the New York Democratic Party, one who made no bones about his love of party as well as politics, and who eventually redefined the very meaning of partisanship with his New Deal policies. Obama, on the contrary, has touted a fuzzy postpartisanship and promised to end "politics as usual" in Washington. If he is to be more Rooseveltian, he will need to master the arts of transactional politics (and not "transformational" posturing) at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, take his inevitable place as Democratic Party leader (especially if the Democrats win large congressional majorities) and assume responsibility as such.
There are also lessons that Obama can learn from the example of Theodore Roosevelt. Obama has thus far enjoyed what looks like an extremely lucky career in politics. The only truly difficult battle he has fought until now was with Hillary Clinton for the nomination, a contest he won only barely. When his campaign against John McCain ran into trouble, the financial collapse completely altered the electoral calculus. Through it all, Obama has been able to be very much the detached, cool customer, the same man who, in his brief time in the Senate, showed no zeal for risky political conflict.
Theodore Roosevelt sometimes had a weakness for tough-guy bombast and braggadocio. But he also knew, from experience as well as temperament, that a successful president cannot always be cool, detached and Olympian, let alone bipartisan, and that events will force him to take risks. To transcend what he called "the twister pride of cynicism," Roosevelt proclaimed in 1910 it is not enough to be thoughtful or even popular; it requires becoming what he called the man "in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood," who fights with the certainty that, even if he fails, "his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." Should Barack Obama become president next January, as now looks almost certain, he will be the man in the cruel arena whether he likes it or not.
In his classic study "The Coming of the New Deal," the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. succinctly described FDR's mission: "To save capitalism from the capitalists." That mission had been Theodore Roosevelt's as well. And until the Age of Reagan dawned in the 1970s, the underlying principle of the Rooseveltian mission—that left unchecked, the system could self-destruct—came as second nature to American policymakers. Then, after years of regressive tax cuts and deregulation, followed by the advent of the Newt Gingrich congressional Republicans, those principles began to fade—despite the stupendous costs of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the Enron meltdown of 2001 and other depredations by capitalist buccaneers.
placeAd2(commercialNode,'bigbox',false,'')
The sudden intrusion of reality in 2008 has been politically costly for John McCain. Supposedly chastened by his links to the S&L debacle, McCain had fashioned a reputation for independence and toughness, and proclaimed his admiration for TR. Yet to secure the nomination of a badly fractured Republican Party, McCain embraced Ronald Reagan's political legacy of tax cuts and small government—exactly as the Age of Reagan was coming to an end. Although he has tried to switch gears since the financial crisis hit by denouncing Wall Street greed and proposing government intervention, McCain's outrage is less than Rooseveltian, and his continued recital of Reaganite dogma makes him sound archaic, like a golden-oldies act. His running mate, although youthful and spirited, seems caught in the same time warp.
Last week in Toledo, Ohio, Barack Obama, after more than a year of campaigning, offered a specific plan of action for economic recovery and rescuing the middle class. He has even been willing to embrace proposals, such as Hillary Clinton's moratorium on house foreclosures, which he disdained during the Democratic primaries. It was an encouraging first step.
Yet Obama must adjust swiftly on other fronts as well if he is fully to update the Rooseveltian legacy.
The symbol of change has shown himself to be changeable, and there is plenty he can alter. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, was an unashamed politician from the anti-Tammany wing of the New York Democratic Party, one who made no bones about his love of party as well as politics, and who eventually redefined the very meaning of partisanship with his New Deal policies. Obama, on the contrary, has touted a fuzzy postpartisanship and promised to end "politics as usual" in Washington. If he is to be more Rooseveltian, he will need to master the arts of transactional politics (and not "transformational" posturing) at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, take his inevitable place as Democratic Party leader (especially if the Democrats win large congressional majorities) and assume responsibility as such.
There are also lessons that Obama can learn from the example of Theodore Roosevelt. Obama has thus far enjoyed what looks like an extremely lucky career in politics. The only truly difficult battle he has fought until now was with Hillary Clinton for the nomination, a contest he won only barely. When his campaign against John McCain ran into trouble, the financial collapse completely altered the electoral calculus. Through it all, Obama has been able to be very much the detached, cool customer, the same man who, in his brief time in the Senate, showed no zeal for risky political conflict.
Theodore Roosevelt sometimes had a weakness for tough-guy bombast and braggadocio. But he also knew, from experience as well as temperament, that a successful president cannot always be cool, detached and Olympian, let alone bipartisan, and that events will force him to take risks. To transcend what he called "the twister pride of cynicism," Roosevelt proclaimed in 1910 it is not enough to be thoughtful or even popular; it requires becoming what he called the man "in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood," who fights with the certainty that, even if he fails, "his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." Should Barack Obama become president next January, as now looks almost certain, he will be the man in the cruel arena whether he likes it or not.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Like Palin? No, thanks.
Sarah Palin is the latest Republican practicioner of identity politics. You're supposed to swoon to her tune because she's "like us." Well, she ain't like me. She scares me to death. Her ignorance, incompetence, and lack of curiosity (think W) is astounding. As Gen. Powell said today on Meet in the Press in endorsing Obama, she is not fit or competent to be President, which is the way you have to think about it. Her selection is reason enough to question McCain's judgement (as if we had no other reason to question his judgement).
I am not a "dude." I am not a member of the NRA. Read my lipstick? Puh-leeze.
Joe Sixpack? Not me. Larry Brown's crowd would love Palin. The term used to be "redneck." Is this word still in vogue?
The testosterone flows freely in her manly crowds.
I can just see here "dudes" passing around the Red Man and shouting "You go, girl."
I am not part of the hunting, fishing, and hockey (in the South?) crowd.
I don't wear steel-toed boots and I don't have tattoos.
Last but not least, I do not want a VP candidate winking at me.
I am not one of your dudes, sweetheart. (I would love to call derisively call her "sweetheart" to her face)
I guess I just wasn't born to like Palin.
I am not a "dude." I am not a member of the NRA. Read my lipstick? Puh-leeze.
Joe Sixpack? Not me. Larry Brown's crowd would love Palin. The term used to be "redneck." Is this word still in vogue?
The testosterone flows freely in her manly crowds.
I can just see here "dudes" passing around the Red Man and shouting "You go, girl."
I am not part of the hunting, fishing, and hockey (in the South?) crowd.
I don't wear steel-toed boots and I don't have tattoos.
Last but not least, I do not want a VP candidate winking at me.
I am not one of your dudes, sweetheart. (I would love to call derisively call her "sweetheart" to her face)
I guess I just wasn't born to like Palin.
What Do Conservatives Have Left?
What do conservatives have left? The tactics that we are seeing from McCalin/Palin: ridiculous scare tactics that should embarass any thinking person. Where is the REAL old-fashioned, honest conservatism?
17.10.2008
What Do Conservatives Have Left?
As members of my family might readily attest, I am prone to worst case thinking. Knowing I am going to fly, I always assume a blizzard; watching the Red Sox, I can guarantee a loss. And so a touch of sympathy went directly from my heart today to a group with whom I am never in agreement: the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Contemplating the prospects of an Obama victory and a Congressional Democratic super-majority, they warn their readers of the disasters ahead.
I am not a regular Journal reader, at least not since Rupert Murdoch took it over. But these days I've been in love with "The Corner," the National Review blog, where the Republican Party bears its true soul. "The most important piece of writing on the contest that has yet appeared," proclaimed one Peter Robinson of the editorial. "Marshalling fact after fact, reasoning tightly, and deploying beautiful, lean, unfussy prose, the editorial then goes on for some 1,200 words, demonstrating why such a sweeping Democratic victory would do grave and lasting damage to the Republic."
So here, then, is the worst that can happen: No one in the United States would find themselves in a situation in which one unexpected illness could wipe out their life savings. Corporations would be held responsible for their mistakes. More workers would gain the protections that only unions can offer. The tax system would be made more progressive. There would be more environment protection. A person's right to vote would be strengthened. And the United States would once again respect civil liberties. And that is it.
Conservatives have not been having a good year, what with internecine squabbles and the sinking of the McCain ship. But surely they can do better than this. The notion that a slight tilt to the left will cause grave and lasting damage to the Republic is about as credible as John McCain's charge, in the third debate, that ACORN represents a huge menace to democracy. If conservatives keep at it like this, their indignation machine will go a-sputtering. It is difficult to know which prospect they find worse: the idea of Democrats returning to power or the reality that, once they return to power, Democrats will prove to be so moderate that conservative scare tactics against them will lose all resonance.
No wonder the bloggers at "The Corner" want McCain to talk about socialism. Doing so, from their points of view, beats acknowledging just how cautious Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are.
--Alan Wolfe
Posted: Friday
17.10.2008
What Do Conservatives Have Left?
As members of my family might readily attest, I am prone to worst case thinking. Knowing I am going to fly, I always assume a blizzard; watching the Red Sox, I can guarantee a loss. And so a touch of sympathy went directly from my heart today to a group with whom I am never in agreement: the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Contemplating the prospects of an Obama victory and a Congressional Democratic super-majority, they warn their readers of the disasters ahead.
I am not a regular Journal reader, at least not since Rupert Murdoch took it over. But these days I've been in love with "The Corner," the National Review blog, where the Republican Party bears its true soul. "The most important piece of writing on the contest that has yet appeared," proclaimed one Peter Robinson of the editorial. "Marshalling fact after fact, reasoning tightly, and deploying beautiful, lean, unfussy prose, the editorial then goes on for some 1,200 words, demonstrating why such a sweeping Democratic victory would do grave and lasting damage to the Republic."
So here, then, is the worst that can happen: No one in the United States would find themselves in a situation in which one unexpected illness could wipe out their life savings. Corporations would be held responsible for their mistakes. More workers would gain the protections that only unions can offer. The tax system would be made more progressive. There would be more environment protection. A person's right to vote would be strengthened. And the United States would once again respect civil liberties. And that is it.
Conservatives have not been having a good year, what with internecine squabbles and the sinking of the McCain ship. But surely they can do better than this. The notion that a slight tilt to the left will cause grave and lasting damage to the Republic is about as credible as John McCain's charge, in the third debate, that ACORN represents a huge menace to democracy. If conservatives keep at it like this, their indignation machine will go a-sputtering. It is difficult to know which prospect they find worse: the idea of Democrats returning to power or the reality that, once they return to power, Democrats will prove to be so moderate that conservative scare tactics against them will lose all resonance.
No wonder the bloggers at "The Corner" want McCain to talk about socialism. Doing so, from their points of view, beats acknowledging just how cautious Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are.
--Alan Wolfe
Posted: Friday
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Robert Remini - A Short History of the United States
The author is professor emeritus at the U of Illinois at Chicago. He is the official historian of the US House of Representatives and has written the definitive history of that body. It's hard to write American history these partisan days without being judged as polemical. This author has succeeded in being non-partisan. As Robert Dallek says, "It's a perfect history for our times." This book is a great popular (as opposed to textbook) summary of American history suitable for quick reference and suitable as a refresher course in our country's history.
Real Republicanism vs. the Pseudo Republicanism of Palin
Roger Cohen writes a fascinating article based on Branson, Missouri, in which he contrasts what should be real Republicanism (the party) with the tired, rascist, trash-talking of Sarah Palin. I can indentify with the values of former Republicanism, but not the current fey version.
By ROGER COHEN
Published: October 16, 2008
BRANSON, Mo.
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"We may differ ... but we are one nation. The only chance we have of solving our collective problems is to work together."Carolyn Hollingsworth, Tennessee
I never imagined that a Republican mayor from Bible-belt Missouri would revive my faith in American democracy, but Raeanne Presley did just that.
As a high-energy brunette running a small town, she’s been ribbed since Sarah Palin became her party’s nominee for vice president. “Guess you’ll be moving on to governor soon,” she gets told. “And up from there.”
But Presley’s not interested. She’s Midwestern practical to Palin’s rabble-rousing frontierswoman. Common sense interests her more than aw-shucks nonsense. She prefers balanced budgets to unbalanced attacks.
Presley — no relation to Elvis — runs the capital of the American heartland. Branson, population 7,500, is to country-western, country-first, evangelical culture what Haight-Ashbury once was to the hippie movement: its mother lode.
You won’t find gambling in wholesome Branson. Food gets deep-fried; Christmas gets celebrated from Nov, 1; churches get filled.
On the gridlocked “strip” — more theater seats than Broadway — nobody blows their horn. The featured speaker at veterans’ week in November will be Oliver North, the Reagan-era rogue of the Iran-contra scandal. He’ll get a cheer: this area of southern Missouri voted about 70 percent Bush in 2004.
What you do find on the strip are the 8 million tourists — more than a thousand times the population — who come here annually in search of religious, family and patriotic entertainment. Dream on, Wasilla.
(If the Branson population-tourist ratio applied in New York, the city would get upward of 8 billion tourists a year. It gets around 46 million.)
Entertainment includes country-western music, the “Dixie Stampede” rodeo show, old favorites like Andy Williams, Chinese acrobats, Irish tenors and a Veterans Memorial Museum. A Japanese violinist does country and Cajun.
“For skimpy costumes or harsh language,” Presley, 50, said, “you go to Vegas or New York. We’ve no rules against a racy show. You’re welcome to give it a shot. But we hope you don’t succeed.”
One thing Branson does not have is foreign tourists. Head-shaking Europeans bewildered by “the other America” should check it out. The town, with its more than 50 theaters (Broadway has 39), would be an education.
My own did not go according to plan. I came to Branson and its mayor with my liberal prejudices and was disarmed. Presley reminded me of my ex-mother-in-law, another brisk, pragmatic, funny, no-nonsense Republican Midwesterner with little tolerance for debt, delinquency, dumbness or dereliction of duty. She also reminded me of a great American virtue: getting on with it.
And it dawned on me that Palin, with her vile near-accusations of treason against Barack Obama, her cloying doggone hymns to small-town U.S.A., her with-us-or-against-us refrain, is really an impostor.
She’s the representative of a kind of last-gasp Republicanism, of an exhausted party, whose proud fiscal conservatism and patriotism have given away to scurrilous fear-mongering and ideological confusion.
It’s a party in need of a break from power after the Bush years in order to re-learn what Presley represents: the can-do, down-to-earth, honest, industrious, spend-what-you-earn civility of the heartland. That civility has been usurped into Palin’s trash talk.
Presley’s busy, in a tough economic climate, balancing a $61 million budget, trying to preserve jobs, getting a new $500 million convention center rolling, seeking a better balance between development and the environment.
I asked her about the election. “This is an exciting moment,” she said. “An African-American at the top of the Democratic ticket. As Americans we should be proud of that. A woman running for vice president. We can be proud of that, too.”
I asked her if she was a closet liberal. She laughed.
She said her oldest son, Nick, went to Stanford, and she expected him to come back from California “with a tattoo and a piercing.” But, no. He’s now working at the family’s Country Jubilee Theater.
It was one of the first to open on the strip. I’m 53, and I reckon the night I saw the show I lowered the audience’s average age to about 78. Fall is “empty-nester” season — oceans of gray hair.
The audience roared when a hillbilly idiot said something dumb and was rebuked by his father: “Next thing, you’ll believe in global warming!”
So go the culture wars in Branson.
This is red-state central, dear to evangelicals. But Presley has few illusions. Obama has been surging in bellwether Missouri with its long and almost perfect record of voting for the winner. He is now neck and neck with John McCain in the state polls.
Americans still vote their pocketbooks — always have, always will.
“I can see how the drift is going, but we’ll move on,” the mayor said.
A speech four years ago brought Obama to the national stage: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”
I found that spirit in Branson, the last place I expected. And it gave me hope, in these sobering days, for a nation aching to unite behind a new start and uplifting endeavor.
By ROGER COHEN
Published: October 16, 2008
BRANSON, Mo.
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Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Roger Cohen
Go to Columnist Page » Blog: Passages
Readers' Comments
"We may differ ... but we are one nation. The only chance we have of solving our collective problems is to work together."Carolyn Hollingsworth, Tennessee
I never imagined that a Republican mayor from Bible-belt Missouri would revive my faith in American democracy, but Raeanne Presley did just that.
As a high-energy brunette running a small town, she’s been ribbed since Sarah Palin became her party’s nominee for vice president. “Guess you’ll be moving on to governor soon,” she gets told. “And up from there.”
But Presley’s not interested. She’s Midwestern practical to Palin’s rabble-rousing frontierswoman. Common sense interests her more than aw-shucks nonsense. She prefers balanced budgets to unbalanced attacks.
Presley — no relation to Elvis — runs the capital of the American heartland. Branson, population 7,500, is to country-western, country-first, evangelical culture what Haight-Ashbury once was to the hippie movement: its mother lode.
You won’t find gambling in wholesome Branson. Food gets deep-fried; Christmas gets celebrated from Nov, 1; churches get filled.
On the gridlocked “strip” — more theater seats than Broadway — nobody blows their horn. The featured speaker at veterans’ week in November will be Oliver North, the Reagan-era rogue of the Iran-contra scandal. He’ll get a cheer: this area of southern Missouri voted about 70 percent Bush in 2004.
What you do find on the strip are the 8 million tourists — more than a thousand times the population — who come here annually in search of religious, family and patriotic entertainment. Dream on, Wasilla.
(If the Branson population-tourist ratio applied in New York, the city would get upward of 8 billion tourists a year. It gets around 46 million.)
Entertainment includes country-western music, the “Dixie Stampede” rodeo show, old favorites like Andy Williams, Chinese acrobats, Irish tenors and a Veterans Memorial Museum. A Japanese violinist does country and Cajun.
“For skimpy costumes or harsh language,” Presley, 50, said, “you go to Vegas or New York. We’ve no rules against a racy show. You’re welcome to give it a shot. But we hope you don’t succeed.”
One thing Branson does not have is foreign tourists. Head-shaking Europeans bewildered by “the other America” should check it out. The town, with its more than 50 theaters (Broadway has 39), would be an education.
My own did not go according to plan. I came to Branson and its mayor with my liberal prejudices and was disarmed. Presley reminded me of my ex-mother-in-law, another brisk, pragmatic, funny, no-nonsense Republican Midwesterner with little tolerance for debt, delinquency, dumbness or dereliction of duty. She also reminded me of a great American virtue: getting on with it.
And it dawned on me that Palin, with her vile near-accusations of treason against Barack Obama, her cloying doggone hymns to small-town U.S.A., her with-us-or-against-us refrain, is really an impostor.
She’s the representative of a kind of last-gasp Republicanism, of an exhausted party, whose proud fiscal conservatism and patriotism have given away to scurrilous fear-mongering and ideological confusion.
It’s a party in need of a break from power after the Bush years in order to re-learn what Presley represents: the can-do, down-to-earth, honest, industrious, spend-what-you-earn civility of the heartland. That civility has been usurped into Palin’s trash talk.
Presley’s busy, in a tough economic climate, balancing a $61 million budget, trying to preserve jobs, getting a new $500 million convention center rolling, seeking a better balance between development and the environment.
I asked her about the election. “This is an exciting moment,” she said. “An African-American at the top of the Democratic ticket. As Americans we should be proud of that. A woman running for vice president. We can be proud of that, too.”
I asked her if she was a closet liberal. She laughed.
She said her oldest son, Nick, went to Stanford, and she expected him to come back from California “with a tattoo and a piercing.” But, no. He’s now working at the family’s Country Jubilee Theater.
It was one of the first to open on the strip. I’m 53, and I reckon the night I saw the show I lowered the audience’s average age to about 78. Fall is “empty-nester” season — oceans of gray hair.
The audience roared when a hillbilly idiot said something dumb and was rebuked by his father: “Next thing, you’ll believe in global warming!”
So go the culture wars in Branson.
This is red-state central, dear to evangelicals. But Presley has few illusions. Obama has been surging in bellwether Missouri with its long and almost perfect record of voting for the winner. He is now neck and neck with John McCain in the state polls.
Americans still vote their pocketbooks — always have, always will.
“I can see how the drift is going, but we’ll move on,” the mayor said.
A speech four years ago brought Obama to the national stage: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”
I found that spirit in Branson, the last place I expected. And it gave me hope, in these sobering days, for a nation aching to unite behind a new start and uplifting endeavor.
The End of Libertarianism
If nothing else, this election within the context of the current economic tribulations, should spell the end of the nonesense of libertarianism.
Consider this blog from Jacob Weisberg.
The End of LibertarianismThe financial collapse proves that its ideology makes no sense.By Jacob WeisbergPosted Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008, at 6:17 AM ET
A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching libertarians scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of too much government intervention rather than too little. One line of argument casts as villain the Community Reinvestment Act, which prevents banks from "redlining" minority neighborhoods as not creditworthy. Another theory blames Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the trouble by subsidizing and securitizing mortgages with an implicit government guarantee. An alternative thesis is that past bailouts encouraged investors to behave recklessly in anticipation of a taxpayer rescue.
There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.
To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven't you people done enough harm already? We have narrowly avoided a global depression and are mercifully pointed toward merely the worst recession in a long while. This is thanks to a global economic meltdown made possible by libertarian ideas. I don't have much patience with the notion that trying to figure out how we got into this mess is somehow unacceptably vicious and pointless—Sarah Palin's view of global warming. As with any failure, inquest is central to improvement. And any competent forensic work has to put the libertarian theory of self-regulating financial markets at the scene of the crime.
To be more specific: In 1997 and 1998, the global economy was rocked by a series of cascading financial crises in Asia, Latin America, and Russia. Perhaps the most alarming moment was the failure of a giant, superleveraged hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, which threatened the solvency of financial institutions that served as counter-parties to its derivative contracts, much in the manner of Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. this year. After LTCM's collapse, it became abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to this unfortunately esoteric issue that unregulated credit market derivatives posed risks to the global financial system, and that supervision and limits of some kind were advisable. This was a very scary problem and a very boring one, a hazardous combination.
As with the government failures that made 9/11 possible, neglecting to prevent the crash of '08 was a sin of omission—less the result of deregulation per se than of disbelief in financial regulation as a legitimate mechanism. At any point from 1998 on, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, various members of their administrations, or a number of congressional leaders with oversight authority might have stood up and said, "Hey, I think we're in danger and need some additional rules here." The Washington Post ran an excellent piece this week on how one such attempt to regulate credit derivatives got derailed. Had the advocates of prudent regulation been more effective, there's an excellent chance that the subprime debacle would not have turned into a runaway financial inferno.
There's enough blame to go around, but this wasn't just a collective failure. Three officials, more than any others, have been responsible for preventing effective regulatory action over a period of years: Alan Greenspan, the oracular former Fed chairman; Phil Gramm, the heartless former chairman of the Senate banking committee; and Christopher Cox, the unapologetic chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Blame Greenspan for making the case that the exploding trade in derivatives was a benign way of hedging against risk. Blame Gramm for making sure derivatives weren't covered by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, a bill he shepherded through Congress in 2000. Blame Cox for championing Bush's policy of "voluntary" regulation of investment banks at the SEC.
Cox and Gramm, in particular, are often accused of being in the pocket of the securities industry. That's not entirely fair; these men took the hands-off positions they did because of their political philosophy, which holds that markets are always right and governments always wrong to interfere. They share with Greenspan, the only member of the trio who openly calls himself a libertarian, a deep aversion to any infringement of the right to buy and sell. That belief, which George Soros calls market fundamentalism, is the best explanation of how the natural tendency of lending standards to turn permissive during a boom became a global calamity that spread so far and so quickly.
The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic. Those outside of government at places like the Cato Institute and Reason magazine are just as consistent in their opposition to government bailouts as to the kind of regulation that might have prevented one from being necessary. "Let failed banks fail" is the purist line. This approach would deliver a wonderful lesson in personal responsibility, creating thousands of new jobs in the soup-kitchen and food-pantry industries.
The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster. They are bankrupt, and this time, there will be no bailout
Consider this blog from Jacob Weisberg.
The End of LibertarianismThe financial collapse proves that its ideology makes no sense.By Jacob WeisbergPosted Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008, at 6:17 AM ET
A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching libertarians scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of too much government intervention rather than too little. One line of argument casts as villain the Community Reinvestment Act, which prevents banks from "redlining" minority neighborhoods as not creditworthy. Another theory blames Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the trouble by subsidizing and securitizing mortgages with an implicit government guarantee. An alternative thesis is that past bailouts encouraged investors to behave recklessly in anticipation of a taxpayer rescue.
There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.
To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven't you people done enough harm already? We have narrowly avoided a global depression and are mercifully pointed toward merely the worst recession in a long while. This is thanks to a global economic meltdown made possible by libertarian ideas. I don't have much patience with the notion that trying to figure out how we got into this mess is somehow unacceptably vicious and pointless—Sarah Palin's view of global warming. As with any failure, inquest is central to improvement. And any competent forensic work has to put the libertarian theory of self-regulating financial markets at the scene of the crime.
To be more specific: In 1997 and 1998, the global economy was rocked by a series of cascading financial crises in Asia, Latin America, and Russia. Perhaps the most alarming moment was the failure of a giant, superleveraged hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, which threatened the solvency of financial institutions that served as counter-parties to its derivative contracts, much in the manner of Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. this year. After LTCM's collapse, it became abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to this unfortunately esoteric issue that unregulated credit market derivatives posed risks to the global financial system, and that supervision and limits of some kind were advisable. This was a very scary problem and a very boring one, a hazardous combination.
As with the government failures that made 9/11 possible, neglecting to prevent the crash of '08 was a sin of omission—less the result of deregulation per se than of disbelief in financial regulation as a legitimate mechanism. At any point from 1998 on, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, various members of their administrations, or a number of congressional leaders with oversight authority might have stood up and said, "Hey, I think we're in danger and need some additional rules here." The Washington Post ran an excellent piece this week on how one such attempt to regulate credit derivatives got derailed. Had the advocates of prudent regulation been more effective, there's an excellent chance that the subprime debacle would not have turned into a runaway financial inferno.
There's enough blame to go around, but this wasn't just a collective failure. Three officials, more than any others, have been responsible for preventing effective regulatory action over a period of years: Alan Greenspan, the oracular former Fed chairman; Phil Gramm, the heartless former chairman of the Senate banking committee; and Christopher Cox, the unapologetic chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Blame Greenspan for making the case that the exploding trade in derivatives was a benign way of hedging against risk. Blame Gramm for making sure derivatives weren't covered by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, a bill he shepherded through Congress in 2000. Blame Cox for championing Bush's policy of "voluntary" regulation of investment banks at the SEC.
Cox and Gramm, in particular, are often accused of being in the pocket of the securities industry. That's not entirely fair; these men took the hands-off positions they did because of their political philosophy, which holds that markets are always right and governments always wrong to interfere. They share with Greenspan, the only member of the trio who openly calls himself a libertarian, a deep aversion to any infringement of the right to buy and sell. That belief, which George Soros calls market fundamentalism, is the best explanation of how the natural tendency of lending standards to turn permissive during a boom became a global calamity that spread so far and so quickly.
The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic. Those outside of government at places like the Cato Institute and Reason magazine are just as consistent in their opposition to government bailouts as to the kind of regulation that might have prevented one from being necessary. "Let failed banks fail" is the purist line. This approach would deliver a wonderful lesson in personal responsibility, creating thousands of new jobs in the soup-kitchen and food-pantry industries.
The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster. They are bankrupt, and this time, there will be no bailout
Words of Wisdom
Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
-John Maynard Keynes
-John Maynard Keynes
Friday, October 17, 2008
Robert Remini - A Short History of the United States
I like to think that I am a keen, though amateur, student of American history. What this means in practical terms is that I put current political events in historical perspective, as best I can understand things. There is no substitute for historical perspective.
We've had economic panics a number of times in our history. The current economic situation is not unique in that way. In this book that I am reading presently, here is a description of the Panic of 1873 during another Republican heyday that lasted about 6 years. Of course, this occurred during the so-called Gilded Age during which there were numerous Republican scandals.
"The consequences of these scandals and the involvement of Congress with big business were bad enough for the (Grant) administration and the Republican Party, but the onset of the Panic of 1873 proved devastating. This was an economic depression that hit hard and lasted from 1873 to 1879. Triggered by the wild speculation in railroads, DISHONEST BANKING PRACTICES (emphasis added), overexpansion in industry, commerce, and agriculture, and the failure of Jay Cooke's banking firm, the Panic generated widespread suffering. Three million workers lost their jobs over the next five years, the stock market collapsed, banks closed, farm prices fell, and one in four railroads defaulted on its bonds."
The more things change, the more they stay the same!
We've had economic panics a number of times in our history. The current economic situation is not unique in that way. In this book that I am reading presently, here is a description of the Panic of 1873 during another Republican heyday that lasted about 6 years. Of course, this occurred during the so-called Gilded Age during which there were numerous Republican scandals.
"The consequences of these scandals and the involvement of Congress with big business were bad enough for the (Grant) administration and the Republican Party, but the onset of the Panic of 1873 proved devastating. This was an economic depression that hit hard and lasted from 1873 to 1879. Triggered by the wild speculation in railroads, DISHONEST BANKING PRACTICES (emphasis added), overexpansion in industry, commerce, and agriculture, and the failure of Jay Cooke's banking firm, the Panic generated widespread suffering. Three million workers lost their jobs over the next five years, the stock market collapsed, banks closed, farm prices fell, and one in four railroads defaulted on its bonds."
The more things change, the more they stay the same!
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Is Digital Reading Rewiring Our Brains?
Reading This Will Change Your Brain
A leading neuroscientist says processing digital information can rewire your circuits. But is it evolution?
By Jeneen Interlandi NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 14, 2008
Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small's new book, "iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. "Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."
The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise. The brain's plasticity—it's ability to change in response to different stimuli—is well known. Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes' brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That's because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that's not the same thing as evolution.
To see how the Internet might be rewiring us, Small and colleagues monitored the brains of 24 adults as they performed a simulated Web search, and again as they read a page of text. During the Web search, those who reported using the Internet regularly in their everyday lives showed twice as much signaling in brain regions responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning, compared with those who had limited Internet exposure. The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain's capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.
Small says these differences are likely to be even more profound across generations, because younger people are exposed to more technology from an earlier age than older people. He refers to this as the brain gap. On one side, what he calls digital natives—those who have never known a world without e-mail and text messaging—use their superior cognitive abilities to make snap decisions and juggle multiple sources of sensory input. On the other side, digital immigrants—those who witnessed the advent of modern technology long after their brains had been hardwired—are better at reading facial expressions than they are at navigating cyberspace. "The typical immigrant's brain was trained in completely different ways of socializing and learning, taking things step-by-step and addressing one task at a time," he says. "Immigrants learn more methodically and tend to execute tasks more precisely."
But whether natural selection will favor one skill set over the other remains to be seen. For starters, there's no reason to believe the two behaviors are mutually exclusive. In fact, a 2005 Kaiser study found that young people who spent the most time engaged with high-technology also spent the most time interacting face-to-face, with friends and family. And as Small himself points out, digital natives and digital immigrants can direct their own neural circuitry—reaping the cognitive benefits of modern technology while preserving traditional social skills—simply by making time for both.
In the meantime, modern technology, and the skills it fosters, is evolving even faster than we are. There's no telling whether future iterations of computer games, online communities and the like will require more or less of the traditional social skills and learning strategies that we've spent so many eons cultivating. "Too many people write about this as if kids are in one country and adults are in another," says James Gee, a linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What the future brain will look like is still anybody's guess.
A leading neuroscientist says processing digital information can rewire your circuits. But is it evolution?
By Jeneen Interlandi NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 14, 2008
Is technology changing our brains? A new study by UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small adds to a growing body of research that says it is. And according to Small's new book, "iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. "Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."
The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise. The brain's plasticity—it's ability to change in response to different stimuli—is well known. Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes' brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That's because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that's not the same thing as evolution.
To see how the Internet might be rewiring us, Small and colleagues monitored the brains of 24 adults as they performed a simulated Web search, and again as they read a page of text. During the Web search, those who reported using the Internet regularly in their everyday lives showed twice as much signaling in brain regions responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning, compared with those who had limited Internet exposure. The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain's capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.
Small says these differences are likely to be even more profound across generations, because younger people are exposed to more technology from an earlier age than older people. He refers to this as the brain gap. On one side, what he calls digital natives—those who have never known a world without e-mail and text messaging—use their superior cognitive abilities to make snap decisions and juggle multiple sources of sensory input. On the other side, digital immigrants—those who witnessed the advent of modern technology long after their brains had been hardwired—are better at reading facial expressions than they are at navigating cyberspace. "The typical immigrant's brain was trained in completely different ways of socializing and learning, taking things step-by-step and addressing one task at a time," he says. "Immigrants learn more methodically and tend to execute tasks more precisely."
But whether natural selection will favor one skill set over the other remains to be seen. For starters, there's no reason to believe the two behaviors are mutually exclusive. In fact, a 2005 Kaiser study found that young people who spent the most time engaged with high-technology also spent the most time interacting face-to-face, with friends and family. And as Small himself points out, digital natives and digital immigrants can direct their own neural circuitry—reaping the cognitive benefits of modern technology while preserving traditional social skills—simply by making time for both.
In the meantime, modern technology, and the skills it fosters, is evolving even faster than we are. There's no telling whether future iterations of computer games, online communities and the like will require more or less of the traditional social skills and learning strategies that we've spent so many eons cultivating. "Too many people write about this as if kids are in one country and adults are in another," says James Gee, a linguistics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What the future brain will look like is still anybody's guess.
McCain's Economic Proposals
It never ceases to amaze me how the Republicans seek to cut the captital gains tax. No matter what happens, whether it has anything to do with economics even, their first suggestion is to cut the capital gains tax. This will do nothing to help the middle class in this country.
"Sen. McCain also shows how little he understands the economy by offering lower capital gains rates in a year in which people don't have an awful lot of capital gains," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton responded. "His trickle-down, ideological recipes won't strengthen our economy and grow our middle-class." Burton added that the McCain plan provides "no tax relief at all to 101 million hardworking families, including 97 percent of senior citizens, and it does nothing to cut taxes for small businesses or give them access to credit."
"Sen. McCain also shows how little he understands the economy by offering lower capital gains rates in a year in which people don't have an awful lot of capital gains," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton responded. "His trickle-down, ideological recipes won't strengthen our economy and grow our middle-class." Burton added that the McCain plan provides "no tax relief at all to 101 million hardworking families, including 97 percent of senior citizens, and it does nothing to cut taxes for small businesses or give them access to credit."
Monday, October 13, 2008
MCain to Promise More Help for the Affluent
In yet another attempt to jump-start his campaign, it appears that Sen. John McCain is poised to offer more help to our beleagured wealthiest citizens. This is stock Republicanism.
The two men will debate Wednesday at Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y. CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer will moderate the 90-minute forum. Still, McCain promised to run a "respectful" campaign in the weeks to come. "I respect Senator Obama, we will conduct a respectful race and be sure everyone else does too. But there are stark difference between us," McCain said. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a top adviser to McCain, said the presidential candidate was considering a reduction in taxes on investments, including a possible cut in the capital gains tax. But campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said McCain would not announce any specific proposals during campaign stops Monday in Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. He added, "We will likely have further proposals this week as economic news and conditions change." Graham, on CBS News' Face the Nation said the GOP candidate was considering policy proposals that would cut taxes on investments. "I think it goes along the lines of now's the time to lower tax rates for investors, capital gains tax, dividend tax rates, to make sure that we can get the economy jump-started," Graham said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "It will be a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes." McCain already has laid out proposals to address the crisis, including a $300 billion plan for the federal government to buy distressed mortgages and renegotiate them at a reduced price.
The two men will debate Wednesday at Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y. CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer will moderate the 90-minute forum. Still, McCain promised to run a "respectful" campaign in the weeks to come. "I respect Senator Obama, we will conduct a respectful race and be sure everyone else does too. But there are stark difference between us," McCain said. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a top adviser to McCain, said the presidential candidate was considering a reduction in taxes on investments, including a possible cut in the capital gains tax. But campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said McCain would not announce any specific proposals during campaign stops Monday in Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. He added, "We will likely have further proposals this week as economic news and conditions change." Graham, on CBS News' Face the Nation said the GOP candidate was considering policy proposals that would cut taxes on investments. "I think it goes along the lines of now's the time to lower tax rates for investors, capital gains tax, dividend tax rates, to make sure that we can get the economy jump-started," Graham said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "It will be a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes." McCain already has laid out proposals to address the crisis, including a $300 billion plan for the federal government to buy distressed mortgages and renegotiate them at a reduced price.
An Explanation of the Financial Meltdown
From my colleague Paul Durantini.
Hi Everyone,
This is one of the better summaries of why we are in the financial mess that we are in.
Cheers,
Paul
MarkRobertson Date 09-22-2008 17:48 On the heels of this weekend's latest morph involving Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the last brick from the wall that was Glass-Steagall has been kicked to the curb. Hugh McManus has shared the works of Charles R. Morris (Trillion Dollar Meltdown) with us and I thought it would be good to check and see what the seemingly-prescient Mr. Morris has on his mind lately. He didn't disappoint. See:The Madness of BankersSometimes things disappear into the ether when it comes to Internet links, so I'm going to do something unusual and copy the entire interview here, for posterity. This isn't intended to infringe on the works of The Texas Observer or Mr. Bryce or CounterCurrents in any way whatsoever.Millions of words have been written about the ongoing financial disaster largely caused by the subprime mortgage mess. But the most concise and easiest to understand handbook on the issue is almost certainly Charles R. Morris' The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. The book, published in March, spent several weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, and for good reason: The book explains in clear language exactly what happened and why.Morris, a lawyer and former banker who lives in Manhattan, has written 11 books. His articles have been published in myriad publications, including Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and BusinessWeek. He exchanged e-mails with Observer contributing writer Robert Bryce in early August.Texas Observer: You wrote a recent piece for BusinessWeek in which you argue that it is "essential to shrink the hypertrophied financial sector." Why has the financial sector grown so large over the past few decades?Charles Morris: Financial rewards on Wall Street have been rising much faster than in the rest of the economy for about 20 years. Commerce Department surveys show that financial sector profits were more than 40 percent of all corporate profits in 2007, far out of proportion to their share of output. Those rewards sucked in the cream of each year's B-school grads, top mathematicians and physicists, lawyers, etc. Couple that with the anti-regulatory atmosphere of the last couple decades, and we have seen an orgy of truly irresponsible, destructive "innovation"--anything to drive up earnings.The subprime crisis was purely a Wall Street invention. Subprime lending had always been a tiny sliver of the mortgage market, mostly within the Federal Housing Administration. In 2004 or so, Wall Street realized they needed higher mortgage yields to sell the complicated, mortgage-backed structures that produced their biggest fees. They started acquiring subprime lenders, paying brokers premiums for high-yield mortgages and the like, until by 2006, high-risk mortgages were about a third of all new originations. Nobody seemed to care that most of them could never be repaid; the focus was just on the fees. It's not much different from what happened with the infamous "investment trusts" that National City and other big banks were flogging in the late 1920s.TO: Perhaps the most important single deregulatory move of the past few decades was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a law created in 1933 that kept banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses from merging with each other. Glass-Steagall was replaced by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act (named for the trio of Republicans who sponsored it, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, U.S. Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, and U.S. Rep. Thomas Bliley of Virginia), which was signed into law in 1999. How culpable is Gramm for our current mess?CM: Gramm-Leach was part of the zeitgeist, and by the time it was passed, the big banks had long since worked around the old rules, so Glass-Steagall had already become virtually a dead letter. Investment banks had been stripping away the bread-and-butter lending businesses of the commercial banks, so Gramm-Leach was partly just an attempt to restore some balance. The root problem wasn't Gramm-Leach, but the prevailing dogma that self-regulated markets were inherently superior to supervised markets.TO: Speaking of Glass-Steagall, you wrote in your book that Congress "should seriously consider restoring some version" of it, including the separation of commercial banking and investment banking. Why is this so important?CM: Over the long term, financial sector profits have been about twice as high as corporate profits as a whole, which flies in the face of economic theory. High peak profits at financial companies make sense because they are so highly leveraged. But that should also expose them to commensurately greater losses, so profits would be about average over the cycle. But we tend to socialize financial sector losses, as we're doing now, while allowing partners and shareholders to keep their profits from the booms.I think we need a rigid distinction between regulated and unregulated financial companies. Only the regulated sectors would have access to deposit insurance, the Fed window, etc., while there would be strong legal bars against government support for the unregulated sector. [The "Fed window" refers to lending that the Federal Reserve normally provides to depository commercial banks. The Fed recently opened its "window" to Wall Street investment banks.]The regulated sectors would have strict leverage rules, and be intentionally a bit boring. Enforcing such distinctions would require very carefully crafted legislation. And I admit it would probably be hard to pass. Everyone deplores "moral hazard," but bankers make a lot of money when they succumb to it.TO: In our recent phone conversation, we talked about the role of hedge funds and their use of leverage, which is magnifying the potential damage of the derivatives now being employed. You said, "We can't control hedge funds. But we can stop regulated banks from lending to hedge funds." What effect will that prohibition on lending have?CM: There are many different kinds of hedge funds, of course. But a common strategy is to earn outsized returns by using extremely high leverage; and the leveraged lending, most of the time, comes from banks. If rich people want to invest in high-risk, high-leverage undertakings, that's their business. But regulated banks with a potential claim on public support shouldn't be allowed to lend to them, or be allowed to lend only with a very high capital penalty. If a hedge fund, or a highly leveraged investment bank, a Goldman Sachs, say, is at risk of failing, the core banking and payments system won't be at risk. The corollary of that, of course, is that if a hedge fund or an unregulated investment bank, say, gets into big trouble, they must simply fail, no matter how much damage it causes, which is why the barriers to a bailout would have to be written into law. Markets can't work if there is a "social safety net" for the biggest players.TO: It's obvious from your book that you are no fan of Alan Greenspan and his laissez-faire attitude toward financial markets. How responsible is he for our current situation?CM: To state it as generously as possible: Greenspan is the classic case of a good man in a job for much too long. Starting with the 1987 market crash, he built his reputation as a financial genius by intervening, often very adroitly, to supply fresh market capital at moments of crisis. He did the same thing after 9/11 and the 2001-2002 recession, but then kept rates much too low for much too long. His anti-regulatory zealotry also blinded him to the obvious asset bubble building up. And that's not hindsight; there were a lot of warnings, including from other governments.TO: Given your book's take on Paul Volcker and how he addressed the problems in the U.S. economy in the 1980s, it appears that you favor higher interest rates as a way to strengthen the dollar and therefore restore credibility to the U.S. financial system. That will almost certainly lower oil prices. It's also likely to trigger a sharp recession. But you think that a quick (and likely painful) recession is the best cure for our financial ailments. Why?CM: By my rough count, the federal government has already poured some $2 trillion into propping up the financial sector--that's including new Fed lending facilities, expanded lending by Freddie and Fannie (much of which goes to buying up mortgages from banks), the spending rebates, the new housing bill, and so on.Consumers have been spending far more than their incomes, at least since 2004 or so, personal savings rates are near zero, retirements are looming, we have crippling trade deficits and a collapsing dollar, which is a big factor in the oil price rise. And the current federal strategy is just to keep all that going, pouring in borrowed federal money to make up for the fall in consumer borrowing.It's the most shortsighted, let's-get-through-the-next-month strategy possible--not unlike strapped consumers playing credit-card roulette. I fear we're just making the ultimate reckoning worse and worse, much as Japan did when it covered up its asset bubble through the 1990s.The recessions that Volcker triggered in 1981 and 1982 were awful, but he managed to wrench the country onto a radically different course. I don't think there's any choice. Consumer spending rates are still near an all-time peak relative to income, and overall debt is still rising. We need a radical change of course. Whether McCain or Obama wins the presidency, they should try to get this behind them in their first two years.TO: I agree that we need better regulation of financial institutions. But it appears that financial chicanery happens on a regular, almost predictable cycle. In the '80s we had Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. In the '90s we had the savings and loan debacle and the Barings Bank meltdown. In the early '00s, we had Enron and Adelphia. We'll never be able to stop all the scam artists, but will more regulation reduce the frequency of the disasters?CM: My hopes are more modest than that. I just want to stop the scams going on now. If Wall Street and its lobbyists have their way, we'll end up with a total Wall Street bailout, plus some cosmetic regulatory changes ... It's the same kind of thing that's proved such a brilliant success at the Department of Homeland Security.TO: Perhaps your most important recommendation is this: "Force tough leverage constraints on regulated institutions while moving all risky exposures onto the balance sheet." Enron and other companies were experts at moving their risky assets off the balance sheet. If we are to achieve better regulation of assets and assure that they get properly accounted for on the balance sheet, won't that require better funding of regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission?CM: There are two ways to defeat regulation: One is to pass toothless laws; the other is to pass tough laws and not finance them. The [Food and Drug Administration] is perhaps the classic case of the second one, even more than the SEC. But, yes, it's pointless to create regulatory regimes without the tools to do their jobs.TO: Your book is titled The Trillion Dollar Meltdown. Will the final cost be $1 trillion? Or more?CM: More. It looks like probably $1.5 to $2 trillion at this point, although there may never be a final accounting.
Hi Everyone,
This is one of the better summaries of why we are in the financial mess that we are in.
Cheers,
Paul
MarkRobertson Date 09-22-2008 17:48 On the heels of this weekend's latest morph involving Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the last brick from the wall that was Glass-Steagall has been kicked to the curb. Hugh McManus has shared the works of Charles R. Morris (Trillion Dollar Meltdown) with us and I thought it would be good to check and see what the seemingly-prescient Mr. Morris has on his mind lately. He didn't disappoint. See:The Madness of BankersSometimes things disappear into the ether when it comes to Internet links, so I'm going to do something unusual and copy the entire interview here, for posterity. This isn't intended to infringe on the works of The Texas Observer or Mr. Bryce or CounterCurrents in any way whatsoever.Millions of words have been written about the ongoing financial disaster largely caused by the subprime mortgage mess. But the most concise and easiest to understand handbook on the issue is almost certainly Charles R. Morris' The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. The book, published in March, spent several weeks on The New York Times best-seller list, and for good reason: The book explains in clear language exactly what happened and why.Morris, a lawyer and former banker who lives in Manhattan, has written 11 books. His articles have been published in myriad publications, including Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and BusinessWeek. He exchanged e-mails with Observer contributing writer Robert Bryce in early August.Texas Observer: You wrote a recent piece for BusinessWeek in which you argue that it is "essential to shrink the hypertrophied financial sector." Why has the financial sector grown so large over the past few decades?Charles Morris: Financial rewards on Wall Street have been rising much faster than in the rest of the economy for about 20 years. Commerce Department surveys show that financial sector profits were more than 40 percent of all corporate profits in 2007, far out of proportion to their share of output. Those rewards sucked in the cream of each year's B-school grads, top mathematicians and physicists, lawyers, etc. Couple that with the anti-regulatory atmosphere of the last couple decades, and we have seen an orgy of truly irresponsible, destructive "innovation"--anything to drive up earnings.The subprime crisis was purely a Wall Street invention. Subprime lending had always been a tiny sliver of the mortgage market, mostly within the Federal Housing Administration. In 2004 or so, Wall Street realized they needed higher mortgage yields to sell the complicated, mortgage-backed structures that produced their biggest fees. They started acquiring subprime lenders, paying brokers premiums for high-yield mortgages and the like, until by 2006, high-risk mortgages were about a third of all new originations. Nobody seemed to care that most of them could never be repaid; the focus was just on the fees. It's not much different from what happened with the infamous "investment trusts" that National City and other big banks were flogging in the late 1920s.TO: Perhaps the most important single deregulatory move of the past few decades was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a law created in 1933 that kept banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses from merging with each other. Glass-Steagall was replaced by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act (named for the trio of Republicans who sponsored it, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, U.S. Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, and U.S. Rep. Thomas Bliley of Virginia), which was signed into law in 1999. How culpable is Gramm for our current mess?CM: Gramm-Leach was part of the zeitgeist, and by the time it was passed, the big banks had long since worked around the old rules, so Glass-Steagall had already become virtually a dead letter. Investment banks had been stripping away the bread-and-butter lending businesses of the commercial banks, so Gramm-Leach was partly just an attempt to restore some balance. The root problem wasn't Gramm-Leach, but the prevailing dogma that self-regulated markets were inherently superior to supervised markets.TO: Speaking of Glass-Steagall, you wrote in your book that Congress "should seriously consider restoring some version" of it, including the separation of commercial banking and investment banking. Why is this so important?CM: Over the long term, financial sector profits have been about twice as high as corporate profits as a whole, which flies in the face of economic theory. High peak profits at financial companies make sense because they are so highly leveraged. But that should also expose them to commensurately greater losses, so profits would be about average over the cycle. But we tend to socialize financial sector losses, as we're doing now, while allowing partners and shareholders to keep their profits from the booms.I think we need a rigid distinction between regulated and unregulated financial companies. Only the regulated sectors would have access to deposit insurance, the Fed window, etc., while there would be strong legal bars against government support for the unregulated sector. [The "Fed window" refers to lending that the Federal Reserve normally provides to depository commercial banks. The Fed recently opened its "window" to Wall Street investment banks.]The regulated sectors would have strict leverage rules, and be intentionally a bit boring. Enforcing such distinctions would require very carefully crafted legislation. And I admit it would probably be hard to pass. Everyone deplores "moral hazard," but bankers make a lot of money when they succumb to it.TO: In our recent phone conversation, we talked about the role of hedge funds and their use of leverage, which is magnifying the potential damage of the derivatives now being employed. You said, "We can't control hedge funds. But we can stop regulated banks from lending to hedge funds." What effect will that prohibition on lending have?CM: There are many different kinds of hedge funds, of course. But a common strategy is to earn outsized returns by using extremely high leverage; and the leveraged lending, most of the time, comes from banks. If rich people want to invest in high-risk, high-leverage undertakings, that's their business. But regulated banks with a potential claim on public support shouldn't be allowed to lend to them, or be allowed to lend only with a very high capital penalty. If a hedge fund, or a highly leveraged investment bank, a Goldman Sachs, say, is at risk of failing, the core banking and payments system won't be at risk. The corollary of that, of course, is that if a hedge fund or an unregulated investment bank, say, gets into big trouble, they must simply fail, no matter how much damage it causes, which is why the barriers to a bailout would have to be written into law. Markets can't work if there is a "social safety net" for the biggest players.TO: It's obvious from your book that you are no fan of Alan Greenspan and his laissez-faire attitude toward financial markets. How responsible is he for our current situation?CM: To state it as generously as possible: Greenspan is the classic case of a good man in a job for much too long. Starting with the 1987 market crash, he built his reputation as a financial genius by intervening, often very adroitly, to supply fresh market capital at moments of crisis. He did the same thing after 9/11 and the 2001-2002 recession, but then kept rates much too low for much too long. His anti-regulatory zealotry also blinded him to the obvious asset bubble building up. And that's not hindsight; there were a lot of warnings, including from other governments.TO: Given your book's take on Paul Volcker and how he addressed the problems in the U.S. economy in the 1980s, it appears that you favor higher interest rates as a way to strengthen the dollar and therefore restore credibility to the U.S. financial system. That will almost certainly lower oil prices. It's also likely to trigger a sharp recession. But you think that a quick (and likely painful) recession is the best cure for our financial ailments. Why?CM: By my rough count, the federal government has already poured some $2 trillion into propping up the financial sector--that's including new Fed lending facilities, expanded lending by Freddie and Fannie (much of which goes to buying up mortgages from banks), the spending rebates, the new housing bill, and so on.Consumers have been spending far more than their incomes, at least since 2004 or so, personal savings rates are near zero, retirements are looming, we have crippling trade deficits and a collapsing dollar, which is a big factor in the oil price rise. And the current federal strategy is just to keep all that going, pouring in borrowed federal money to make up for the fall in consumer borrowing.It's the most shortsighted, let's-get-through-the-next-month strategy possible--not unlike strapped consumers playing credit-card roulette. I fear we're just making the ultimate reckoning worse and worse, much as Japan did when it covered up its asset bubble through the 1990s.The recessions that Volcker triggered in 1981 and 1982 were awful, but he managed to wrench the country onto a radically different course. I don't think there's any choice. Consumer spending rates are still near an all-time peak relative to income, and overall debt is still rising. We need a radical change of course. Whether McCain or Obama wins the presidency, they should try to get this behind them in their first two years.TO: I agree that we need better regulation of financial institutions. But it appears that financial chicanery happens on a regular, almost predictable cycle. In the '80s we had Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. In the '90s we had the savings and loan debacle and the Barings Bank meltdown. In the early '00s, we had Enron and Adelphia. We'll never be able to stop all the scam artists, but will more regulation reduce the frequency of the disasters?CM: My hopes are more modest than that. I just want to stop the scams going on now. If Wall Street and its lobbyists have their way, we'll end up with a total Wall Street bailout, plus some cosmetic regulatory changes ... It's the same kind of thing that's proved such a brilliant success at the Department of Homeland Security.TO: Perhaps your most important recommendation is this: "Force tough leverage constraints on regulated institutions while moving all risky exposures onto the balance sheet." Enron and other companies were experts at moving their risky assets off the balance sheet. If we are to achieve better regulation of assets and assure that they get properly accounted for on the balance sheet, won't that require better funding of regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission?CM: There are two ways to defeat regulation: One is to pass toothless laws; the other is to pass tough laws and not finance them. The [Food and Drug Administration] is perhaps the classic case of the second one, even more than the SEC. But, yes, it's pointless to create regulatory regimes without the tools to do their jobs.TO: Your book is titled The Trillion Dollar Meltdown. Will the final cost be $1 trillion? Or more?CM: More. It looks like probably $1.5 to $2 trillion at this point, although there may never be a final accounting.
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