Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky Says

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

Cornel West - Brother West

I am reading this memoir by Cornel West. It is electrifying. More later.

The Last 10 Miserable Years

Ten Miserable Years
Why it's going to so hard--and why it's so important--to put this decade behind us.
E.J. Dionne Jr.

Ten Miserable Years The Whipping Boy Church and State December 31, 2009 | 12:00 am

How Barack Obama Ended the Culture Wars--For Now

Dionne: Why Progressives Need to Stop Screaming and Start Organizing for the Next Health Care FightWASHINGTON -- Certain decades shape the country's political life for generations by leaving behind an era to embrace or, at least as often, to scorn.

The 1960s were definitely such a decade. The 1930s qualify, and so do the 1980s. But as important as all these periods have been, their significance may be dwarfed by the reckless and squandered decade that is, mercifully, ending.

I'm afraid that the past 10 years will be seen as a time when the United States badly lost its way by using our military power carelessly, misunderstanding the real challenges to our long-term security, and pursuing domestic policies that constrained our options for the future while needlessly threatening our prosperity.

I am aware that the previous paragraph is thoroughly controversial, and that befits any description of a politically consequential decade. Much of the contention surrounding Barack Obama's presidency is simply a continuation of our argument over the effects of George W. Bush's time in office.

That is why Obama, despite his fervent wishes, has been unable to usher in a new period of consensus. Bush's defenders know that Obama's election represented a popular reaction against the consequences of the 43rd president's time in office. Because Obama is both the anti-Bush and the leader of the post-Bush cleanup squad, his success would complete the rebuke. So the Bush camp -- Karl Rove's regular contributions to The Wall Street Journal's opinion pages are emblematic -- must stay on the attack.

Domestically, Obama inherited an economic catastrophe. Dealing with the wreckage required a large expenditure of public funds that increased a deficit already bloated by the previous president's decision to fight two wars and to cut taxes at the same time. Bush's defenders, preferring to focus attention away from this earlier period of irresponsibility, act as if the world began on Jan. 20, 2009, by way of saddling Obama with the blame for everything that now ails us. But the previous eight years cannot be wished away.

Our current president is more deliberate about the use of American power than his predecessor was, and determined to repair America's image with other nations. Obama is committed to fighting terrorism, but does not believe that a "war on terror" should define American foreign policy.

This leads directly to another essential argument over the meaning of the last decade: whether the proper response to the 9/11 attacks included not only the widely supported retaliation in Afghanistan but also the invasion of Iraq. Obama's view -- that the Iraq War wasted American power and dissipated good will toward us around the world -- is a direct reproach to the core assumptions of the Bush foreign policy.

So is Obama's refusal "to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests," as he put it in his recent West Point speech, as well as his insistence upon appreciating "the connection between our national security and our economy." This measured approach to the use of force is antithetical to a foreign policy based on "bring 'em on" and sweeping pledges to "defeat our enemies across the world."

But this makes it imperative for Obama to inspire trust in his capacity to thwart terrorism, and his administration's initial response to the Christmas Day airliner attack fell short. Republicans were shameless in politicizing the incident, knowing that rehabilitating Bush's approach to terrorism depends upon discrediting Obama's. The president can't afford to give them anything to work with, as he finally seemed to grasp on Tuesday.

It should not surprise us that the battle for the future will be shaped by struggles over the past. How often over the last 40 years have conservatives defended their policies in the name of rolling back "the excesses of the '60s"? For even longer, liberals were charged with being locked into "the New Deal approaches of the 1930s." Liberals, in turn, pointed proudly to both eras as times of unparalleled social advance.

As for the 1980s, they remain a positive reference point for conservatives even as progressives condemn the Age of Reagan for opening the way to the deregulatory excesses that led to the recent downturn.

Americans instinctively recoil at living too much in the past. Yet we have no choice but to reach a settlement about the meaning of the last 10 years. It is the only way we will successfully turn the next 10 into a decade of renewal.

Joe Klein on Health Care Reform

The Left's Idiocy on Health Reform
By Joe Klein Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009




In the snarkier precincts of the left-wing blogosphere, mainstream journalists like me are often called villagers. The reference, so far as I can tell, has to do with isolation: we live in this little village on the Potomac — actually, I don't, but no matter — constantly intermingling over hors d'oeuvres, deciding who is "serious" (a term of derision in the blogosphere) and who is not, regurgitating spin spoon-fed by our sources or conjuring a witless conventional wisdom that has nothing to do with reality as it is lived outside the village. There is, of course, some truth to this. Washington is insular; certain local shamans are celebrated beyond all logic; some of my columnar colleagues have lost touch with everything beyond their armchairs and egos.

But there is a great irony here: villagery is a trope more applicable to those making the accusation than to those being snarked upon. The left-wing blogosphere, at its worst, is a claustrophobic hamlet of the well educated, less interested in meaningful debate than the "village" it mocks. (At its best, it is a source of clever and well-informed anti-Establishment commentary.) Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as that other, more populous hamlet, the right-wing Fox News and Limbaugh slum. Hilariously, as we stagger from one awful decade into the next, there has been a coagulation of these extremes — a united front against the turgid ceremonies of legislative democracy, like compromise, and disdain for the politician most responsible for nudging our snarled checks and balances toward action, Barack Obama. The issue that has brought them together is opposition to the Senate's health care–reform bill, which makes some sense on the right, but none at all on the left.
(See the 5 things that the House and Senate have to iron out on health care.)

The prejudices of the tea partiers, birthers, deathers, Palinites and other assorted "real" Americans are well known; the historic conservative opposition to universal health care isn't news. The dyspepsia of the left blogosphere is less easily explained, though. It has its roots in an issue the left got right and almost everyone else got wrong: the war in Iraq. There is still intense, unabated anger on the left because its opposition to the war was often ridiculed and almost always ignored in 2003. The anger at so-called moderates — actually, Democratic conservatives like Joe Lieberman — who supported the war is especially intense. This was the anger that fed the Howard Dean movement in 2004, and it sets the emotional parameters for other issues far more complicated than the war, like health care. Those who were wrong about Iraq can't be trusted on anything else.

Actually, both the left and right opponents of health care reform are drinking from the same watercooler. Activists on both sides — consulting their focus groups, no doubt — found that the message that most roused their troops was the same: a government takeover of health care. The tidbit in the plan that came closest to embodying that message was a worthy but relatively minor provision called the public option, which would offer something like Medicare as one of a menu of choices for several million Americans not receiving health insurance from their employers. For the right, this was socialism. For the left, it was a step toward stripping private insurers of their choke hold on the system. When the public option was killed — by Lieberman, of all people — the left saw Iraq redux and rebelled. Not only was there no public option, but people would also be mandated — forced! — to patronize the same insurance companies that exploit them now. There would be a windfall of 30 million new customers for the insurers and drug companies. What a sellout! Bloggers at sites like Daily Kos, the Huffington Post (including Arianna herself) and FireDogLake held a village bonfire. Dean materialized to help fan the flames.
(Read "Forcing Insurers to Spend Enough on Health Care.")

To be sure, the bill that emerged from the Senate has problems. But it is landmark social legislation that guarantees and subsidizes health care coverage for 30 million Americans who don't have it now. Yes, this means a lot of new customers for the insurance companies — but the insurers will face strict new regulations, and many of their new customers will be people they refused to cover in the past. Ultimately, it means an annual income redistribution of $200 billion to help the working poor pay for insurance, which is why Republicans oppose the bill. But Jacob Hacker, the leading promoter of the public option, favors it. Every Democratic Senator, including those like Ohio's Sherrod Brown who have impeccable liberal records, favors it.

The Malkin Award

From Andrew Sullivan

28 Dec 2009 06:23 pm



Dish Award Results 2009: Malkin Award Winner
By a mile, it's Glenn Beck, with 42 percent of the near 8,000 votes in this category. His award-winning statement:

“We call them progressives now, but back in Samuel Adams’ day, they used to call them tyrants. A little later, I think they were also called slave owners."

Palin's Death Panels "Lie of the Year"

Death Panels Lie On Factcheck.Org's 'Whoppers Of 2009'

The non-partisan group, however, pinned most of the blame on longtime reform foe Betsy McCaughey.

"Death Panels" The "pulling the plug on grandma" falsehood really took off once former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin coined the term "Death Panel," but this falsehood got its first push from former New York lieutenant governor and health care overhaul opponent Betsy McCaughey.

She misrepresented a provision (since dropped) that merely called for Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling sessions to help seniors make end-of-life care decisions, such as designating a health care proxy, choosing a hospice or writing a living will. McCaughey twisted that into "a required counseling session" that would "tell them how to end their life sooner." Palin later wrote on her Facebook page that she doesn't want government bureaucrats to decide whether her parents or child with Down Syndrome are "worthy of health care." Who would? Certainly not legislators, who didn't call for the creation of any such "Death Panel" in the health care bills.

FROM ANDREW SULLIVAN
December 25

My Reader's Literary Mentor
A reader writes:

The tone of the "From The In-Tray II" emails reminds me of the great Ignatius J. Reilly character in A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Maybe the funniest book I've ever read. A few Ignatius gems...

"A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.”

and

"I am at this moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."

The Senate Passes Health Care Reform

from Paul Krugman

December 24, 2009, 10:47 am
Noo Yawk Roolz!
I watched the Senate vote this morning, and despite all, it was an inspiring moment. A few random thoughts:

1. It’s petty and silly, but after what seems like a whole adult lifetime in which Central Casting insisted that major politicians be either Southern gentlemen or Midwestern heartland types, it felt good to watch and listen to Chuck Schumer, speaking the language of my roots, at the victory press conference — even with that green tie. Noo Yawk Roolz!

2. More seriously, Jon Chait is right: this is a great achievement.

3. As expected, self-proclaimed centrists can’t bring themselves to say anything nice about a bill that delivers everything they claim to want. Many people have pointed to David Broder’s piece this morning; let me add a historical note. Back in 2006, Broder hailed the Massachusetts health reform as a “major policy success”. Now the Senate has passed a bill that is, broadly speaking, a better-funded version of the MA plan plus a major effort at cost control. Where’s the praise?

Anyway, a pretty good morning.

"I Never Read Poetry"

"I never read poetry. It might soften me."

-General Hindenburg (1912)
From "The Case for Books" by Robert Darnton

Krugman Likes the Impending Health Care Bill

Paul Krugman likes the bill. That's good enough for me. He points out that all the Republicans ever propose is to cut taxes on the rich and remove some regulations on business, whereas finally the Democratically controlled Congress has at long last addressed the nation's number one problem with appropriate legislation.

December 19, 2009, 3:55 pm
The Insincere Center

Matthew Yglesias makes a good point: The health care bill

represents a return, after fifteen years, of the idea that congress should be trying to pass major legislation that tackles major national problems. And even beyond that, it restores an even longer-lost tradition of congress trying to pass major legislation on specifically progressive priorities.

More than that, it represents a rejection of the view that the solution for all problems is to cut some taxes and remove some regulations. In that sense, what’s happening now, for all the disappointment it represents for progressives, is a historic moment.

And let’s also not fail to take note of those who had a chance to join in this historic moment, and punted.

I’m not talking about the progressives who have rejected this bill because they don’t think it’s good enough; I disagree, but I respect their motives. I’m talking instead about the self-described centrists, pundits and politicians, who have spent years lecturing us on the need to make hard choices and actually come to grip with America’s problems; you know who I mean. So what did they do when faced with a chance to help confront those problems? They made excuses.

Health care costs are, as everyone serious acknowledges, at the core of many of our difficulties, very much including long-term budget deficits. What reformers have been saying for years is that the only way to tackle health care costs is in the context of a reform that also tackles the problem of uninsurance; and so it has proved. As Atul Gawande and others have pointed out, the Senate bill tries a wide variety of approaches to cost containment — in fact, just about everything that has been suggested. We don’t know which of these approaches will work or how well, but that’s more than anyone has managed to achieve ever before.

Oh, and the legislation is fiscally responsible from the start.

So did the deficit scolds, the people who preach the need to rein in entitlements and start paying our way, rally behind the cost-containment plans? Um, no. As I said, they made excuses, whining that the bill doesn’t do enough (as if there were any chance of passing a bill with everything they want), or insisting that even though the legislation does do the right thing, it doesn’t matter, because Congress won’t let the cost cuts go into effect — which turns out to be a claim at odds with the evidence of history.

And the lesson I take from that is that these people are insincere. They like posing as defenders of fiscal rectitude; they like declaring a pox on both houses; but when push comes to shove, their dislike of social insurance, their refusal to consider any government economy measures that don’t involve punishing people with lower incomes, trumps their supposed concern about acting responsibly.

Gentlemen — everyone I can think of here does happen to be male — this was your moment of truth, your test of character. You failed.

Smartphones and Shopping

If I EVER start using a phone for shopping, then you will know that I have completely lost my mind. . . FLH

THE STORY
Mobile Phones Become Essential Tool for Holiday Shopping

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Michael Robison uses an application called ShopSavvy to find deals, but he doesn't always go for the product that costs less.

Powerful software applications for devices like the Apple iPhone are making it easy for bargain-hunting consumers to see if another retailer is offering a better deal on a big-screen HDTV or pair of shoes and to use it to haggle at the cash register.

Online retailers are revamping the mobile versions of their sites so consumers can make purchases without tedious typing. And offline retailers, battling for every last dollar, are sending cellphone users electronic coupons to lure them away from competitors.

One in five shoppers said they intended to use their cellphones to shop this holiday season, according to an annual survey by Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm. Of those, 45 percent said they would use their phone to research prices, 32 percent said they would use it to find coupons or read reviews and 25 percent said they would make purchases from their phones.

“We are at the cusp of this technology really driving a lot of activity during the shopping season,” said Stacy Janiak, United States retail practice leader at Deloitte. “It is both an opportunity and a challenge for a retailer, because you can have a consumer who can cross-shop your store with other bricks-and-mortar stores or online, all from the convenience of your aisle.”

Is the Future of Digital in Your Phone?

I do hope that I will NEVER be reading off of my phone.

Bonus Pool Size | Main | Why A Housing Bubble Came About »

Dec 10 2009, 4:33 pm by Derek Thompson

Are You Reading This on Your Phone?
How have our media-consumption habits changed over the last few decades? Print has shriveled, radio has gone mute and the Internet has obviously soaked up a lot of those lost eyeballs and ears. Via Felix Salmon, these cool pictures break down where we consume most of our information -- TV vs. Internet vs. newspapers, etc -- and how our media diet has evolved in the last 40 years. My takeaway: The information revolution is living in your pocket.





My favorite graph is this one, that explains how our information consumption habits have changed since 1960 and 1980:
The big loser here is evidently print and radio. Old-fashioned print represented a quarter Americans' consumed words in 1960, and now struggles along at 9 percent, one-third of computers. The big winner, as I see it, is phones, which have exploded as a source of reading in the last few years. Google acquired Ad Mob, a mobile display advertising company, in November precisely because this trend is growing exponentially and Google needs to stay of Internet ads, wherever we access them.

Mobile ad spending is expected to grow 15 percent next year. I think that prediction could be conservative. As the smart phone war between iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm, Android, etc heats up, the competition will only drive up their capacity and utility and encourage more people to think of their phones as small computers that can make calls, rather than phones pretending as small computers.

Consuming "Data"

From The NY Times

Part of the Daily American Diet, 34 Gigabytes of Data
E-MailPrint



BuzzPermalinkBy NICK BILTON
Published: December 9, 2009
The average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day — an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades — according to a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego.

According to calculations in the report, that daily information diet includes about 100,000 words, both those read in print and on the Web as well as those heard on television and the radio. By comparison, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” contains about 460,000 words.

The researchers, who built their work on previous studies of information consumption, found that Americans take in data through various channels, including the television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games. Most of this time is spent in front of screens watching TV-related content, averaging nearly five hours of daily consumption.

Second is radio, which the average American listens to for about 2.2 hours a day. The computer comes in third, at just under two hours a day. Video games take up about an hour, and reading takes up 36 minutes.

Most of these experiences happen simultaneously, like talking on the phone while checking e-mail, or instant messaging while watching TV.

Overall, information consumption is increasing at about 6 percent a year, the report estimated.

“Gaming saw the biggest leap in the number of bytes we consume,” accounting for about 55 percent of the total, said Roger Bohn, a professor of technology management and co-author of the study, which is the first to consider video games part of overall data consumption.

Consumption of print media has declined consistently, Professor Bohn said. “But if you add up the amount of time people spend surfing the Web, they are actually reading more than ever,” he added.

Collectively, American households consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information of all kinds in 2008, the researchers estimated.

A zettabyte is equal to one billion trillion bytes: a 1 with 21 zeros at the end. A single zettabyte is equivalent to 100 billion copies of all the books in the Library of Congress, or as the report says, seven layers of textbooks covering the continental United States and Alaska.

Financing for the research project came from AT&T, Cisco Systems, I.B.M., Intel, LSI, Oracle and Seagate Technology, with early support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Coming to Terms with William Faulkner

The literate Southerner must come to terms with Faulkner. My task is to understand the man, the writer, without getting bogged down in his writings, which I find difficult. The novels demand a lot of the reader, and are not fun reading. The short stories are OK.

Stephen Oates - Faulkner: The Man and the Artist

I thoroughly enjoyed this biography of William Faulkner. For the first time I get a sense of the flesh and blood man. Faulkner seems to have been a hard man to get to know, for he was not garrulous and didn't not seek to reveal much of himself.

This book is valuable also because the author summarizes each of the novels. I have read some Faulkner, but do not plan to read any more except to finish the short stories and maybe read Alsalom, Alsalom.

What intests me is to come to terms with the man himself and his work as a whole without getting bogged down in particular works. He constructed his imaginary world with characters who wandered across multiple books. He said he wrote about universal themes based on the human heart in conflict with itself. He came out of small-town Mississippi in the early decades of the 20th century. He had family history and stories to draw on. The material was at hand for his writing.

I enjoyed reading about his time in New Orleans with writer Sherwood Anderson. Faulkner made the obligatory trip to Europe in the early 1920's. He had numerous stints in Hollywood writing movie scripts though none of them amounted to much. Given his acute and chronic alcoholism, it's amazing that he lived to almost 65. His wife Estelle was crazy in her own right---as much a drinker as he was. He would have long brooding spells when he would shut himself into his writing room.

At the time of death in 1962, he was planning to move to Virginia having fallen in love with that state when he served as writer in residence at UVA. I did not know this.

I suppose I will have further comments on Mr. Faulkner.

Another Glimpse at Palin

Palin Question of the Day
Isaac Chotiner

December 4, 2009 | 11:13 am 13 comments



Palinology 101?

Weekend Reading, December 4-6

You Think the American Relationship With Pakistan Is Fraught Now...Sam Tanenhaus' New Yorker review of Sarah Palin's book, as well as another book about the former governor, contains this nugget:

Palin, though notoriously ill-travelled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not. But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to [Scott] Conroy and [Shushannah] Walshe [authors of 'Sarah From Alaska']. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” [Italics Mine]

Why--and readers should weigh in--has this gotten absolutely no media attention?

The NY Times Top 10 Nonfiction

1 GOING ROGUE, by Sarah Palin. (Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99.) A memoir by the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate. PABLUM FOR IDIOTS, FULL OF FACTUAL ERRORS, POLITICS FOR DUMMIES, A RACIST MANIFESTO.

2 HAVE A LITTLE FAITH, by Mitch Albom. (Hyperion, $23.99.) A suburban rabbi and a Detroit pastor teach lessons about the comfort of belief. WHO KNOWS? I MIGHT READ IT.

3 OPEN, by Andre Agassi. (Knopf, $28.95.) The tennis champion’s autobiography. I COULDN'T CARE LESS ABOUT AGASSI.

4 SUPERFREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I READ THE FIRST ONE (Morrow/HarperCollins, $29.99.) A scholar and a journalist apply economic thinking to everything: the sequel. I READ THE FIRST ONE AND WAS UNDERWHELMED. VASTLY OVERRATED. ECONOMICS FOR IDIOTS.

5 ARGUING WITH IDIOTS, written and edited by Glenn Beck, Kevin Balfe and others. (Mercury Radio Arts/Threshold Editions, $29.99.) The case against big government. REASON ENOUGH NEVER TO ARGUE WITH AN IDIOT LIKE BECK. IT'S SCARY THAT ANYONE TAKES THIS IDIOT SERIOUSLY.

6 TRUE COMPASS, by Edward M. Kennedy. (Twelve, $35.) The late senator’s autobiography. I HOPE TO GET AROUND TO READING IT.

7 A SIMPLE CHRISTMAS, by Mike Huckabee. (Sentinel, $19.95.) Christmas memories from the former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential aspirant. HUCKABEE HAS TIME TO WRITE THIS BETWEEN PARDONING CRIMINALS WHO GET OUT OF JAIL AND KILL AGAIN.

8 WHAT THE DOG SAW, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) A decade of New Yorker essays. NO THANKS

9 THE IMPERIAL CRUISE, by James Bradley. (Little, Brown, $29.99.) In 1905, during a diplomatic journey organized by Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft negotiated secret agreements with several Asian countries. NO REASON TO READ.

10 OUTLIERS, by Malcolm Gladwell. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Why some people succeed, from the author of “Blink.” I ENJOYED IT.

Now or Never for Health Care Reform?

Reform or Else

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 3, 2009
Health care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of “centrist” senators — senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible


But if they’re really concerned with fiscal responsibility, they shouldn’t be worried about what would happen if health reform passes. They should, instead, be worried about what would happen if it doesn’t pass. For America can’t get control of its budget without controlling health care costs — and this is our last, best chance to deal with these costs in a rational way.

Some background: Long-term fiscal projections for the United States paint a grim picture. Unless there are major policy changes, expenditure will consistently grow faster than revenue, eventually leading to a debt crisis.

What’s behind these projections? An aging population, which will raise the cost of Social Security, is part of the story. But the main driver of future deficits is the ever-rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. If health care costs rise in the future as they have in the past, fiscal catastrophe awaits.

You might think, given this picture, that extending coverage to those who would otherwise be uninsured would exacerbate the problem. But you’d be wrong, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured in America are, on average, relatively young and healthy; covering them wouldn’t raise overall health care costs very much.

Second, the proposed health care reform links the expansion of coverage to serious cost-control measures for Medicare. Think of it as a grand bargain: coverage for (almost) everyone, tied to an effort to ensure that health care dollars are well spent.

Are we talking about real savings, or just window dressing? Well, the health care economists I respect are seriously impressed by the cost-control measures in the Senate bill, which include efforts to improve incentives for cost-effective care, the use of medical research to guide doctors toward treatments that actually work, and more. This is “the best effort anyone has made,” says Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A letter signed by 23 prominent health care experts — including Mark McClellan, who headed Medicare under the Bush administration — declares that the bill’s cost-control measures “will reduce long-term deficits.”

The fact that we’re seeing the first really serious attempt to control health care costs as part of a bill that tries to cover the uninsured seems to confirm what would-be reformers have been saying for years: The path to cost control runs through universality. We can only tackle out-of-control costs as part of a deal that also provides Americans with the security of guaranteed health care.

That observation in itself should make anyone concerned with fiscal responsibility support this reform. Over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, the proposed legislation would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. And by giving us a chance, finally, to rein in the ever-growing spending of Medicare, it would greatly improve our long-run fiscal prospects.

But there’s another reason failure to pass reform would be devastating — namely, the nature of the opposition.

The Republican campaign against health care reform has rested in part on the traditional arguments, arguments that go back to the days when Ronald Reagan was trying to scare Americans into opposing Medicare — denunciations of “socialized medicine,” claims that universal health coverage is the road to tyranny, etc.

But in the closing rounds of the health care fight, the G.O.P. has focused more and more on an effort to demonize cost-control efforts. The Senate bill would impose “draconian cuts” on Medicare, says Senator John McCain, who proposed much deeper cuts just last year as part of his presidential campaign. “If you’re a senior and you’re on Medicare, you better be afraid of this bill,” says Senator Tom Coburn.

If these tactics work, and health reform fails, think of the message this would convey: It would signal that any effort to deal with the biggest budget problem we face will be successfully played by political opponents as an attack on older Americans. It would be a long time before anyone was willing to take on the challenge again; remember that after the failure of the Clinton effort, it was 16 years before the next try at health reform.

That’s why anyone who is truly concerned about fiscal policy should be anxious to see health reform succeed. If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won’t deal with our biggest fiscal problem until we’re forced into action by a nasty debt crisis.

So to the centrists still sitting on the fence over health reform: If you care about fiscal responsibility, you better be afraid of what will happen if reform fails.

I Hope We've Heard the End of Republican Tax Giveaways to the Rich

From Andrew Sullivan
The main reason to be a Republican is to believe that the main domestic purpose of government is to cut taxes for the rich---to make the richest amongst us prosperous with the largesse trickling down to the rest of us. This is and always has been nonsense.


The Stimulus Worked?, Ctd
Looking at the recent numbers, Bruce Bartlett makes the case:

The CBO also looked at the stimulative effect of various parts of the stimulus package. It found that purchases of goods and services by the federal government--such as for public works--had the largest bang for the buck, raising GDP by $2.50 for each $1 spent. Transfer payments had a lesser impact, but were still significantly more stimulative than tax cuts. Moreover, tax cuts of the sort favored by Republicans have the least impact. According to the CBO, tax cuts for low-income individuals raise GDP by as much as $1.70 for every $1 of revenue loss, while those for the rich and for corporations raised GDP by at most 50 cents for every $1 of revenue loss.

Lest one suspect the CBO of bias, private economists have also found that tax cuts are far less stimulative than spending under current economic conditions. Mark Zandi of Moody's ( MCO - news - people ) Economy.com, an advisor to John McCain last year, recently testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that the Republicans' favorite tax proposals--making all the Bush tax cuts permanent and cutting the corporate tax rate--would raise GDP by at most 37 cents for each $1 of revenue loss. By contrast, increased outlays for infrastructure, aid to state and local governments and extended unemployment benefits increase GDP by between $1.41 and $1.57 for every $1 spent.

About Faulkner

What interests me about William Faulkner is less the writing than the man himself: his trials and tribulations and the sources of his literature. In this Oates biography, for the first time I am getting a feeling for the man.

The Stephen Oates Biography of Faulkner

I am reading this bio of William Faulkner and am thoroughly enjoying it. The mood to read this book came to me after driving thru Faulkner Country last week as Freddy and I drove to Little Rock and back. We drove thru New Albany, where he was born. We see a sign for Ripley, where you will find the statue of the Old Colonel, Faulkner's great grandfather and a major inspiration. We see the sign for Byhalia where he died in 1962. It's haunting.

The Danger She Represents

From Andrew Sullivan

Why I worry. . .
And why I will not relent on Palin and the danger she represents:

WMDs, Conservatives, Liberals
A reader writes:

That the psychology behind why the WMD propaganda was so obvious and so enraging to liberals, and so opaque to conservatives, has been one of the more interesting elements of the past 6 years (for me).

Orwell wrote:

"The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action ... He [H.G. Wells] was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity."

Orwell nailed the dynamics boiling under the surface of the current political environment. Liberals are instinctively opposed to racial pride, nationalism, religious bigotry, and leader-worship--and we saw it in spades with George Bush and Bushism. Umberto Eco's "Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" were on parade and it set our hair on fire.

Have you considered why you were blind to this?

I think I have. I trusted a president after a national catastrophe in a time of war. I had become completely inured to the evidence of Saddam's WMDs, and mindful of our under-estimating his WMD potential in 1990. I assumed that no president would launch a war without sufficient troops to keep the peace therefater. I was unaware we had effectively withdrawn from the Geneva Conventions. I was deeply suspicious of the motives of those who opposed the president, many of whom, I suspected, would have opposed him under any circumstance.

I love this country and was deeply angry at what had been done to her.

Was I or am I a nascent fascist? No more than any of us are, I hope. Do I feel racial pride? Nah. I do feel pride in the West, though. Religious faith? Check. Leader worship? Nah. Trust and misplaced hope are not the same as worship, but I do confess to lionizing Bush after 9/11 arguably because I desperately wanted to believe we had a president who could rise to the occasion. And the September 20 speech was remarkable. Love of war? I hope not. But I was less respectful of the benefits of a poisonous peace than I should have been in retrospect.

The key, I think, and Orwell is a model in this, is not to lose those passions that make us human, but to subject them to constant scrutiny and to evaluate the facts as best one can as they emerge. This is neither bloodless liberalism nor authoritarian conservatism. It's an attempt at balance.



And we appease or ignore those forces at our peril.

A Thanksgiving

"In this world of sin and sorrow, there is always something to be thankful for. I am thankful I am not a Republican."

-H.L. Mencken

A Great Article

This is good stuff, my kind of stuff, an article about current politics within the context of American history by a first-class historian. Perhaps I'll have more to say once I digest it.

Populism Monday, Nov 23, 2009 17:05 PST
Can populism be liberal?
The GOP has owned it since Nixon. Democrats would have to return to the New Deal to recapture it
By Michael Lind

Is a Jackson revival under way? I'm referring not to the late King of Pop but to the 19th century populist president whom his opponents called "King Andrew." According to Michael Barone, in the 2010 elections Republicans have a chance to knock Democrats out of as many as three dozen insecure congressional seats in "Jacksonian districts."

By itself, this would merely reinforce the identification of the Party Formerly Known as Lincoln's with the white South. But in a time of popular anger over banker bonuses and lobby-hobbled government, the themes of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism have appeal far beyond the Scots-Irish enclaves of the Appalachians and Ozarks. Witness the calls from Democrats as well as Republicans for President Obama to oust Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and pay more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street.

In itself, American populism is neither left nor right. Translated into economics, Jacksonian populism spells producerism. For generations, Jacksonian populists have believed that the hardworking majority of small producers is threatened from above and below by two classes of drones: unproductive capitalists and unproductive paupers. While government promotion of public goods like defense, infrastructure and utilities that benefit all citizens is acceptable, Jacksonomics is suspicious of crony capitalists who owe their fortunes to political connections (can you spell B-A-I-L-O-U-T?). And Jacksonian producerism naturally is haunted by the nightmare of a class of the idle poor, who are capable of working but instead live off the labors of others and lack an ownership stake in the community.

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Reform movements have succeeded in the United States only when their programs resonated with populist and producerist values. Lincoln's antislavery Republicans succeeded where the earlier Whigs had failed because the Republicans persuaded Jacksonian farmers that snobbish, parasitic Southern Democratic slave owners were a greater threat to white farmers and white workers in the Midwest than rich Republican bankers and industrialists in the Northeast. Lincoln's Hamiltonian program of aid to railroads and national banking had to be sweetened with the offer of Western homesteads for yeoman farmers before former Jacksonian Democrats would join his coalition.

In the 20th century, the most popular and enduring legacies of the New Deal have been the programs compatible with small-d Jacksonian democracy -- public spending on infrastructure like dams and electric grids and highways, the promotion of single-family home ownership, federal aid to education and Social Security and Medicare, two entitlements tied to individual work by means of the payroll tax. In contrast, welfare for the nonworking poor was always unpopular with most New Deal Democratic voters, who preferred public works programs like the WPA, CCC and CETA to relief payments for the poor and unemployed. Although he broke with the New Deal tradition in other ways, President Bill Clinton was true to its spirit when he collaborated with the Republicans in converting "welfare" from an unpopular federal entitlement to state-based workfare programs.

All too often in American politics the populist distinction between producers and parasites has been mapped onto the racial division between whites and nonwhites. But the Jacksonian republican concern about freeloaders is not, in itself, racist. And it has frequently manifested itself in anger at the freeloading rich as well as the freeloading poor. At the moment, populist anxieties about the nonworking poor or illegal immigrants receiving medical coverage are eclipsed by populist anger at federal bailouts for well-connected Wall Street bankers who pay themselves titanic bonuses for unproductive gambling with other people's money.

Here, one might think, would be an opening for the center-left. And yet the Obama Democrats, unlike the Roosevelt Democrats, cannot take advantage of the popular backlash against Wall Street. Why?

One reason is that the attempt of the "New Democrats" like Clinton, Al Gore and Obama to win Wall Street campaign donations has been all too successful. As Clinton's Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin helped complete the conversion of the Democrats from a party of unions and populists into a party of financial elites and college-educated professionals. Subsequently Obama raised more money from Wall Street than his Democratic primary rivals and John McCain. On becoming president, he turned over economic policymaking to Rubin's protégé Larry Summers and others like Timothy Geithner from the Wall Street Democratic network.

The financial industry is now to the Obama Democrats what the AFL-CIO was to the Roosevelt-to-Johnson Democrats. It is touching to watch progressives lament that "their" president has the wrong advisors. "We trust the czar, we simply dislike his ministers." Obama owed his meteoric rise from obscurity to the presidency not to any bold progressive ideas -- he didn't have any -- but rather to a combination of his appealing life story with the big money that allowed him to abandon campaign finance limits. According to one Obama supporter I know, the Obama campaign pressured its Wall Street donors to make their contributions in the form of many small checks, in order to create the illusion that the campaign was more dependent on small contributors than it was in fact. Even now President Obama continues to raise money on Wall Street, while his administration says no to every progressive proposal for significant structural reform of the financial industry.

There remains the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, represented more in Congress than in Obama's White House -- and more in the House than in the Senate, a dully complacent millionaires' club. Can congressional progressives compete with conservatives to channel popular outrage? Unfortunately, progressivism in the form in which it has evolved in the last generation does not resonate with populist producerism.

To begin with, most of the moral fervor of the contemporary center-left has been diverted from the issue of fair rewards for labor to the environmental movement. In theory, environmentalism ought to fit the populist narrative of defending shared goods against special interests. Indeed, clean air and water legislation and public parks and wilderness areas are broadly popular with working-class Americans, not least hunters and fishers. But many environmentalists insist that global warming must be combated not only by low-CO2 energy technology but also by radical lifestyle changes like switching from industrial farming to small-scale organic agriculture and moving from car-based suburbs and exurbs to deliberately "densified" cities with mass transit. Whether environmentalists propose to engineer this utopian social transformation by tax incentives or coercive laws, the campaign triggers the populist nightmare of arrogant social elites trying to dictate where and how ordinary people should live.

Even if it had not been eclipsed by moralistic lifestyle environmentalism, contemporary economic progressivism would be crippled by its own priorities. New Deal liberalism was primarily about jobs and wages, with benefits as an afterthought. Post-New Deal progressivism is primarily about benefits, with jobs and wages as an afterthought. This inversion of priorities is underlined by the agenda of the Democrats since the last election -- universal healthcare coverage first, jobs later.

It is only in the post-New Deal era that universal healthcare has become the Holy Grail of the American center-left, rather than, say, full employment or a living wage. Sure, Democrats from Truman to Johnson sought universal healthcare, and Medicare for the elderly was a down payment for that goal. But the main concern of the New Dealers was providing economic growth with full employment, on the theory that if the economy is growing and workers have the bargaining power to obtain their fair share of the new wealth in the form of wages, you don't need a vastly bigger welfare state. Having forgotten the New Deal's emphasis on high-wage work, all too many of today's progressives seem to have internalized the right's caricature of FDR-to-LBJ liberalism as being primarily about redistribution from the rich to the poor.

This shift in emphasis is connected with the shift in the social base of the Democratic Party from the working class to an alliance of the wealthy, parts of the professional class and the poor. And progressive redistributionism also reflects the plutocratic social structure of the big cities that are now the Democratic base. Unlike the egalitarian farmer-labor liberalism that drew on the populist values of the small town and the immigrant neighborhood, metropolitan liberalism tends to define center-left politics not as self-help on the part of citizens but rather as charity for the disadvantaged carried out by affluent altruists. Tonight the fundraiser for endangered species; tomorrow the gala charity auction for poor children.

At a recent event in Washington, I was surprised when a Democratic senator said, "The major threat facing America today is the class divide." The speaker was Jim Webb of Virginia, the self-conscious heir to Scots-Irish Jacksonian populism. He went on to attack the inhumane treatment of prisoners in American jails and the avoidance of military service by the American elite.

Populists like Webb are rare in today's Democratic Party, while the Republicans, for all their folksy rhetoric, offer nothing but the economic program of their Wall Street Journal/Club for Growth wing. If mass unemployment and slow growth persist for years, some sort of third-party, "Middle American" populist movement in 2012 seems possible. (Lou Dobbs: tanned, rested and ready?)

Could a new wave of populist independents be steered into the Democratic Party? Alas, that seems unlikely, if Democrats are viewed as the compromised, establishmentarian governing party. Moreover, the Republican Party benefited from the last two populist upheavals. Richard Nixon built the generation-long hegemony of the Republicans on the anger of George Wallace voters, and, following the campaign of Ross Perot in 1992, Newt Gingrich captured anti-system reformism to build a Republican congressional majority for most of the period between 1994 and 2006.

In each case, liberals and progressives indiscriminately rejected the populist voters. The Wallace voters, most of whom were New Deal Democrats, were dismissed by most liberals as though they were motivated by nothing but opposition to racial integration. In 1992 the New Republic published an idiotic cover with Perot dressed as Mussolini, implying that he and his supporters were crypto-fascists. Today ridicule of the bombastic Sarah Palin shades all too easily into loathing for the lower middle class.

It would be much easier for the Republicans to rebuild the conservative-populist coalition that dominated American politics from 1968 to 2006 than it would be for the Democrats to rebuild the kind of liberal-populist coalition of the New Deal era from 1932 to 1968. Will the Democrats be marginalized a third time rather than empowered by anti-system populism? In the next few election cycles we may find out.

Palin in Birmingham

So Palin was in town yesterday. Since I am out-of-town I didn't get to see any of the theatrics. I hope they did it right. A band playing "Dixie." Confederate flags waving. A noose or two being brandished. Did the white-sheeted men show up with their support? Jefferson Davis and George Wallace would LOVE Sarah Palin. She would have made a great president of the Confederate States of America. If Alabama ever secedes from the United States, she would make a great President of Alabama. Yee-hah!

What's Irreplaceable About Books?

David WeinbergerWriter, Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center
Posted: November 22, 2009 09:27

What's Irreplaceable About Books?

As Marshall McLuhan said, new media generally do not replace old media. For example, radio remained important even after television came to dominance. On the other hand, by the time Western Union ended its telegram service in 2006, the cultural role and importance of telegrams had changed ... and shrunk. So, after we have networked digital books, will books be as ubiquitous and culturally important as radio? Will their role become as narrow as the telegram's in 2005? Will they be as cherished but infrequently attended as live theater? What's the future of books?

The answer depends on what we value about printed books that electronic books cannot replace.

We won't know the answer until we invent the future. But, I'm going to hypothesize, predict, or stipulate (pick one) that at some point we will have ebooks (which may be distinct hardware or software running in something other device we carry around), with paper-quality displays that are full-color and multimedia, that are fully on the Net, with software that lets us interact with the book and with other readers, that are a part of the standard outfitting of citizens, and that exist within a world that provides ubiquitous Net connectivity.

Those are a lot of assumptions, of course, and each and every one of them could be disrupted by some 17 year old at work in her parents' basement. Nevertheless, if the future is something like that, then what of pbooks' value will be left unreplaced by ebooks?

Readability. I'm assuming paper-quality displays, which may turn out to be unattainable without having to wheel around batteries the size of suitcases. But, with a display not as crisp as ink on paper, ebooks' ability to display text in various fonts and sizes should remove this advantage from pbooks.

Convenience. I am assuming that ebooks will be more convenient than pbooks: as legible in sunlight, at least as easy to hold and use, easier to use for those with certain disabilities, long enough battery life, possibly self-lit, etc. The biggest open question, I believe, is whether it will be as easy to annotate ebooks...

Annotatability. The current crop of ebooks make highlighting passages and making notes so difficult that you have to take a break from reading to do either of those things. But, that's one big reason why the current crop of ebooks are pathetic. With a touchscreen and a usable keyboard (or handwriting recognition software), ebooks of the future should be as easy to annotate as a pbook is. And those annotations will then become more useful, since they will be searchable and sharable.

Affordability. The marginal cost of producing ebook content is tiny, which doesn't mean prices will drop as dramatically as we might like. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine a world in which ebook content costs more than pbooks. Of course, this assumes that ebook readers will be cheap enough to compete with pbooks, given the combined cost of content and hardware. On the other hand, if ebook readers turn out to be software that runs on some more generalized device, the economics will likely work in ebooks' favor.

Social flags. We use the books we own as tribal flags, as Cory Doctorow points out in a recent interview. You probably carefully choose which book you're going to bring with you on a job interview, and which books get moved to the shelves in your living room. Ebooks can serve the same role when introduced into social networks, including social networks explicitly built around books, such as LibraryThing.com. They obviously don't work in physical space that way; if you want to show off your books to people who visit your home, you're going to have to get physical copies.

Aesthetic objects. Many of us love the feel and smell of books. While ebooks might be able to simulate that in some way — maybe their page displays could yellow over time — it'd still just be a simulation. While ebooks will undoubtedly develop their own aesthetics, so that we'll call people over to see how beautiful this or that new ebook is, they can't replace the particular aesthetics of pbooks. So, those who love pbooks will continue to cherish them.

Sentimental objects. For my bar mitzvah, some friend of my parents gave me a leatherbound copy of A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" and other poems. It was a beautiful aesthetic object, but I also understood that it had a personal meaning to the giver. I doubt that that particular copy did — I don't think it came from his own collection — but the physicality of the book was itself a marker for the personal meaning it had for the giver. As Cory says, the books your father read — the very copies that were in his hands — probably have special meaning to you. It's hard to see how ebooks could have the same sentimental value, except perhaps if you are reading the highlights and notes left by your father, and even then, it's not the same.

Historic objects. Likewise, knowing that you're looking at the very copy that was read by Thomas Jefferson gives a book an historic value that ebook content just can't have. It's hard to see how an author could autograph an ebook in any meaningful way.

Historical objects. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have pointed out, as has Anthony Grafton, books as physical objects collect metadata that can be useful to historians, e.g., the smell of vinegar that indicates the book came from a town visited by cholera. Ebooks, however, accumulate and generate far more metadata. So, we will lose some types of metadata but gain much more...maybe more than our current norms of privacy are comfortable with.

Specialized objects. It will take somewhere between an improbably long time and forever for all collections of pbooks to be digitized. Thus, books in special collections are likely to be required well after we can take the presence of ebooks for granted.

Possessions. We are headed towards a model that grants us licenses to read books, but not outright ownership. (This is Cory's main topic in the interview that stimulated this post.) If we lose ownership of ebooks, then they won't have the sentimental value, they will lose some of their economic value to readers (because we won't be able to resell them or buy them cheaper used), and we won't be as invested in them culturally. Whether ebooks will be ownable, and whether that will be the default of the exception, is unresolved.

Single-mindedness. Books are the exemplar in our culture of thinking. We write our best thoughts in books. We engage with the best thoughts of others by reading books. Books encourage and enable long-form thinking. Ebooks, because they are (ex hypothesis) on the Net, are distracting. They string together associated chunks and tempt us with links beyond themselves. It is easy to imagine ebooks providing the singleminded pbook experience: "Press here to remove all links." But, of course, you could always unpress the button. Besides, since your ebook is on the Net (ex hypothesis), all that's stopping you from jumping out of the book and into your email or Facebook is self-discipline. So, while ebooks can provide the singledminded experience of pbooks, some of us may prefer the paper version to keep the distraction of the Net at bay.

Religious objects. Some books have special meaning within some religions. It's hard to imagine, for example, that an ebook is going to replace the Torah scrolls in synagogues. In fact, orthodox Jews can't use electronic devices on the Sabbath, so they are certainly going to continue to buy pbooks. But, this is the very definition of a specialty market.

So, what does all this mean for the future of books? It depends.

First, are there other values of pbooks that I left off the list?

Second, I haven't listed any unique advantages of ebooks. For example, ebooks will allow social reading: engaging with others who are reading the book or with the traces left by those who have already it. That's potentially transformative of reading. Also, ebooks are likely to radically reduce the cost of reading, especially of some categories of overpriced pbooks (e.g., textbooks). Also, ebooks will make it much easier to understand the content of books through embedded dictionaries, search capabilities, and links to explanatory discussions. Also, as more of the corpus gets digitized, ebooks will make it far easier for scholars to pursue the footnotes (except they'll be embedded links, not footnotes). Also, ebooks will incorporate multimedia. Also, reading ebooks will build a searchable personal corpus that is far more useful to us than bookcases filled with out conquered pbooks. Also, we'll always have our entire library with us, ready to be read or reread, which is good news for readers.

I leave it to you to decide how this mix of values is likely to play out. What will be the social role and meaning of pbooks as we go forward into the ebook era? In twenty years — giving ourselves plenty of time to develop usable ebook readers, to digitize most of what we need, and to build an always-available network — will pbooks be used mainly by collectors, and scholars working with unique texts? Will they be sentimental objects? What poor people read? What rich people read? Will physical books be the equivalent of AM radio, of the road company of "Cats," of quaint objects in book museums — and/or the continuing pinnacle and embodiment of learning?

Bill Henderson - Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club (3)

"My core fear is that we are, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth---from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery---and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millenia has been central to the very idea of a culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web."

-Sven Birkerts in Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club, p. 28

Bill Henderson - Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club (2)

Once upon a time there was a "club" called The Lead Pencil Club. The members of this club swore off the electronic revolution as latter day Luddites. This book, published in 1996, contains some of their views. It is interesting reading today more than 10 years later.

It was still possible in 1996 to "refuse it," like literary critic Sven Birkerts says. Today we cannot refuse it unless we wish to be completely out of touch and ill-informed. I cannot conceive of a life without the internet to keep up with what is going on in the world, without blogs like this one to record my views, and a cell phone for personal AND business use. You cannot avoid voice mail. You cannot not have a computer and use it. You CAN turn off the TV, which I do frequently. You CAN avoid Blackberries and iPhones. But I DO flip thru multiple websites each day to keep with politics and culture. I cannot do without this access.

The key is to find a balance between print and digital. For someone of my age, born in print and still dedicated to print, but conversant in digital, using digital, this is certainly possible. Perhaps it is not possible for people on the extreme sides of my age category. I really don't know.

And so I like to think that I am balanced, still reading books, not ebooks, but active in keeping up with the world on the internet.

New Moon Will Save Hollywood From Disaster

BY Danny Groner
18 November 2009
The Huffington Post

As the decade comes to a close, it's worth taking a nostalgic look back at what we lived through in the first 10 years of the new century. A list of the top films that have come and gone over the past decade, though, brings some lessons and signs that a shift has taken place in Hollywood.

We don't like movies anymore. Well, adults don't. Not in the way we used to at least. Just look at the list of the top worldwide grossing movies of the 2000s and you'll struggle to find a title that was primarily sold for an adult audience. It's evident that big blockbuster franchises reigned supreme in a way they never had before and nobody would have anticipated.

And they did it bigger than any decade before. These so-called "kids' movies" pulled in huge numbers around the world. Just compare some of the stats to 1990s for context: Three movies topped $1 billion in the 2000s; Just one did that in the 1990s. Eighteen topped $800 million; Just four a decade earlier. All fifty got to $500 million; Just 14 by comparison in the 1990s.

It's hard to judge with any certainty what changed in the landscape and make up of the movie industry. But what's clear from these two lists is the emphasis over the past decade went from being focused on domestic numbers and appeal to the vaster global market. America emerged this decade as a powerhouse in animation and explosions. Guys like Michael Bay ushered in an era where America could dominate at foreign box offices and generate additional revenue as the leaders in expensive, innovative projects,

Character-driven stories, as a result, have been largely abandoned. Foreign directors can partially fill in the gaps left behind by big American studios going after the next huge hit. Filmmakers like Pedro Almadovar should seize the chance to really break out as proven and proficient filmmakers for an American audience. Because for those of us looking to be captured by a beautifully written and shot story, there's a dearth of material nowadays, uprooted in the name of larger productions with possibilities of massive payoffs.

Which may help answer why many mothers have turned to the "Twilight" series as their saving grace amid a movie world full of fantasy, robotics and cartoons. They have grown a decade older along with their daughters. They contributed the tens of dollars at a time to help establish studios like Pixar as forces in the Hollywood game. But now they're outgrowing those kids' movies, seeking cinema worth spending their money on that they can enjoy with their teenage children. In a different era, they would see movies with their husbands or friends; today they accompany their children to theaters for movies that have a broader reach and shrink the perceived gap between the two generations.

It's keeping parents young rather than, as the past decade's movies did, reminding them that they once were young. Fourties these days skews younger, not older, and that's where Hollywood is seemingly heading in the next decade. Sure, new parents are bound to pop up to replace the young moms who have outgrown Dreamworks' animated films. Nevertheless, if this decade's enormous box office stats has taught us anything it's that people are willing to see twice as many movies as long as it keeps them feeling young and in touch with what's popular.

What we are seeing now is Hollywood growing up with a generation of men and women who were marrying in the 90s, having kids in the 00s, and are staring ahead at an uncertain future in the next decade. Thus far, things look promising (at least at the box office) thanks in large part to the success of the "Twilight" series. There are bound to be tons of 40-somethings on lines and in crowds this weekend at "New Moon" showings. And there are a couple more sequels to follow in the ensuing years that will find equal fanfare from the aging fans.

These "tweener" adults are a smart investment for movie studios. More than ever, when it comes to movie picks, people want to stay young. At any cost.

The Wrong Side of History

BY Nicholas D. Kristof
New York Times
18 November 2009

Critics storm that health care reform is “a cruel hoax and a delusion.” Ads in 100 newspapers thunder that reform would mean “the beginning of socialized medicine.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.”

All dire — but also wrong. Those forecasts date not from this year, but from the battle over Medicare in the early 1960s. I pulled them from newspaper archives and other accounts.

Yet this year those same accusations are being recycled in an attempt to discredit the health reform proposals now before Congress. The heirs of those who opposed Medicare are conjuring the same bogymen — only this time they claim to be protecting Medicare.

Indeed, these same arguments we hear today against health reform were used even earlier, to attack President Franklin Roosevelt’s call for Social Security. It was denounced as a socialist program that would compete with private insurers and add to Americans’ tax burden so as to kill jobs.

Daniel Reed, a Republican representative from New York, predicted that with Social Security, Americans would come to feel “the lash of the dictator.” Senator Daniel Hastings, a Delaware Republican, declared that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country.”

John Taber, a Republican representative from New York, went further and said of Social Security: “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers.”

In hindsight, it seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? Social Security passed, and the republic survived.

Similar, ferocious hyperbole was unleashed on the proposal for Medicare. President John Kennedy and later President Lyndon Johnson pushed for a government health program for the elderly, but conservatives bitterly denounced the proposal as socialism, as a plan for bureaucrats to make medical decisions, as a means to ration health care.

The American Medical Association was vehement, with Dr. Donovan Ward, the head of the A.M.A. in 1965, declaring that “a deterioration in the quality of care is inescapable.” The president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went further and suggested that for doctors to cooperate with Medicare would be “complicity in evil.”

The Wall Street Journal warned darkly in editorials in 1965 that Medicare amounted to “politicking with a nation’s health.” It quoted a British surgeon as saying that in Britain, government health care was “crumbling to utter ruin” and suggested that the United States might be heading in the same direction.

“The basic concerns and arguments were the same” in 1935 against Social Security, in 1965 against Medicare, and today against universal coverage, said Nancy J. Altman, author of “The Battle for Social Security,” a history of the program. (The quotes against Social Security above were taken from that book.)

These days, the critics of Medicare have come around because it manifestly works. Life expectancy for people who have reached the age of 65 has risen significantly. America is no longer shamed by elderly Americans suffering for lack of medical care.

Yet although America’s elderly are now cared for, our children are not. A Johns Hopkins study found that hospitalized children who are uninsured are 60 percent more likely to die than those with insurance, presumably because they are less likely to get preventive care and to be taken to the doctor when sick. The study suggested that every year some 1,000 children may die as a consequence of lacking health insurance.

Why is it broadly accepted that the elderly should have universal health care, while it’s immensely controversial to seek universal coverage for children? What’s the difference — except that health care for children is far cheaper?

Granted, there are problems in the House and Senate bills — in particular, they falter on cost-containment. In the same way, there were many specific flaws in the Social Security and Medicare legislation, but, in retrospect, it’s also clear that they were major advances for our nation.

It’s now broadly apparent that those who opposed Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965 were wrong in their fears and tried to obstruct a historical tide. This year, the fate of health care will come down to a handful of members of Congress, including Senators Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu. If they flinch and health reform fails, they’ll be letting down their country at a crucial juncture. They’ll be on the wrong side of history.

Neo-Confederates

by William Bradley from the Huffington Post


A once great party has turned into a neo-Confederate political party, looking for a very shallow, mean, dishonest, know-nothing version of Ronald Reagan. And in Sarah Palin, it has found it.

America doesn't buy her as a potential president. Especially after she bizarrely quit as governor of small state Alaska halfway through her only term.

But in a multi-candidate winner take all GOP primary scenario, she could definitely walk away with the party's presidential nomination. And in the meantime, her poisonous brand of charisma will continue to infect Republicans, meaning that all of national politics will continue to be infected with a vicious virus of dishonest, know-nothing hyper-partisanship.

It's White Supremacy, Baby

AS I have said repeatedly, the heart of movement conservatism---Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Dobbs, etc---is white supremacy. That is the core value. Everything else flows from that. P.S. The Michael Hill mentioned below is from my hometown of Winfield. He is two years younger than me. His nickname in high school was "Gore." I don't remember where that came from.

by Sol Stein
Share Print CommentsConservative radio and television talk show host Glenn Beck has made his reputation and fortune in part by taking innocent if not strictly professional relations and turning them into major political scandals. His crusades against Obama administration advisers Patrick Gaspard and Van Jones, who has since resigned, stand out as crowning achievements of the guilt-by-association game.

What happens, however, when one looks closely at the people Beck has chosen to invite onto his show, and to whom he has lent his megaphone?

The Huffington Post took a look some of the bombastic host's past guests and found names steeped in controversy. Beck has hosted, and even occasionally praised, a renowned white supremacist, a devout southern secessionist, a defender of slavery, and a 9/11 skeptic.

On October 4, 2007, for instance, Beck had on his CNN/Headline News show Michael Hill, the founder and president of the League of the South, and Thomas Naylor, a secessionist who is head of the Second Vermont Republic. The conversation, which centered on dissolving the government, was at times, contentious. But Beck - for all the pushback he offered - did acknowledge that he was kind of intrigued. "Don`t get me wrong," he said. "There`s part of me that says, mm-hmm."

Hill's League of the South (LOS) group is a decidedly white supremacist organization, arguing that the "Anglo-Celtic" culture of the South must be protected and insisting that "white men" must "shed the guilt heaped upon them by their opponents and defend their interests." The group has questioned "what sort of ammunition is being given to black 'racists' by the media's skewed coverage of interracial crimes." Hill himself has been quoted as saying, "Let us not flinch when our enemies call us, 'Racists;' rather, just reply with, 'So, what's your point?'''

Hill wasn't the only Beck guest with LOS ties. Beck has also given airtime to Tom Woods, a historian and economic theorist who was present at the group's founding. Woods was just 21 years old at the time and insists that he is no longer a member. But even those who have accepted those explanations say he harbors radical, pro-Confederate views.

In his book, "Politically Incorrect Guide to the American History," Woods wrote that "strictly speaking, there was never an American Civil War...Other, more ideologically charged (but nevertheless much more accurate) names for the conflict include the War for Southern Independence and even the War for Northern Aggression."

"Woods clearly wants to tender a neo-Confederate interpretation, in which slavery is shunted into the background as a motive for southern secession," wrote Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, a San Diego University Professor who reviewed the book for the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

Story continues below

Nevertheless, Woods has appeared twice on Beck's radio program and three times on his Fox News show. When Beck was out with appendicitis last week, Woods was on with fill-in host, Judge Andrew Napolitano, to discuss his new book, "Meltdown." He's regarded so highly by the program that Beck has asked him to write for his newsletter "because I think you've got it down," Beck said.

Another Beck guest with a controversial past is Larry Pratt, the president of Gun Owners of America. Pratt appeared on the Fox News program on February 16, 2009.

A Second-Amendment rights enthusiast, Pratt may be best known for being forced to resign as co-chair of Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential campaign because of ties to white supremacist and extremist groups. The same year, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Pratt was contributing to an anti-Semitic periodical titled "United Sovereigns of America." Gun Owners of America, meanwhile, was discovered donating money to a white supremacist attorney's group.

Nevertheless, he was warmly greeted on the show by Beck, who promptly complimented him for his "dream marriage" because neither he nor his wife exchanged Valentine's Day cards.

Roy Beck, the founder and president of NumbersUSA -- and no relation -- has appeared with Beck three times, including one appearance just over two weeks ago. According to SPLC, Roy Beck "is the Washington editor of The Social Contract, a quarterly journal that has published articles by 'white nationalists' like Samuel Francis, who was fired from the conservative Washington Times after writing a racially inflammatory column, and James Lubinskas, a contributing editor for the racist American Renaissance magazine."

Finally, there is Charles Goyette, a self-described Independent and popular Phoenix-based radio host, who appeared as a guest on Beck's October 12, 2009, Fox News program. Goyette would be non-contreversial except for the fact that months earlier, on his own program, he said that the official story behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks is "worse than Swiss cheese." Beck, of course, memorably pilloried Van Jones for putting his name on a petition that questioned whether 9/11 was a government conspiracy.

If Beck were a self-avowed journalist -- which he's not -- these guests could be chalked up as an effort to foster intriguing debate, whether about immigration policy, constitutional principles or the strength of the dollar. But, taken as a whole, the roster reflects the host's partiality to an ideology that is far-right if not outright extremist.

Beck himself has argued that one must "step back and look at the big picture" if one wants to understand philosophical motives.

After repeated requests for response by the Huffington Post, Beck's production company declined comment for this article.

The Problem is Not Palin

The problem for the GOP, the problem for the COUNTRY, is not Sarah Palin. She is simply the air-head and dangerous demogogue that she is. So be her. The problem for the party & the country is that 59% of the Republican Party identify with her. This is scary.

»
16 Nov 2009 10:37 am
From Andrew Sullivan
The Palin Party
Rasmussen - the polling outfit for the GOP base - finds that 59 percent of Republicans identify with Palin, while only 21 percent disagree. Time to purge that 21 percent, don't you think?

The Shameless Audacity of Liz Cheney

Sunday, November 15, 2009
15 Nov 2009 08:04 pm
From Andrew Sullivan
The Cheney Cocoon
Liz Cheney has become an almost comic echo of her war criminal father.

We are nine months into Obama's first term. He inherited two disastrous and failed wars, a recession steeper than any since the Great Depression, countless prisoners of war imprisoned in a gulag in Cuba and largely unprosecutable because of torture illegally authorized by the former president, $5 trillion of debt accrued in eight years by Dick "deficits don't matter" Cheney, alliances frayed to near-collapse, and a total failure in eight years to do anything about climate change.

And she actually says that a Republican in 2013 will have to cope with the damage Obama has done to the country! And she talks about America's "standing in the world"!

Yes, this is the world she inhabits, a world of shamelessness, cynicism and contempt for this country's stability and health. She is her father's daughter.

Bill Henderson - Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club

I am enjoying this book of commentary by people who wish to pull the plug on the electronic revolution. The interesting thing is that this book was published in 1996. It's like unearthing a time capsule. In our rapidly evolving digital (that word isn't even used in this book) world, many of the comments seems quaint. Thirteen years ago is like 130 years used to be.

The Deeply Disturbed Sarah Palin

Here is a chilling summary of Palin. Indeed, she is obviously a deeply disturbed woman,totally lacking in self-awarenesss, totally cut-off from reality, who invents her own reality, as do her ignorant minions. THIS is what is so disturbing about her. I totally lack all respect for anyone who admires this idiot.

Sunday, November 15, 2009
15 Nov 2009 09:43 am

15 Nov 2009 01:24 am

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin: A Summary Before The Next Round



On the eve of Palin's latest version of reality, the Dish offers a recap of all the demonstrable lies she has told in the public record. We reprint the list as a public service and invite readers to run the new "book" through exactly the same empirical wringer, so we can compile an up-to-date and comprehensive list of the fantasies, delusions, lies and non-facts that Palin is so pathologically and unalterably attached to. Remember: we are not including contested stories that we cannot prove definitively one way or another or the usual spin that politicians use, or even hypocrisy or shading of facts. We are merely including things she has said or written that can be definitively proven as untrue, by incontestable evidence in the public record.

After you have read these, ask yourself: what wouldn't Sarah Palin lie about if she felt she had to?

Palin lied when she said the dismissal of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire state trooper Mike Wooten; in fact, the Branchflower Report concluded that she repeatedly abused her power when dealing with both men.

Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor.

Palin lied when she denied that Wasilla's police chief and librarian had been fired; in fact, both were given letters of termination the previous day.

Palin lied when she wrote in the NYT that a comprehensive review by Alaska wildlife officials showed that polar bears were not endangered; in fact, email correspondence between those scientists showed the opposite.

Palin lied when she claimed in her convention speech that an oil gas pipeline "began" under her guidance; in fact, the pipeline was years from breaking ground, if at all.

Palin lied when she told Charlie Gibson that she does not pass judgment on gay people; in fact, she opposes all rights between gay spouses and belongs to a church that promotes conversion therapy.

Palin lied when she denied having said that humans do not contribute to climate change; in fact, she had previously proclaimed that human activity was not to blame.

Palin lied when she claimed that Alaska produces 20 percent of the country's domestic energy supply; in fact, the actual figures, based on any interpretation of her words, are much, much lower.

Palin lied when she told voters she improvised her convention speech when her teleprompter stopped working properly; in fact, all reports showed that the machine had functioned perfectly and that her speech had closely followed the script.

Palin lied when she recalled asking her daughters to vote on whether she should accept the VP offer; in fact, her story contradicts details given by her husband, the McCain campaign, and even Palin herself. (She later added another version.)


Continue reading "The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin: A Summary Before The Next Round" »

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FROM ANDREW SULLIVAN
15 Nov 2009 12:10 am

"A Narrative That Is Completely False"
The Dish is going to wait for the actual "book" "by" Sarah Palin before analyzing its factual accuracy. The excerpts are so far incomplete and context is missing. The odd lies compiled by the Dish were strictly limited to statements she has made that are directly contradicted by clear and available evidence that she simply refuses to acknowledge. But the first pushback from the McCain campaign does not, shall we say, surprise me. Check this out as an hors d'oeuvre.

As this blog persistently demonstrated in last year's campaign, Palin is a delusional fantasist, existing in a world of her own imagination, asserting fact after fact that are demonstrably untrue, and unable to adjust to the actual reality after it has been demonstrated beyond any empirical doubt. The campaign's media strategy of making sure she was never in a position to be asked anything in an uncontrolled setting, and of never holding an open press conference (unprecedented in the history of presidential campaigns) were a response to this. The only interview that dared stray even a little from this fawning celebrity-deference, Katie Couric's, revealed Palin to be an astonishingly inept know-nothing, camouflaged by incessant victimology.

She is a deeply disturbed individual whose grip on reality is very weak, and whose self-awareness is close to nil. This much is not a leap, let alone unfair. It is simply unavoidable if one examines her surreal invention of reality - even when she must surely know that the evidence exists out there to contradict her.

As I have long noted, this is not the usual political mendacity and spin. It is far weirder and more disturbing than that. She creates her own reality. And the fact-indifferent, editor-free marketing company, HarperCollins, is only too willing to make some money off it.

Another Mainstream Take on the Danger of Palinism

From Newsweek by Jon Meacham

Richard Nixon sensed trouble. seated in the cow palace in San Francisco at the GOP convention in 1964, he listened as Barry Goldwater said: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty—is—no—vice." A 41-second ovation ensued. Then Goldwater continued: "And let me remind you also—that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." As Rick Perlstein reconstructs the scene in his book Before the Storm, Nixon reached over to keep his wife, Pat, from rising politely with the crowd. Later Dwight Eisenhower called the Goldwater speech an offense to "the whole American system." The crowds did not care: Goldwater was one of their own, riding in from Arizona to take the GOP from the Ikes and the Rockefellers.

Goldwater was a seminal figure, and is too often caricatured as a nuclear cowboy by the left and as a conservative John the Baptist by the right. But as Perlstein's reporting makes clear, Goldwater was seen in real time as an extremist, as the embodiment of unflinching conservative dogma. How unflinching? Well, it is striking that even Nixon wanted to distance himself from the nominee.

Now comes Sarah Palin, an heir to the Goldwater tradition, to try to harness the conservative discontent abroad in the land. Her political celebrity is so powerful that it has reduced a large part of the Republican Party to irrationality and civic incoherence. According to Gallup, Republicans are more likely to say they would seriously consider voting for Palin for president (65 percent) than to say she is qualified for the job (58 percent). At the moment she is promoting a book. But she is also, inevitably, promoting a distinctive political sensibility.


What Obama advisers privately refer to as "Palinism" has created a climate of ideological purity inside the GOP. To deviate from the anti-Obama line at all—that is, to acknowledge that politics is the art of compromise—risks the censure of the party. Pure ideologues will argue that this is a good thing; others like, say, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close friend of Palin's onetime champion John McCain, think differently. Graham was denounced last week by the Charleston County Republican Party for working with Democrats on issues such as climate change; the senator's office replied by invoking President Reagan's belief that "elected officials need to find common ground and work together to solve difficult problems."

As Evan Thomas argues in this week's cover, the Reagan style was one that might not have passed muster with Palin's adoring fans. Reagan realized that movement conservatives like him needed moderate conservatives to win and ultimately to govern. In 1976, in his challenge to President Ford, Reagan announced that he would run with Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker, a Rockefeller Republican. It never came to that, but four years later, in Detroit, Reagan seriously considered only two men for the ticket: Ford and George H.W. Bush, both men from the middle, not the far right, of the Republican Party. It is difficult to imagine the 2012 nominee choosing a more moderate running mate, not least because there are so few moderates left in the GOP. Even those of centrist inclinations are finding it virtually impossible to work with the administration for fear of a backlash from the base.

We have been to this movie before, when the unreconstructed liberals of the fading New Deal–Great Society coalition obstinately refused to acknowledge the reality that America is a center-right nation, and that Democrats who wish to win national elections cannot run on the left. We are at our best as a country when there is something approaching a moderate space in politics. The middle way is not always the right way—far from it. But sometimes it is, and a wise nation should cultivate a political spirit that allows opponents to cooperate without fearing an automatic execution from their core supporters. Who knew that the real rogues in American politics would be the ones who dare to get along?

This week's issue includes a package on the future of innovation, not only in America but globally. Anchored by a worldwide survey we conducted with Intel—NEWSWEEK Had editorial control over the questions—the pieces by Fareed Zakaria, Daniel Lyons, Dan Senor and Saul Singer, and Alan Brinkley explore the key economic unknown of the moment: what is the next big idea that will drive growth, and where will it come from? As you will see, a lot of people, including business leaders, think the future belongs to China. Globalization is not a zero-sum game, but we need to hone our skills to stay in play.

Cormac McCarthy Speaks

Cormac discusses Blood Meridian, The Road, religion, life, and death. Read the interview here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html?mod=djemITP

Palin's Lies (2)

13 Nov 2009 08:16 pm
From Andrew Sullivan
The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin, To Be Continued
I'm traveling in Texas and sunk into political philosophy for a couple of heavenly days, so this will have to wait till Monday. But the AP's first glance at the Palin "book" reveals that the pattern of Palin's surreal delusions - a pattern that became obvious over the period of the campaign - remains firmly intact.

The AP has discovered fourteen already proven lies that Palin continues to tell as if they were true.

Of course, I expected this. WhorperCollins has no interest in actually editing the book for accuracy - or editing the book at all. And Palin has no grip on any form of reality but her own solipsistic fantasies. The Dish's comprehensive list of Palin's lies will soon be updated for the record. And we hope to compile it as a handy reference book before too long.

Palin's Lies

Here is a catalogue of Palin's lies in her book from AP. No doubt there are many, many more. The Wasilla Whack-Job lies on. Home Politics WASHINGTON, Nov. 13, 2009
Sarah Palin's Book: The Fact Check
The Associated Press Looks at the Claims Former Vice Presidential Candidate Makes in "Going Rogue"


Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue'

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin prepares to launch a media tour to promote her new memoir "Going Rogue." As Jeff Glor reports, some media watchers are questioning her motives.


(AP) Sarah Palin's new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven't become any truer over time.

Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer's dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.

Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush - a package she seemed to support at the time.

A look at some of her statements in "Going Rogue," obtained by The Associated Press in advance of its release Tuesday:



PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking "only" for reasonably priced rooms and not "often" going for the "high-end, robe-and-slippers" hotels.

THE FACTS: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City's Central Park for a five-hour women's leadership conference in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000. Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter. The governor billed her state more than $20,000 for her children's travel, including to events where they had not been invited, and in some cases later amended expense reports to specify that they had been on official business.



PALIN: Boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations, mostly from first-time givers, and turned back large checks from big donors if her campaign perceived a conflict of interest.

THE FACTS: Of the roughly $1.3 million she raised for her primary and general election campaigns for governor, more than half came from people and political action committees giving at least $500, according to an AP analysis of her campaign finance reports. The maximum that individual donors could give was $1,000; $2,000 for a PAC.

Of the rest, about $76,000 came from Republican Party committees.

She accepted $1,000 each from a state senator and his wife and $30 from a state representative in the weeks after the two Republican lawmakers' offices were raided by the FBI as part of an investigation into a powerful Alaska oilfield services company. After AP reported those donations during the presidential campaign, she gave a comparative sum to charity.



PALIN: Rails against taxpayer-financed bailouts, which she attributes to Obama. She recounts telling daughter Bristol that to succeed in business, "you'll have to be brave enough to fail."

THE FACTS: Palin is blurring the lines between Obama's stimulus plan - a $787 billion package of tax cuts, state aid, social programs and government contracts - and the federal bailout that Republican presidential candidate John McCain voted for and President George W. Bush signed.

Palin's views on bailouts appeared to evolve as McCain's vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said "taxpayers cannot be looked to as the bailout, as the solution, to the problems on Wall Street." A week later, she said "ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy."

During the vice presidential debate in October, Palin praised McCain for being "instrumental in bringing folks together" to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said "it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in."



PALIN: Says Ronald Reagan faced an even worse recession than the one that appears to be ending now, and "showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all."

THE FACTS: The estate tax, which some call the death tax, was not repealed under Reagan and capital gains taxes are lower now than when Reagan was president.

Economists overwhelmingly say the current recession is far worse. The recession Reagan faced lasted for 16 months; this one is in its 23rd month. The recession of the early 1980s did not have a financial meltdown. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent, worse than the October 2009 high of 10.2 percent, but the jobless rate is still expected to climb.



PALIN: She says her team overseeing the development of a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process that allowed any company to compete for the right to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48.

THE FACTS: Palin characterized the pipeline deal the same way before an AP investigation found her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited a company with ties to her administration, TransCanada Corp. Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders during the process, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.



PALIN: Criticizes an aide to her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, for a conflict of interest because the aide represented the state in negotiations over a gas pipeline and then left to work as a handsomely paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil. Palin asserts her administration ended all such arrangements, shoving a wedge in the revolving door between special interests and the state capital.

THE FACTS: Palin ignores her own "revolving door" issue in office; the leader of her own pipeline team was a former lobbyist for a subsidiary of TransCanada, the company that ended up winning the rights to build the pipeline.



PALIN: Writes about a city councilman in Wasilla, Alaska, who owned a garbage truck company and tried to push through an ordinance requiring residents of new subdivisions to pay for trash removal instead of taking it to the dump for free - this to illustrate conflicts of interest she stood against as a public servant.

THE FACTS: As Wasilla mayor, Palin pressed for a special zoning exception so she could sell her family's $327,000 house, then did not keep a promise to remove a potential fire hazard on the property.

She asked the city council to loosen rules for snow machine races when she and her husband owned a snow machine store, and cast a tie-breaking vote to exempt taxes on aircraft when her father-in-law owned one. But she stepped away from the table in 1997 when the council considered a grant for the Iron Dog snow machine race in which her husband competes.



PALIN: Says Obama has admitted that the climate change policy he seeks will cause people's electricity bills to "skyrocket."

THE FACTS: She correctly quotes a comment attributed to Obama in January 2008, when he told San Francisco Chronicle editors that under his cap-and-trade climate proposal, "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket" as utilities are forced to retrofit coal burning power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Obama has argued since then that climate legislation can blunt the cost to consumers. Democratic legislation now before Congress calls for a variety of measures aimed at mitigating consumer costs. Several studies predict average household costs probably would be $100 to $145 a year.



PALIN: Welcomes last year's Supreme Court decision deciding punitive damages for victims of the nation's largest oil spill tragedy, the Exxon Valdez disaster, stating it had taken 20 years to achieve victory. As governor, she says, she'd had the state argue in favor of the victims, and she says the court's ruling went "in favor of the people." Finally, she writes, Alaskans could recover some of their losses.

THE FACTS: That response is at odds with her reaction at the time to the ruling, which resolved the long-running case by reducing punitive damages for victims to $500 million from $2.5 billion. Environmentalists and plaintiffs' lawyers decried the ruling as a slap at the victims and Palin herself said she was "extremely disappointed." She said the justices had gutted a jury decision favoring higher damage awards, the Anchorage Daily News reported. "It's tragic that so many Alaska fishermen and their families have had their lives put on hold waiting for this decision," she said, noting many had died "while waiting for justice."



PALIN: Describing her resistance to federal stimulus money, Palin describes Alaska as a practical, libertarian haven of independent Americans who don't want "help" from government busybodies.

THE FACTS: Alaska is also one of the states most dependent on federal subsidies, receiving much more assistance from Washington than it pays in federal taxes. A study for the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found that in 2005, the state received $1.84 for every dollar it sent to Washington.



PALIN: Says she tried to talk about national security and energy independence in her interview with Vogue magazine but the interviewer wanted her to pivot from hydropower to high fashion.

THE FACTS are somewhat in dispute. Vogue contributing editor Rebecca Johnson said Palin did not go on about hydropower. "She just kept talking about drilling for oil."



PALIN: "Was it ambition? I didn't think so. Ambition drives; purpose beckons." Throughout the book, Palin cites altruistic reasons for running for office, and for leaving early as Alaska governor.

THE FACTS: Few politicians own up to wanting high office for the power and prestige of it, and in this respect, Palin fits the conventional mold. But "Going Rogue" has all the characteristics of a pre-campaign manifesto, the requisite autobiography of the future candidate.