Sunday, March 28, 2010
Jerome Loving - Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens
I'm reading this biography of Mark Twain, the latest full-length biography of the man from Hannibal. The author is a renowned 19th century literary scholar at Texas A & M.
It's Primarily About Race
By FRANK RICH
Published: March 27, 2010
THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.
But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.
How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.
No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.
Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.
When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.
But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.
The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.
That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.
In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.
They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.
If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.
Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.
Published: March 27, 2010
THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.
But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.
How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.
No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.
Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.
When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.
But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.
The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.
That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.
In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.
They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.
If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.
Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.
Whose Country Is It?
Published: March 26, 2010
Charles M. Blow
Times Topics: Tea Party Movement
The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they’re only the most recent manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.
It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.
Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.
Hence their anger and frustration, which is playing out in ways large and small. There is the current spattering of threats and violence, but there also is the run on guns and the explosive growth of nefarious antigovernment and anti-immigrant groups. In fact, according to a report entitled “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism” recently released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “nativist extremist” groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office, and antigovernment “patriot” groups more than tripled over that period.
Politically, this frustration is epitomized by the Tea Party movement. It may have some legitimate concerns (taxation, the role of government, etc.), but its message is lost in the madness. And now the anemic Republican establishment, covetous of the Tea Party’s passion, is moving to absorb it, not admonish it. Instead of jettisoning the radical language, rabid bigotry and rising violence, the Republicans justify it. (They don’t want to refute it as much as funnel it.)
There may be a short-term benefit in this strategy, but it’s a long-term loser.
A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.
You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.
Charles M. Blow
Times Topics: Tea Party Movement
The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they’re only the most recent manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.
It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.
Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.
Hence their anger and frustration, which is playing out in ways large and small. There is the current spattering of threats and violence, but there also is the run on guns and the explosive growth of nefarious antigovernment and anti-immigrant groups. In fact, according to a report entitled “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism” recently released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “nativist extremist” groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office, and antigovernment “patriot” groups more than tripled over that period.
Politically, this frustration is epitomized by the Tea Party movement. It may have some legitimate concerns (taxation, the role of government, etc.), but its message is lost in the madness. And now the anemic Republican establishment, covetous of the Tea Party’s passion, is moving to absorb it, not admonish it. Instead of jettisoning the radical language, rabid bigotry and rising violence, the Republicans justify it. (They don’t want to refute it as much as funnel it.)
There may be a short-term benefit in this strategy, but it’s a long-term loser.
A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.
You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
The Closing of the Conversative Mind
The Closing Of The Conservative Mind
27 Mar 2010 01:49 pm
WF Buckley's son, Chris, notes a fickle individualism and orneriness in his father that simply would not be allowed in today's 'conservative' 'movement':
I invoke William F. for straightforwardly mischievous reasons. He was the founder of the modern conservative movement that is in such terrible shape at the moment. He was also unpredictable.
While his brother James L. Buckley was running (not so well) for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 1976, WFB endorsed Allard K. Lowenstein for Congress. Allard K. Lowenstein was so far to the left of WFB that WFB wouldn't have been able to find him with the Hubble telescope. And yet WFB recognized in his friend Al a fineness of mind and principle. A patriot. But oh, what a hullaballoo it caused.
But then WFB had always been a reliable supplier of hullaballoos. In 1965, while running for mayor, he endorsed construction of bicycle paths in New York City. He was green before Green. In the late 1960's, he came out for decriminalization of drugs...
Flash forward to two years after our invasion of Iraq: He pronounced the enterprise to be failed. The reaction to this sounded an echo of LBJ, post-Tet, when he gloomily said, "If we've lost Walter (Cronkite), we've lost the war." In 1988, WFB endorsed Joe Lieberman, then a Democrat, for the U.S. Senate. Well, the list goes on and on.
Once upon a time, the intellectual conservatives in this country cherished their dissidents, encouraged argument, embraced the quirky, valued the eccentric and mocked the lock-step ideological left. Now they are what they once mocked. And they have the ideological discipline of the old left.
27 Mar 2010 01:49 pm
WF Buckley's son, Chris, notes a fickle individualism and orneriness in his father that simply would not be allowed in today's 'conservative' 'movement':
I invoke William F. for straightforwardly mischievous reasons. He was the founder of the modern conservative movement that is in such terrible shape at the moment. He was also unpredictable.
While his brother James L. Buckley was running (not so well) for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 1976, WFB endorsed Allard K. Lowenstein for Congress. Allard K. Lowenstein was so far to the left of WFB that WFB wouldn't have been able to find him with the Hubble telescope. And yet WFB recognized in his friend Al a fineness of mind and principle. A patriot. But oh, what a hullaballoo it caused.
But then WFB had always been a reliable supplier of hullaballoos. In 1965, while running for mayor, he endorsed construction of bicycle paths in New York City. He was green before Green. In the late 1960's, he came out for decriminalization of drugs...
Flash forward to two years after our invasion of Iraq: He pronounced the enterprise to be failed. The reaction to this sounded an echo of LBJ, post-Tet, when he gloomily said, "If we've lost Walter (Cronkite), we've lost the war." In 1988, WFB endorsed Joe Lieberman, then a Democrat, for the U.S. Senate. Well, the list goes on and on.
Once upon a time, the intellectual conservatives in this country cherished their dissidents, encouraged argument, embraced the quirky, valued the eccentric and mocked the lock-step ideological left. Now they are what they once mocked. And they have the ideological discipline of the old left.
Republicans Were for "Obamacare" Before They Were Against It
Republicans Were For Obama's Health Insurance Rule Before They Were Against It: AP
WASHINGTON — Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it. The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that's been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.
Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the GOP presidential nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a personal responsibility principle" and Massachusetts' newest GOP senator, Scott Brown, backed it. Romney now says Obama's plan is a federal takeover that bears little resemblance to what he did as governor and should be repealed.
Republicans say Obama and the Democrats co-opted their original concept, minus a mechanism they proposed for controlling costs. More than a dozen GOP attorneys general are determined to challenge the requirement in federal court as unconstitutional.
Starting in 2014, the new law will require nearly all Americans to have health insurance through an employer, a government program or by buying it directly. That year, new insurance markets will open for business, health plans will be required to accept all applicants and tax credits will start flowing to millions of people, helping them pay the premiums.
Those who continue to go without coverage will have to pay a penalty to the IRS, except in cases of financial hardship. Fines vary by income and family size. For example, a single person making $45,000 would pay an extra $1,125 in taxes when the penalty is fully phased in, in 2016.
Conservatives today say that's unacceptable. Not long ago, many of them saw a national mandate as a free-market route to guarantee coverage for all Americans – the answer to liberal ambitions for a government-run entitlement like Medicare. Most experts agree some kind of requirement is needed in a reformed system because health insurance doesn't work if people can put off joining the risk pool until they get sick.
In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon favored a mandate that employers provide insurance. In the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, embraced an individual requirement. Not anymore.
"The idea of an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer was a Republican idea," said health economist Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In 1991, he published a paper that explained how a mandate could be combined with tax credits – two ideas that are now part of Obama's law. Pauly's paper was well-received – by the George H.W. Bush administration.
"It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn't," said Pauly. "Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."
Story continues below
Obama rejected a key part of Pauly's proposal: doing away with the tax-free status of employer-sponsored health care and replacing it with a standard tax credit for all Americans. Labor strongly opposes that approach because union members usually have better-than-average coverage and suddenly would have to pay taxes on it. But many economists believe it's a rational solution to America's health care dilemma since it would raise enough money to cover the uninsured and nudge people with coverage into cost-conscious plans.
Romney's success in Massachusetts with a bipartisan health plan that featured a mandate put the idea on the table for the 2008 presidential candidates.
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who failed in the 1990s to require employers to offer coverage, embraced the individual requirement, an idea advocated by her Republican opponents in the earlier health care debate.
"Hillary Clinton believed strongly in universal coverage," said Neera Tanden, her top health care adviser in the 2008 Democratic campaign. "I said to her, 'You are not going to be able to say it's universal coverage unless you have a mandate.' She said, 'I don't want to run unless it's universal coverage.'"
Obama was not prepared to go that far. His health care proposal in the campaign required coverage for children, not adults. Clinton hammered him because his plan didn't guarantee coverage for all. He shot back that health insurance is too expensive to force people to buy it.
Obama remained cool to an individual requirement even once in office. But Tanden, who went on to serve in the Obama administration, said the first sign of a shift came in a letter to congressional leaders last summer in which Obama said he'd be open to the idea if it included a hardship waiver. Obama openly endorsed a mandate in his speech to a joint session of Congress in September.
It remains one of the most unpopular parts of his plan. Even the insurance industry is unhappy. Although the federal government will be requiring Americans to buy their products – and providing subsidies worth billions – insurers don't think the penalties are high enough.
Tanden, now at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, says she's confident the mandate will work. In Massachusetts, coverage has gone up and only a tiny fraction of residents have been hit with fines.
Brown, whose election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy almost led to the collapse of Obama's plan, said his opposition to the new law is over tax increases, Medicare cuts and federal overreach on a matter that should be left up to states. Not so much the requirement, which he voted for as a state lawmaker.
"In Massachusetts, it helped us deal with the very real problem of uncompensated care," Brown said.
WASHINGTON — Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it. The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that's been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.
Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the GOP presidential nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a personal responsibility principle" and Massachusetts' newest GOP senator, Scott Brown, backed it. Romney now says Obama's plan is a federal takeover that bears little resemblance to what he did as governor and should be repealed.
Republicans say Obama and the Democrats co-opted their original concept, minus a mechanism they proposed for controlling costs. More than a dozen GOP attorneys general are determined to challenge the requirement in federal court as unconstitutional.
Starting in 2014, the new law will require nearly all Americans to have health insurance through an employer, a government program or by buying it directly. That year, new insurance markets will open for business, health plans will be required to accept all applicants and tax credits will start flowing to millions of people, helping them pay the premiums.
Those who continue to go without coverage will have to pay a penalty to the IRS, except in cases of financial hardship. Fines vary by income and family size. For example, a single person making $45,000 would pay an extra $1,125 in taxes when the penalty is fully phased in, in 2016.
Conservatives today say that's unacceptable. Not long ago, many of them saw a national mandate as a free-market route to guarantee coverage for all Americans – the answer to liberal ambitions for a government-run entitlement like Medicare. Most experts agree some kind of requirement is needed in a reformed system because health insurance doesn't work if people can put off joining the risk pool until they get sick.
In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon favored a mandate that employers provide insurance. In the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, embraced an individual requirement. Not anymore.
"The idea of an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer was a Republican idea," said health economist Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In 1991, he published a paper that explained how a mandate could be combined with tax credits – two ideas that are now part of Obama's law. Pauly's paper was well-received – by the George H.W. Bush administration.
"It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn't," said Pauly. "Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."
Story continues below
Obama rejected a key part of Pauly's proposal: doing away with the tax-free status of employer-sponsored health care and replacing it with a standard tax credit for all Americans. Labor strongly opposes that approach because union members usually have better-than-average coverage and suddenly would have to pay taxes on it. But many economists believe it's a rational solution to America's health care dilemma since it would raise enough money to cover the uninsured and nudge people with coverage into cost-conscious plans.
Romney's success in Massachusetts with a bipartisan health plan that featured a mandate put the idea on the table for the 2008 presidential candidates.
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who failed in the 1990s to require employers to offer coverage, embraced the individual requirement, an idea advocated by her Republican opponents in the earlier health care debate.
"Hillary Clinton believed strongly in universal coverage," said Neera Tanden, her top health care adviser in the 2008 Democratic campaign. "I said to her, 'You are not going to be able to say it's universal coverage unless you have a mandate.' She said, 'I don't want to run unless it's universal coverage.'"
Obama was not prepared to go that far. His health care proposal in the campaign required coverage for children, not adults. Clinton hammered him because his plan didn't guarantee coverage for all. He shot back that health insurance is too expensive to force people to buy it.
Obama remained cool to an individual requirement even once in office. But Tanden, who went on to serve in the Obama administration, said the first sign of a shift came in a letter to congressional leaders last summer in which Obama said he'd be open to the idea if it included a hardship waiver. Obama openly endorsed a mandate in his speech to a joint session of Congress in September.
It remains one of the most unpopular parts of his plan. Even the insurance industry is unhappy. Although the federal government will be requiring Americans to buy their products – and providing subsidies worth billions – insurers don't think the penalties are high enough.
Tanden, now at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, says she's confident the mandate will work. In Massachusetts, coverage has gone up and only a tiny fraction of residents have been hit with fines.
Brown, whose election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy almost led to the collapse of Obama's plan, said his opposition to the new law is over tax increases, Medicare cuts and federal overreach on a matter that should be left up to states. Not so much the requirement, which he voted for as a state lawmaker.
"In Massachusetts, it helped us deal with the very real problem of uncompensated care," Brown said.
Bad Behaving Republicans
Going to Extreme
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 25, 2010
I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law. But a few days later, it doesn’t seem quite as entertaining — and not just because of the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers. For if you care about America’s future, you can’t be happy as extremists take full control of one of our two great political parties.
To be sure, it was enjoyable watching Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican of California, warn that by passing health reform, Democrats “will finally lay the cornerstone of their socialist utopia on the backs of the American people.” Gosh, that sounds uncomfortable. And it’s been a hoot watching Mitt Romney squirm as he tries to distance himself from a plan that, as he knows full well, is nearly identical to the reform he himself pushed through as governor of Massachusetts. His best shot was declaring that enacting reform was an “unconscionable abuse of power,” a “historic usurpation of the legislative process” — presumably because the legislative process isn’t supposed to include things like “votes” in which the majority prevails.
A side observation: one Republican talking point has been that Democrats had no right to pass a bill facing overwhelming public disapproval. As it happens, the Constitution says nothing about opinion polls trumping the right and duty of elected officials to make decisions based on what they perceive as the merits. But in any case, the message from the polls is much more ambiguous than opponents of reform claim: While many Americans disapprove of Obamacare, a significant number do so because they feel that it doesn’t go far enough. And a Gallup poll taken after health reform’s enactment showed the public, by a modest but significant margin, seeming pleased that it passed.
But back to the main theme. What has been really striking has been the eliminationist rhetoric of the G.O.P., coming not from some radical fringe but from the party’s leaders. John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health reform was “Armageddon.” The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.” And Sarah Palin put out a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight.
All of this goes far beyond politics as usual. Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush — but you’ll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials.
No, to find anything like what we’re seeing now you have to go back to the last time a Democrat was president. Like President Obama, Bill Clinton faced a G.O.P. that denied his legitimacy — Dick Armey, the second-ranking House Republican (and now a Tea Party leader) referred to him as “your president.” Threats were common: President Clinton, declared Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, “better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” (Helms later expressed regrets over the remark — but only after a media firestorm.) And once they controlled Congress, Republicans tried to govern as if they held the White House, too, eventually shutting down the federal government in an attempt to bully Mr. Clinton into submission.
Mr. Obama seems to have sincerely believed that he would face a different reception. And he made a real try at bipartisanship, nearly losing his chance at health reform by frittering away months in a vain attempt to get a few Republicans on board. At this point, however, it’s clear that any Democratic president will face total opposition from a Republican Party that is completely dominated by right-wing extremists.
For today’s G.O.P. is, fully and finally, the party of Ronald Reagan — not Reagan the pragmatic politician, who could and did strike deals with Democrats, but Reagan the antigovernment fanatic, who warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. It’s a party that sees modest efforts to improve Americans’ economic and health security not merely as unwise, but as monstrous. It’s a party in which paranoid fantasies about the other side — Obama is a socialist, Democrats have totalitarian ambitions — are mainstream. And, as a result, it’s a party that fundamentally doesn’t accept anyone else’s right to govern.
In the short run, Republican extremism may be good for Democrats, to the extent that it prompts a voter backlash. But in the long run, it’s a very bad thing for America. We need to have two reasonable, rational parties in this country. And right now we don’t.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 25, 2010
I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law. But a few days later, it doesn’t seem quite as entertaining — and not just because of the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers. For if you care about America’s future, you can’t be happy as extremists take full control of one of our two great political parties.
To be sure, it was enjoyable watching Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican of California, warn that by passing health reform, Democrats “will finally lay the cornerstone of their socialist utopia on the backs of the American people.” Gosh, that sounds uncomfortable. And it’s been a hoot watching Mitt Romney squirm as he tries to distance himself from a plan that, as he knows full well, is nearly identical to the reform he himself pushed through as governor of Massachusetts. His best shot was declaring that enacting reform was an “unconscionable abuse of power,” a “historic usurpation of the legislative process” — presumably because the legislative process isn’t supposed to include things like “votes” in which the majority prevails.
A side observation: one Republican talking point has been that Democrats had no right to pass a bill facing overwhelming public disapproval. As it happens, the Constitution says nothing about opinion polls trumping the right and duty of elected officials to make decisions based on what they perceive as the merits. But in any case, the message from the polls is much more ambiguous than opponents of reform claim: While many Americans disapprove of Obamacare, a significant number do so because they feel that it doesn’t go far enough. And a Gallup poll taken after health reform’s enactment showed the public, by a modest but significant margin, seeming pleased that it passed.
But back to the main theme. What has been really striking has been the eliminationist rhetoric of the G.O.P., coming not from some radical fringe but from the party’s leaders. John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health reform was “Armageddon.” The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.” And Sarah Palin put out a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight.
All of this goes far beyond politics as usual. Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush — but you’ll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials.
No, to find anything like what we’re seeing now you have to go back to the last time a Democrat was president. Like President Obama, Bill Clinton faced a G.O.P. that denied his legitimacy — Dick Armey, the second-ranking House Republican (and now a Tea Party leader) referred to him as “your president.” Threats were common: President Clinton, declared Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, “better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” (Helms later expressed regrets over the remark — but only after a media firestorm.) And once they controlled Congress, Republicans tried to govern as if they held the White House, too, eventually shutting down the federal government in an attempt to bully Mr. Clinton into submission.
Mr. Obama seems to have sincerely believed that he would face a different reception. And he made a real try at bipartisanship, nearly losing his chance at health reform by frittering away months in a vain attempt to get a few Republicans on board. At this point, however, it’s clear that any Democratic president will face total opposition from a Republican Party that is completely dominated by right-wing extremists.
For today’s G.O.P. is, fully and finally, the party of Ronald Reagan — not Reagan the pragmatic politician, who could and did strike deals with Democrats, but Reagan the antigovernment fanatic, who warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. It’s a party that sees modest efforts to improve Americans’ economic and health security not merely as unwise, but as monstrous. It’s a party in which paranoid fantasies about the other side — Obama is a socialist, Democrats have totalitarian ambitions — are mainstream. And, as a result, it’s a party that fundamentally doesn’t accept anyone else’s right to govern.
In the short run, Republican extremism may be good for Democrats, to the extent that it prompts a voter backlash. But in the long run, it’s a very bad thing for America. We need to have two reasonable, rational parties in this country. And right now we don’t.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Obama Earns His Place in History
by Jonathan Chait
Let me offer a ludicrously premature opinion: Barack Obama has sealed his reputation as a president of great historical import. We don't know what will follow in his presidency, and it's quite possible that some future event--a war, a scandal--will define his presidency. But we do know that he has put his imprint on the structure of American government in a way that no Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has.
The last two generations have no model for such a president. The only two other Democratic presidents of the last four decades are Jimmy Carter, a failure, and Bill Clinton, who enjoyed modest successes but failed in his most significant legislative fight. Obama, who helped pull the country out of a depression and reshaped the health care system, has already accomplished far more than Clinton. (This isn't necessarily Clinton's fault--he lacked the votes to break a Republican filibuster that Obama has--but the historical convention is to judge a president by what he and the Congress achieve together.) He will never be plausibly compared with Jimmy Carter.
Historians will see this health care bill as a masterfully crafted piece of legislation. Obama and the Democrats managed to bring together most of the stakeholders and every single Senator in their party. The new law untangles the dysfunctionalities of the individual insurance market while fulfilling the political imperative of leaving the employer-provided system in place. Through determined advocacy, and against special interest opposition, they put into place numerous reforms to force efficiency into a wasteful system. They found hundreds of billions of dollars in payment offsets, a monumental task in itself. And they will bring economic and physical security to tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise risk seeing their lives torn apart. Health care experts for decades have bemoaned the impossibility of such reforms--the system is wasteful, but the very waste creates a powerful constituency for the status quo. Finally, the Democrats have begun to untangle the Gordian knot. It's a staggering political task and substantive achievement.
The template of a powerful, historically consequential Democratic president is unfamiliar to many of us. Certainly the Republicans have no real idea how to deal with it. Look at Bill Kristol's taunting editorial in the Weekly Standard:
After his 1851 coup d’état, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the real Napoleon, pronounced himself Napoleon III. It was the rise to power of this great-man-wannabe that prompted the famous opening of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Bonaparte: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
And presiding over this three-ring circus of liberal incompetence was President Barack Obama, who stands in relation to the towering and tragic figure of Lyndon Johnson as Napoleon III did to the real Napoleon. Have we had in modern times a president who was so out of his depth?
It occurs to me that Bill Kristol stands in relation to the towering and tragic figure of Irving Kristol as Napoleon III did to the real Napoleon. But I digress. The broader point is that the Republicans have spent a year chortling over the inevitable collapse of Obama, and they seem to cling even more tightly to that fantasy--"Incompetence"? "Out of his depth"?--as it slips further away.
Obama's accomplishments do not, and probably will not, meet those of Johnson, let alone Franklin Roosevelt. It's worth noting that he has smaller majorities, and governs in an era when the republican Party is far more ideologically radical and unified in opposition. A measure of that greater discipline and partisan unity can be seen in the fact that Social Security and Medicare both won significant Republican support, and both were far more liberal and government-centric in their design.
We can't know what the future holds in store for Obama. It's entirely possible that Republicans will gain control of the House in November and block any further domestic progress, unemployment will stay high, and Republicans will win the White House in 2012. Yet he's already left his imprint on history.
Let me offer a ludicrously premature opinion: Barack Obama has sealed his reputation as a president of great historical import. We don't know what will follow in his presidency, and it's quite possible that some future event--a war, a scandal--will define his presidency. But we do know that he has put his imprint on the structure of American government in a way that no Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson has.
The last two generations have no model for such a president. The only two other Democratic presidents of the last four decades are Jimmy Carter, a failure, and Bill Clinton, who enjoyed modest successes but failed in his most significant legislative fight. Obama, who helped pull the country out of a depression and reshaped the health care system, has already accomplished far more than Clinton. (This isn't necessarily Clinton's fault--he lacked the votes to break a Republican filibuster that Obama has--but the historical convention is to judge a president by what he and the Congress achieve together.) He will never be plausibly compared with Jimmy Carter.
Historians will see this health care bill as a masterfully crafted piece of legislation. Obama and the Democrats managed to bring together most of the stakeholders and every single Senator in their party. The new law untangles the dysfunctionalities of the individual insurance market while fulfilling the political imperative of leaving the employer-provided system in place. Through determined advocacy, and against special interest opposition, they put into place numerous reforms to force efficiency into a wasteful system. They found hundreds of billions of dollars in payment offsets, a monumental task in itself. And they will bring economic and physical security to tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise risk seeing their lives torn apart. Health care experts for decades have bemoaned the impossibility of such reforms--the system is wasteful, but the very waste creates a powerful constituency for the status quo. Finally, the Democrats have begun to untangle the Gordian knot. It's a staggering political task and substantive achievement.
The template of a powerful, historically consequential Democratic president is unfamiliar to many of us. Certainly the Republicans have no real idea how to deal with it. Look at Bill Kristol's taunting editorial in the Weekly Standard:
After his 1851 coup d’état, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the real Napoleon, pronounced himself Napoleon III. It was the rise to power of this great-man-wannabe that prompted the famous opening of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Bonaparte: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
And presiding over this three-ring circus of liberal incompetence was President Barack Obama, who stands in relation to the towering and tragic figure of Lyndon Johnson as Napoleon III did to the real Napoleon. Have we had in modern times a president who was so out of his depth?
It occurs to me that Bill Kristol stands in relation to the towering and tragic figure of Irving Kristol as Napoleon III did to the real Napoleon. But I digress. The broader point is that the Republicans have spent a year chortling over the inevitable collapse of Obama, and they seem to cling even more tightly to that fantasy--"Incompetence"? "Out of his depth"?--as it slips further away.
Obama's accomplishments do not, and probably will not, meet those of Johnson, let alone Franklin Roosevelt. It's worth noting that he has smaller majorities, and governs in an era when the republican Party is far more ideologically radical and unified in opposition. A measure of that greater discipline and partisan unity can be seen in the fact that Social Security and Medicare both won significant Republican support, and both were far more liberal and government-centric in their design.
We can't know what the future holds in store for Obama. It's entirely possible that Republicans will gain control of the House in November and block any further domestic progress, unemployment will stay high, and Republicans will win the White House in 2012. Yet he's already left his imprint on history.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Raucous, ugly buildup to House health care vote
BY Alan Fram
Associated Press
20 March 2010
WASHINGTON – House Democrats heard it all Saturday — words of inspiration from President Barack Obama and raucous chants of protests from demonstrators. And at times it was flat-out ugly, including some racial epithets aimed at black members of Congress.
Most of the day's important work leading up to Sunday's historic vote on health care was being done behind closed doors. Democratic leaders cajoled, bargained and did what they could to nail down the votes they will need to finally push Obama's health care overhaul bill through the House.
But much else about the day was noisy, emotional and right out in the open. After more than a year debating the capstone of Obama's domestic agenda and just hours to go before the showdown vote, there was little holding back.
The tone was set outside the Capitol. Clogging the sidewalks and streets of Capitol Hill were at least hundreds — no official estimate was yet available — of loud, furious protesters, many of them tea party opponents of the health care overhaul.
Rallies outside the Capitol are typically orderly, with speeches and well-behaved crowds. Saturday's was different, with anger-fueled demonstrators surrounding members of Congress who walked by, yelling at them.
"Kill the bill," the largely middle-aged crowd shouted, surging toward lawmakers who crossed the street between their office buildings and the Capitol.
The motorcade that carried Obama to Capitol Hill to whip up support for the bill drove past crowds waving signs that read "Stop the spending" and "Get your hands out of my pocketbook and health care." Many booed and thrust their thumbs down as Obama rode by.
As police held demonstrators back to clear areas for lawmakers outside the Capitol Obama's speech, some protesters jeered and chanted at the officers, "You work for us."
Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., told a reporter that as he left the Cannon House Office Building with Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a leader of the civil rights era, some among the crowd chanted "the N-word, the N-word, 15 times." Both Carson and Lewis are black, and Lewis spokeswoman Brenda Jones also said that it occurred.
"It was like going into the time machine with John Lewis," said Carson, a large former police officer who said he wasn't frightened but worried about the 70-year-old Lewis, who is twice his age. "He said it reminded him of another time."
Kristie Greco, spokeswoman for Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said a protester spit on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who is black and said police escorted the lawmakers into the Capitol. Cleaver's office said he would decline to press charges, but Sgt. Kimberly Schneider of the U.S. Capitol Police said in an e-mail later: "We did not make any arrests today."
Clyburn, who led fellow black students in integrating South Carolina's public facilities a half century ago, called the behavior "absolutely shocking."
"I heard people saying things today that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try to get off the back of the bus," Clyburn told reporters.
Inside House office buildings, protesters made their views known by visiting lawmakers' offices and chanting at legislators walking by.
Among the demonstrators was Delane Stewart, 65, of Cookeville, Tenn., who had come with her husband, Jesse.
"You know what's coming next if this happens?" she said, referring to the health bill's passage. "They're going to come after gun control."
Retired businessman Randy Simpson, 67, of Seneca, S.C., also said the health bill was just a first step.
"My concerns are about the health care bill, and the direction it takes us is toward communism, quite frankly," he said.
At a daylong meeting of the House Rules Committee, members of both parties squeezed into a tiny hearing room traded accusations in a session that was often a shouting match.
"You all in the minority know what the American people think," Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., said loudly and mockingly at Republicans repeatedly saying the public overwhelmingly opposes Obama's health care bill.
Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said a tricky voting procedure Democrats had been contemplating "corrupts and prostitutes the system" and would "unleash a cultural war in this country."
Obama's Capitol Hill visit was the day's emotional peak for House Democrats as he sought to energize them to finally approve the legislation.
He conceded that it could be tough for some to vote for the bill, but predicted it would end up being politically smart because once it becomes law people will realize they like its provisions like curbs on insurance companies.
"It is in your hands," the president said in what Clyburn later called the best speech he'd ever heard Obama make. "It is time to pass health care reform for America, and I am confident that you are going to do it tomorrow."
Associated Press
20 March 2010
WASHINGTON – House Democrats heard it all Saturday — words of inspiration from President Barack Obama and raucous chants of protests from demonstrators. And at times it was flat-out ugly, including some racial epithets aimed at black members of Congress.
Most of the day's important work leading up to Sunday's historic vote on health care was being done behind closed doors. Democratic leaders cajoled, bargained and did what they could to nail down the votes they will need to finally push Obama's health care overhaul bill through the House.
But much else about the day was noisy, emotional and right out in the open. After more than a year debating the capstone of Obama's domestic agenda and just hours to go before the showdown vote, there was little holding back.
The tone was set outside the Capitol. Clogging the sidewalks and streets of Capitol Hill were at least hundreds — no official estimate was yet available — of loud, furious protesters, many of them tea party opponents of the health care overhaul.
Rallies outside the Capitol are typically orderly, with speeches and well-behaved crowds. Saturday's was different, with anger-fueled demonstrators surrounding members of Congress who walked by, yelling at them.
"Kill the bill," the largely middle-aged crowd shouted, surging toward lawmakers who crossed the street between their office buildings and the Capitol.
The motorcade that carried Obama to Capitol Hill to whip up support for the bill drove past crowds waving signs that read "Stop the spending" and "Get your hands out of my pocketbook and health care." Many booed and thrust their thumbs down as Obama rode by.
As police held demonstrators back to clear areas for lawmakers outside the Capitol Obama's speech, some protesters jeered and chanted at the officers, "You work for us."
Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., told a reporter that as he left the Cannon House Office Building with Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a leader of the civil rights era, some among the crowd chanted "the N-word, the N-word, 15 times." Both Carson and Lewis are black, and Lewis spokeswoman Brenda Jones also said that it occurred.
"It was like going into the time machine with John Lewis," said Carson, a large former police officer who said he wasn't frightened but worried about the 70-year-old Lewis, who is twice his age. "He said it reminded him of another time."
Kristie Greco, spokeswoman for Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said a protester spit on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who is black and said police escorted the lawmakers into the Capitol. Cleaver's office said he would decline to press charges, but Sgt. Kimberly Schneider of the U.S. Capitol Police said in an e-mail later: "We did not make any arrests today."
Clyburn, who led fellow black students in integrating South Carolina's public facilities a half century ago, called the behavior "absolutely shocking."
"I heard people saying things today that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try to get off the back of the bus," Clyburn told reporters.
Inside House office buildings, protesters made their views known by visiting lawmakers' offices and chanting at legislators walking by.
Among the demonstrators was Delane Stewart, 65, of Cookeville, Tenn., who had come with her husband, Jesse.
"You know what's coming next if this happens?" she said, referring to the health bill's passage. "They're going to come after gun control."
Retired businessman Randy Simpson, 67, of Seneca, S.C., also said the health bill was just a first step.
"My concerns are about the health care bill, and the direction it takes us is toward communism, quite frankly," he said.
At a daylong meeting of the House Rules Committee, members of both parties squeezed into a tiny hearing room traded accusations in a session that was often a shouting match.
"You all in the minority know what the American people think," Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., said loudly and mockingly at Republicans repeatedly saying the public overwhelmingly opposes Obama's health care bill.
Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said a tricky voting procedure Democrats had been contemplating "corrupts and prostitutes the system" and would "unleash a cultural war in this country."
Obama's Capitol Hill visit was the day's emotional peak for House Democrats as he sought to energize them to finally approve the legislation.
He conceded that it could be tough for some to vote for the bill, but predicted it would end up being politically smart because once it becomes law people will realize they like its provisions like curbs on insurance companies.
"It is in your hands," the president said in what Clyburn later called the best speech he'd ever heard Obama make. "It is time to pass health care reform for America, and I am confident that you are going to do it tomorrow."
Clinton pokes fun at Dems, GOP and himself
Associated Press
21 March 2010
WASHINGTON – Former President Bill Clinton poked fun at Republicans, Democrats, his own health and his audience of reporters Saturday night, telling the Gridiron Club's annual dinner he was there because "I really didn't have anything much better to do tonight."
Clinton, who stood in for President Barack Obama, said Democrats are going to pass health care.
"It may not happen in my lifetime, or Dick Cheney's, but hopefully by Easter," he said referring to his and the former to vice president's heart ailments.
Obama, who's preparing for Sunday's probable House vote on health care reform, spoke to the dinner via videotape, saying that when he called Clinton to stand in for him, the former president said, "Let me clear my schedule for the next three years."
The dinner marked the 125th annual gathering of the Gridiron Club, whose members include Washington based reporters.
In another reference to his health, Clinton said his favorite cocktail now was "Lipitor on the rocks," referring to the widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering medicine.
He said that when Obama appeared recently on Fox News the president was "keeping his word about meeting with hostile leaders without preconditions."
In a poke at Obama's combative chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the former president said, "I found Rahm. I created him. I made him what he is today. I am so sorry."
In the 1990s, Emanuel worked in Clinton's White House.
21 March 2010
WASHINGTON – Former President Bill Clinton poked fun at Republicans, Democrats, his own health and his audience of reporters Saturday night, telling the Gridiron Club's annual dinner he was there because "I really didn't have anything much better to do tonight."
Clinton, who stood in for President Barack Obama, said Democrats are going to pass health care.
"It may not happen in my lifetime, or Dick Cheney's, but hopefully by Easter," he said referring to his and the former to vice president's heart ailments.
Obama, who's preparing for Sunday's probable House vote on health care reform, spoke to the dinner via videotape, saying that when he called Clinton to stand in for him, the former president said, "Let me clear my schedule for the next three years."
The dinner marked the 125th annual gathering of the Gridiron Club, whose members include Washington based reporters.
In another reference to his health, Clinton said his favorite cocktail now was "Lipitor on the rocks," referring to the widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering medicine.
He said that when Obama appeared recently on Fox News the president was "keeping his word about meeting with hostile leaders without preconditions."
In a poke at Obama's combative chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, the former president said, "I found Rahm. I created him. I made him what he is today. I am so sorry."
In the 1990s, Emanuel worked in Clinton's White House.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Rereading Tom Sawyer (4)
I go to a program at the Birmingham Public Library on Twain's Tom Sawyer. The highlight is a panel discussion with 4 people including Dr. Alan Gribben of AUM, one of the leading Twain scholars.
Dr. Gribben talks about how TS isn't much discussed anymore. There is very little scholarship on Tom Sawyer. The main reason is that so much attention is paid to Huckleberry Finn. The latter far outshines TS.
It shouldn't be this way. Tom Sawyer stands on its own as a great work, maybe not as deep or far reaching in its themes as HF but substantial nontheless.
Dr. Gribben talks about how TS isn't much discussed anymore. There is very little scholarship on Tom Sawyer. The main reason is that so much attention is paid to Huckleberry Finn. The latter far outshines TS.
It shouldn't be this way. Tom Sawyer stands on its own as a great work, maybe not as deep or far reaching in its themes as HF but substantial nontheless.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Rereading Tom Sawyer (3)
I finish TOM SAWYER.
I suppose there is not as much depth in TS as there is in the more famous HUCKLEBERRY FINN, yet I think there is much to talk about here.
The book is highly episodic, lacking in a strong narrative. This is one reason I've never been too terribly fond of Twain: he is not strong on plot and narrative. From what I can tell, Twain wrote this story as he went along without an overall plot or scheme in mind at the start. It's as if he's telling everything he remembers from his upbringing from Hannibal and then he's done.
We can question the character of Tom Sawyer. He is conceited and self-centered, but he has a strong conscience and eventually he seems to do the right thing. His Aunt Polly, who is too good to him for his own good, always forgives him. He seems to get away with all of his bad behavior.
It's a boy's story, of course, but I think it's more of an adult book, or maybe it can be read on different levels. Twain is critiquing his hometown, and Aunt Polly (perhaps a stand-in for his own mother) is the only person who comes out pure and wholesome.
A funny part is when Huck Finn rebels against the Widow Douglas trying to "sivilize" him---washing him, putting him in clean clothes, making him sleep in a bed, making him go to church.
"I can't stand it!" Huck cries to Tom. Huck had rather sleep with the hogs than in a clean bed.
You gotta love that Huck. I'm not sure how I feel about Tom Sawyer.
I suppose there is not as much depth in TS as there is in the more famous HUCKLEBERRY FINN, yet I think there is much to talk about here.
The book is highly episodic, lacking in a strong narrative. This is one reason I've never been too terribly fond of Twain: he is not strong on plot and narrative. From what I can tell, Twain wrote this story as he went along without an overall plot or scheme in mind at the start. It's as if he's telling everything he remembers from his upbringing from Hannibal and then he's done.
We can question the character of Tom Sawyer. He is conceited and self-centered, but he has a strong conscience and eventually he seems to do the right thing. His Aunt Polly, who is too good to him for his own good, always forgives him. He seems to get away with all of his bad behavior.
It's a boy's story, of course, but I think it's more of an adult book, or maybe it can be read on different levels. Twain is critiquing his hometown, and Aunt Polly (perhaps a stand-in for his own mother) is the only person who comes out pure and wholesome.
A funny part is when Huck Finn rebels against the Widow Douglas trying to "sivilize" him---washing him, putting him in clean clothes, making him sleep in a bed, making him go to church.
"I can't stand it!" Huck cries to Tom. Huck had rather sleep with the hogs than in a clean bed.
You gotta love that Huck. I'm not sure how I feel about Tom Sawyer.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Rereading Tom Sawyer (2)
"There comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somwhere and dig for hidden treasure."
-Mark Twain, TOM SAWYER, p. 181
-Mark Twain, TOM SAWYER, p. 181
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Shutter Island
Like Fred said about the book, I think it is entertaining. But it won't be something I will feel compelled to think a lot about. I agree the WWII scenes are good. So is the performance of Michelle Williams, who plays the wife. The ending is a bit predictable.
Generally, I have never cared for Martin Scorsese. The only picture of his I really like is The Departed.
Generally, I have never cared for Martin Scorsese. The only picture of his I really like is The Departed.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
A Shallower Culture?
You can make a case that the internet is producing a shallower culture, where depth and detail and nuance are disappearing.
"Nowness Over Ripeness"
13 Mar 2010 11:05 am
David Gelernter contemplates the state of the Internet:
Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world’s attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this.
Nick Carr:
But, [Gelernter] suggests, we can correct that bias.
We can turn the realtime stream into a “lifestream,” tended by historians, along which the past will crystallize into rich, digital deposits of knowledge. We will leap beyond Web 2.0 to "the post-Web," where all the views are long. It’s a pretty vision. I wish I could believe it.
There are times when human beings are able to correct the bias of a technology. There are other times when we make the bias of an instrument our own. Everything we've seen in the development of the Net over the past 20 years, and, indeed, in the development of mass media over the past 50 years, indicates that what we’re seeing today is an example of the latter phenomenon. We are choosing nowness over ripeness.
"Nowness Over Ripeness"
13 Mar 2010 11:05 am
David Gelernter contemplates the state of the Internet:
Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world’s attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this.
Nick Carr:
But, [Gelernter] suggests, we can correct that bias.
We can turn the realtime stream into a “lifestream,” tended by historians, along which the past will crystallize into rich, digital deposits of knowledge. We will leap beyond Web 2.0 to "the post-Web," where all the views are long. It’s a pretty vision. I wish I could believe it.
There are times when human beings are able to correct the bias of a technology. There are other times when we make the bias of an instrument our own. Everything we've seen in the development of the Net over the past 20 years, and, indeed, in the development of mass media over the past 50 years, indicates that what we’re seeing today is an example of the latter phenomenon. We are choosing nowness over ripeness.
Friday, March 12, 2010
How Oscar Found Ms. Right
BY Manohla Dargis
New York Times
10 March 2010
KATHRYN BIGELOW’S two-fisted win at the Academy Awards for best director and best film for “The Hurt Locker” didn’t just punch through the American movie industry’s seemingly shatterproof glass ceiling; it has also helped dismantle stereotypes about what types of films women can and should direct. It was historic, exhilarating, especially for women who make movies and women who watch movies, two groups that have been routinely ignored and underserved by an industry in which most films star men and are made for and by men. It’s too early to know if this moment will be transformative — but damn, it feels so good.
No matter if they’re a source of loathing and laughter, the Oscars matter as a cultural flashpoint, perhaps now more than ever. All those Oscar viewers might not be ticket buyers, but when they watched the show this year they would have heard, perhaps even for the first time, the startling, shocking, infuriating or uninteresting news — pick your degree of engagement — that Ms. Bigelow was the first woman in Oscar’s 82 years to win for best directing. Real discussions about sexual politics don’t usually enter the equation during the interminable Oscar “season,” which is why her nomination was almost as important as her double win.
Even before the nominations were announced on Feb. 2, as she picked up one award after another, including from her peers at the Directors Guild, people who don’t usually talk about women and the movies were talking about this woman and the movies. Uncharacteristically, the issue of female directors working — though all too often not working — was being discussed in print and online, and without the usual accusations of political correctness, a phrase that’s routinely deployed to silence those with legitimate complaints. I don’t think I’ve read the words women and film and feminism in the same sentence as much in the last few months since “Thelma & Louise” rocked the culture nearly two decades ago.
Written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, “Thelma & Louise” galvanized critics and audiences on its release in 1991. Time magazine put them on its cover and one very smart entrepreneur put them on T-shirts (“Thelma & Louise Live Forever.”) Some critics embraced its portrait of a powerful female friendship, while others denounced it. In U.S. News & World Report a male writer accused the film of having “an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism.” Commentators seemed as interested in policing the women’s behavior, their hard-drinking and driving, as their criminal actions. Ms. Khouri insisted that Thelma and Louise were outlaws not feminists, though they were both.
Thelma and Louise didn’t need to tote around “The Second Sex” to confirm their credentials as feminist inspirations; the way viewers received the characters proved they were. The same goes for Ms. Bigelow, who doesn’t like to talk about being a feminist touchstone — she doesn’t need to, she has been one for decades — much less her role a female director. Her refusal, along with the types of movies she makes, have not always sat well with some. Like Thelma and Louise, Ms. Bigelow refuses to behave the way she’s supposed to.
A recent failed takedown of Ms. Bigelow in Salon titled “Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist Pioneer or Tough Guy in Drag?” and written by Martha P. Nochimson exposes some of the issues at stake. The heart of Ms. Nochimson’s critique is the charge that Ms. Bigelow and her “masterly” technique have been lauded while Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron have endured “summary dismissal.” The differences between how they have been received, Ms. Nochimson wrote, “reveal an untenable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the technique appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy.”
Putting aside whether “Julie & Julia” is organic or crammed with artificial flavors, it’s too bad Ms. Nochimson didn’t choose a brilliant director who makes films about women, like Jane Campion, rather than lesser talents like Ms. Meyers and Ms. Ephron to make her argument. Because there is a valid point here: Unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they’re about women, as the patronizing term “chick flick” affirms every time it’s reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only movies that offer female audiences stories about women and female friendships and a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much and usually isn’t, at least in aesthetic terms, but it’s sometimes all there is. Ms. Bigelow doesn’t make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don’t sparkle, they draw blood.) She generally makes kinetic and thrilling movies about men and codes of masculinity set in worlds of violence. Her technique might be masterly [sic], because she learned from the likes of Sam Peckinpah. But she is very much her own woman, and her own auteur. It’s a bummer that her success elicits such unthinking responses, though it’s also predictable because the stakes for women are high and the access to real filmmaking power remains largely out of their reach. But it isn’t her fault that women’s stories are routinely devalued any more than it’s her fault that these days female directors and female stars in Hollywood are too often ghettoized in romantic comedy.
Some women in film help perpetuate this ghetto, when they should be helping dismantle it or walking away from it altogether. One of the lessons of Ms. Bigelow’s success is that it was primarily achieved outside of the reach of the studios. She had help along the way, including from male mentors like James Cameron, her former husband, who helped produce “Strange Days.” But that movie did poorly at the box office, as did her next two features, “The Weight of Water” and “K-19: The Widowmaker.” It wasn’t until she went off to the desert to shoot “The Hurt Locker,” just as she had when she directed “Near Dark,” her 1987 cult vampire western, that she found a movie that hit on every level.
It was a long time coming, as Ms. Bigelow suggested when she appeared on “60 Minutes” on Feb. 28. Her appearance, for which she was interviewed by Lesley Stahl (Steve Kroft must have been busy), was a classic of its type. During the interview Ms. Bigelow explained to the apparently baffled Ms. Stahl the meaning of scopophilia, a significant word in feminist film theory, though Ms. Bigelow kept gender out of her definition (“the desire to watch and identify with what you’re watching”). She insisted that there was no difference between what she and a male director might do, even as she also conceded that “the journey for women, no matter what venue it is — politics, business, film — it’s, it’s a long journey.”
It’s instructive that she didn’t say it had also been a hard journey, because that might have pegged Ms. Bigelow as a whiner, as in whiny woman. Unsurprisingly, she again had to share her few minutes with Mr. Cameron, whose name Ms. Stahl invoked within seconds of starting and not only because he had directed two of the largest hits in history, including “Avatar.” He was the ex-husband, a powerful director and a representation of male authority who could vet Ms. Bigelow. “How sweet is this to be head to head with your ex-husband,” Ms. Stahl asked. “You couldn’t have scripted it,” Ms. Bigelow laughed. As she has these last months, she played it carefully. She seemed well-behaved.
Her cool has disturbed some, who have scrutinized Ms. Bigelow up and down, sometimes taking suspicious measure of her height and willowy frame, partly because these are the only personal parts of her that are accessible to nosy interviewers. Women in movies, both in front of and behind the camera, are expected to offer a lot more of themselves, from skin to confessions. All that Ms. Bigelow freely gives of herself for public consumption is intelligent conversation and her work. Her insistence on keeping the focus on her movies is a quiet yet profound form of rebellion. She might be a female director, but by refusing to accept that gendered designation — or even engage with it — she is asserting her right to be simply a director.
One of the strange truths of American cinema is that women thrived in the silent era — Mary Pickford was one of the first stars and helped start a studio, United Artists — but soon after the movies started to talk in the late 1920s, women’s voices started to fade, at least behind the scenes. Hollywood might have been partly built on the hard work and beauty of its female stars, but it was the rare female director, Dorothy Arzner starting in the 1920s, Ida Lupino beginning in the 1940s, who managed to have her say behind the camera. It hasn’t gotten better. According to Martha M. Lauzen, an academic who annually crunches numbers about women in American movies: “Women comprised 7 percent of all directors working on the top 250 films of 2009. Ninety-three percent of the films had no female directors.”
It’s impossible to tell what Ms. Bigelow’s Oscars will mean for her, much less whether it will help other women working in the American movie industry. Perhaps Amy Pascal, the Sony studio co-chairwoman who once suggested to me in an interview that men were better suited to direct action movies, will pay Ms. Bigelow a lot of money to make another war film. Or she can sign up Kelly Reichardt, the director of “Wendy and Lucy,” for a buddy movie, but, you know, with women. Maybe Sandra Bullock will take all the good will and power she has rightly accrued and, with Oprah Winfrey, produce that Hattie McDaniel biography that Mo’Nique wants to make. Kristen Stewart can play Vivien Leigh, who appeared alongside McDaniel in “Gone With the Wind,” the biggest movie that Hollywood ever made and, you know, a total chick flick.
New York Times
10 March 2010
KATHRYN BIGELOW’S two-fisted win at the Academy Awards for best director and best film for “The Hurt Locker” didn’t just punch through the American movie industry’s seemingly shatterproof glass ceiling; it has also helped dismantle stereotypes about what types of films women can and should direct. It was historic, exhilarating, especially for women who make movies and women who watch movies, two groups that have been routinely ignored and underserved by an industry in which most films star men and are made for and by men. It’s too early to know if this moment will be transformative — but damn, it feels so good.
No matter if they’re a source of loathing and laughter, the Oscars matter as a cultural flashpoint, perhaps now more than ever. All those Oscar viewers might not be ticket buyers, but when they watched the show this year they would have heard, perhaps even for the first time, the startling, shocking, infuriating or uninteresting news — pick your degree of engagement — that Ms. Bigelow was the first woman in Oscar’s 82 years to win for best directing. Real discussions about sexual politics don’t usually enter the equation during the interminable Oscar “season,” which is why her nomination was almost as important as her double win.
Even before the nominations were announced on Feb. 2, as she picked up one award after another, including from her peers at the Directors Guild, people who don’t usually talk about women and the movies were talking about this woman and the movies. Uncharacteristically, the issue of female directors working — though all too often not working — was being discussed in print and online, and without the usual accusations of political correctness, a phrase that’s routinely deployed to silence those with legitimate complaints. I don’t think I’ve read the words women and film and feminism in the same sentence as much in the last few months since “Thelma & Louise” rocked the culture nearly two decades ago.
Written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, “Thelma & Louise” galvanized critics and audiences on its release in 1991. Time magazine put them on its cover and one very smart entrepreneur put them on T-shirts (“Thelma & Louise Live Forever.”) Some critics embraced its portrait of a powerful female friendship, while others denounced it. In U.S. News & World Report a male writer accused the film of having “an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism.” Commentators seemed as interested in policing the women’s behavior, their hard-drinking and driving, as their criminal actions. Ms. Khouri insisted that Thelma and Louise were outlaws not feminists, though they were both.
Thelma and Louise didn’t need to tote around “The Second Sex” to confirm their credentials as feminist inspirations; the way viewers received the characters proved they were. The same goes for Ms. Bigelow, who doesn’t like to talk about being a feminist touchstone — she doesn’t need to, she has been one for decades — much less her role a female director. Her refusal, along with the types of movies she makes, have not always sat well with some. Like Thelma and Louise, Ms. Bigelow refuses to behave the way she’s supposed to.
A recent failed takedown of Ms. Bigelow in Salon titled “Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist Pioneer or Tough Guy in Drag?” and written by Martha P. Nochimson exposes some of the issues at stake. The heart of Ms. Nochimson’s critique is the charge that Ms. Bigelow and her “masterly” technique have been lauded while Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron have endured “summary dismissal.” The differences between how they have been received, Ms. Nochimson wrote, “reveal an untenable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the technique appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy.”
Putting aside whether “Julie & Julia” is organic or crammed with artificial flavors, it’s too bad Ms. Nochimson didn’t choose a brilliant director who makes films about women, like Jane Campion, rather than lesser talents like Ms. Meyers and Ms. Ephron to make her argument. Because there is a valid point here: Unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they’re about women, as the patronizing term “chick flick” affirms every time it’s reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only movies that offer female audiences stories about women and female friendships and a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much and usually isn’t, at least in aesthetic terms, but it’s sometimes all there is. Ms. Bigelow doesn’t make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don’t sparkle, they draw blood.) She generally makes kinetic and thrilling movies about men and codes of masculinity set in worlds of violence. Her technique might be masterly [sic], because she learned from the likes of Sam Peckinpah. But she is very much her own woman, and her own auteur. It’s a bummer that her success elicits such unthinking responses, though it’s also predictable because the stakes for women are high and the access to real filmmaking power remains largely out of their reach. But it isn’t her fault that women’s stories are routinely devalued any more than it’s her fault that these days female directors and female stars in Hollywood are too often ghettoized in romantic comedy.
Some women in film help perpetuate this ghetto, when they should be helping dismantle it or walking away from it altogether. One of the lessons of Ms. Bigelow’s success is that it was primarily achieved outside of the reach of the studios. She had help along the way, including from male mentors like James Cameron, her former husband, who helped produce “Strange Days.” But that movie did poorly at the box office, as did her next two features, “The Weight of Water” and “K-19: The Widowmaker.” It wasn’t until she went off to the desert to shoot “The Hurt Locker,” just as she had when she directed “Near Dark,” her 1987 cult vampire western, that she found a movie that hit on every level.
It was a long time coming, as Ms. Bigelow suggested when she appeared on “60 Minutes” on Feb. 28. Her appearance, for which she was interviewed by Lesley Stahl (Steve Kroft must have been busy), was a classic of its type. During the interview Ms. Bigelow explained to the apparently baffled Ms. Stahl the meaning of scopophilia, a significant word in feminist film theory, though Ms. Bigelow kept gender out of her definition (“the desire to watch and identify with what you’re watching”). She insisted that there was no difference between what she and a male director might do, even as she also conceded that “the journey for women, no matter what venue it is — politics, business, film — it’s, it’s a long journey.”
It’s instructive that she didn’t say it had also been a hard journey, because that might have pegged Ms. Bigelow as a whiner, as in whiny woman. Unsurprisingly, she again had to share her few minutes with Mr. Cameron, whose name Ms. Stahl invoked within seconds of starting and not only because he had directed two of the largest hits in history, including “Avatar.” He was the ex-husband, a powerful director and a representation of male authority who could vet Ms. Bigelow. “How sweet is this to be head to head with your ex-husband,” Ms. Stahl asked. “You couldn’t have scripted it,” Ms. Bigelow laughed. As she has these last months, she played it carefully. She seemed well-behaved.
Her cool has disturbed some, who have scrutinized Ms. Bigelow up and down, sometimes taking suspicious measure of her height and willowy frame, partly because these are the only personal parts of her that are accessible to nosy interviewers. Women in movies, both in front of and behind the camera, are expected to offer a lot more of themselves, from skin to confessions. All that Ms. Bigelow freely gives of herself for public consumption is intelligent conversation and her work. Her insistence on keeping the focus on her movies is a quiet yet profound form of rebellion. She might be a female director, but by refusing to accept that gendered designation — or even engage with it — she is asserting her right to be simply a director.
One of the strange truths of American cinema is that women thrived in the silent era — Mary Pickford was one of the first stars and helped start a studio, United Artists — but soon after the movies started to talk in the late 1920s, women’s voices started to fade, at least behind the scenes. Hollywood might have been partly built on the hard work and beauty of its female stars, but it was the rare female director, Dorothy Arzner starting in the 1920s, Ida Lupino beginning in the 1940s, who managed to have her say behind the camera. It hasn’t gotten better. According to Martha M. Lauzen, an academic who annually crunches numbers about women in American movies: “Women comprised 7 percent of all directors working on the top 250 films of 2009. Ninety-three percent of the films had no female directors.”
It’s impossible to tell what Ms. Bigelow’s Oscars will mean for her, much less whether it will help other women working in the American movie industry. Perhaps Amy Pascal, the Sony studio co-chairwoman who once suggested to me in an interview that men were better suited to direct action movies, will pay Ms. Bigelow a lot of money to make another war film. Or she can sign up Kelly Reichardt, the director of “Wendy and Lucy,” for a buddy movie, but, you know, with women. Maybe Sandra Bullock will take all the good will and power she has rightly accrued and, with Oprah Winfrey, produce that Hattie McDaniel biography that Mo’Nique wants to make. Kristen Stewart can play Vivien Leigh, who appeared alongside McDaniel in “Gone With the Wind,” the biggest movie that Hollywood ever made and, you know, a total chick flick.
The Republican Vision
If you can embrace the vision of Paul Ryan for this country, then you are a true Republican. This is nothing new in that his views merely codify what has always been the Republican view: that government and public policy should exist to beneift the wealthiest members of society & the heck with the rest of us.
by Jonathan Chait
Paul Ryan And The Republican Vision
Ryan and his conservative allies believe that the roadmap clarifies the fact that they have laid out a plan to put the United States on sound fiscal footing, and the Democrats have not. I find this claim highly unconvincing, as does the well-respected Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has a report showing that Ryan's plan would dramatically increase the budget deficit. Ryan disputes the some of the claims in the report. CBPP stands by its report and plans to issue a response to Ryan's response tomorrow.
I'm going to return to the question of whether Ryan's plan increases or decreases the deficit in some future postings. It's an interesting question, but I don't think it's the most interesting thing about Ryan's plan. What I want to focus on is the ideological character of his plan.
The roadmap clarifies the essence of the Republican Party's approach to domestic policy issues. The essence is opposition to the downward redistribution of income. The principle first emerged under Ronald Reagan, but only in fits and starts--Republican presidents agreed to a tax reform in 1986 and a deficit reduction in 1990 that did redistribute income from rich to poor. Over the last twenty years, though, opposition to downward redistribution has hardened into the sacred tenet of Republican policymaking. Ryan's plan both codifies this principle and shows just how far the party is willing to go in its service.
Every major element of Ryan's plan reflects this commitment. Begin with his proposed tax changes. Ryan would not only retain the Bush tax cuts for the highest earners, he would further lower the top tax rate to 25%. On top of that, he would repeal all taxes on corporate income, inherited estates, capital gains, and dividends. In other words, he would completely eliminate the most progressive elements of the tax code, and slash the next most progressive element. In their place he would impose a value-added tax, which would not bring in nearly enough revenue to replace the revenue lost from his tax cuts, but would fall much more heavily on the poor and middle class.
It's worth keeping in mind that the current tax system in this country is only very slightly progressive. State and local taxes are regressive, federal taxes are somewhat progressive, and the net effect redistributes income, very slightly, from the rich to the not-rich:
Ryan's plan would make the federal tax code regressive, especially at the top, on top of an already-regressive state and local tax base. According to the Tax Policy Center, the richest 1% of all taxpayers, who earn more than 21% of the national income and currently pay about 25% of federal taxes, would pay 13% of federal taxes under Ryan's plan. (Ryan's response argues that the corporate income tax he'd eliminate is already born by consumers anyway, a contention most economists including the CBO reject, and even if true would only chip away slightly at the overall critique of his plan's regressive nature.) Ryan's tax plan alone would amount to the greatest shift of resources from the non-rich to the rich in the history of the United States, by far.
And that is just the beginning. Ryan would impose a series of dramatic social policy changes that would all push in the same direction. He would blow up the employer-based health care system, pushing workers into an under-regulated individual market. Instead of sharing medical risk with their fellow employees, they'd bear it entirely by themselves, which would be good for the healthy but bad for the sick. He would convert Social Security into primarily a network of individual investment accounts--meaning that some workers would do well and others poorly. And he would convert Medicare into a voucher system, capping the value of each voucher at well below the rate of medical inflation, which would make the elderly bear a far greater share of medical risk.
All these changes push in the same direction. The basic thrust of liberal public policy over the last century is to keep in places the market system but use government to slightly mitigate against risk--the risk of getting sick, the risk of outliving your savings, the risk that you just won't make much money in the first place. The downside of these policies is that, in order to mitigate the downside risk, you also have to mitigate the upside benefit. If you're unusually rich, you have to pay a somewhat higher tax rate than most people. If you're unusually healthy, you have to subsidize medical care for people who aren't. If you were able to invest well enough to cover your entire retirement, some of your good fortune will be siphoned off to those who weren't. The rewards for getting rich, or merely being born rich, will remain enormous, just slightly less so than in a completely free market.
Republicans want to eliminate these mitigations of risk. Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan's moral philosophy:
"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." ...
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand's writings when he told his audience that, "Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill ... is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict--individualism versus collectivism."
The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers. What's telling about Ryan's program is not so much that a hard-core ideologue like him would advocate it. It's that virtually the whole of the conservative movement has embraced him. (Even someone like Ross Douthat, one of the very few conservatives not implacably hostile to redistribution, has mostly praise for Ryan's plan.)
The rise of Ryan is a sign that the possibilities for bipartisan cooperation on domestic issues are, at the moment, essentially nil. This point is obscured by the figure of Ryan, a cheerful and courteous man who gives every sense of wanting to deal in good faith. But his goals, which are now fully the goals of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, are diametrically opposed to the liberal vision of capitalism shorn of its cruelest edges. His basic moral premises are foreign, even abhorrent, to liberals. He seems like a person you'd like to negotiate with, but there's nothing to negotiate over. Ryan is waging a zero sum fight over resources on behalf of the most fortunate members of society and against everybody else.
by Jonathan Chait
Paul Ryan And The Republican Vision
Ryan and his conservative allies believe that the roadmap clarifies the fact that they have laid out a plan to put the United States on sound fiscal footing, and the Democrats have not. I find this claim highly unconvincing, as does the well-respected Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has a report showing that Ryan's plan would dramatically increase the budget deficit. Ryan disputes the some of the claims in the report. CBPP stands by its report and plans to issue a response to Ryan's response tomorrow.
I'm going to return to the question of whether Ryan's plan increases or decreases the deficit in some future postings. It's an interesting question, but I don't think it's the most interesting thing about Ryan's plan. What I want to focus on is the ideological character of his plan.
The roadmap clarifies the essence of the Republican Party's approach to domestic policy issues. The essence is opposition to the downward redistribution of income. The principle first emerged under Ronald Reagan, but only in fits and starts--Republican presidents agreed to a tax reform in 1986 and a deficit reduction in 1990 that did redistribute income from rich to poor. Over the last twenty years, though, opposition to downward redistribution has hardened into the sacred tenet of Republican policymaking. Ryan's plan both codifies this principle and shows just how far the party is willing to go in its service.
Every major element of Ryan's plan reflects this commitment. Begin with his proposed tax changes. Ryan would not only retain the Bush tax cuts for the highest earners, he would further lower the top tax rate to 25%. On top of that, he would repeal all taxes on corporate income, inherited estates, capital gains, and dividends. In other words, he would completely eliminate the most progressive elements of the tax code, and slash the next most progressive element. In their place he would impose a value-added tax, which would not bring in nearly enough revenue to replace the revenue lost from his tax cuts, but would fall much more heavily on the poor and middle class.
It's worth keeping in mind that the current tax system in this country is only very slightly progressive. State and local taxes are regressive, federal taxes are somewhat progressive, and the net effect redistributes income, very slightly, from the rich to the not-rich:
Ryan's plan would make the federal tax code regressive, especially at the top, on top of an already-regressive state and local tax base. According to the Tax Policy Center, the richest 1% of all taxpayers, who earn more than 21% of the national income and currently pay about 25% of federal taxes, would pay 13% of federal taxes under Ryan's plan. (Ryan's response argues that the corporate income tax he'd eliminate is already born by consumers anyway, a contention most economists including the CBO reject, and even if true would only chip away slightly at the overall critique of his plan's regressive nature.) Ryan's tax plan alone would amount to the greatest shift of resources from the non-rich to the rich in the history of the United States, by far.
And that is just the beginning. Ryan would impose a series of dramatic social policy changes that would all push in the same direction. He would blow up the employer-based health care system, pushing workers into an under-regulated individual market. Instead of sharing medical risk with their fellow employees, they'd bear it entirely by themselves, which would be good for the healthy but bad for the sick. He would convert Social Security into primarily a network of individual investment accounts--meaning that some workers would do well and others poorly. And he would convert Medicare into a voucher system, capping the value of each voucher at well below the rate of medical inflation, which would make the elderly bear a far greater share of medical risk.
All these changes push in the same direction. The basic thrust of liberal public policy over the last century is to keep in places the market system but use government to slightly mitigate against risk--the risk of getting sick, the risk of outliving your savings, the risk that you just won't make much money in the first place. The downside of these policies is that, in order to mitigate the downside risk, you also have to mitigate the upside benefit. If you're unusually rich, you have to pay a somewhat higher tax rate than most people. If you're unusually healthy, you have to subsidize medical care for people who aren't. If you were able to invest well enough to cover your entire retirement, some of your good fortune will be siphoned off to those who weren't. The rewards for getting rich, or merely being born rich, will remain enormous, just slightly less so than in a completely free market.
Republicans want to eliminate these mitigations of risk. Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan's moral philosophy:
"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." ...
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand's writings when he told his audience that, "Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill ... is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict--individualism versus collectivism."
The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers. What's telling about Ryan's program is not so much that a hard-core ideologue like him would advocate it. It's that virtually the whole of the conservative movement has embraced him. (Even someone like Ross Douthat, one of the very few conservatives not implacably hostile to redistribution, has mostly praise for Ryan's plan.)
The rise of Ryan is a sign that the possibilities for bipartisan cooperation on domestic issues are, at the moment, essentially nil. This point is obscured by the figure of Ryan, a cheerful and courteous man who gives every sense of wanting to deal in good faith. But his goals, which are now fully the goals of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, are diametrically opposed to the liberal vision of capitalism shorn of its cruelest edges. His basic moral premises are foreign, even abhorrent, to liberals. He seems like a person you'd like to negotiate with, but there's nothing to negotiate over. Ryan is waging a zero sum fight over resources on behalf of the most fortunate members of society and against everybody else.
Rereading Tom Sawyer
I'm devoting March & April mainly to Mark Twain. Having finished Huckleberry Finn, I am rereading Tom Sawyer. I must say it's very enjoyable. That Tom Sawyer is a conniver, isn't he?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
From Glen Beck
Rev. James Martin, S.J.Jesuit priest and culture editor of America magazine
Posted: March 8, 2010 05:15 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
Glenn Beck to Jesus: Drop Dead
Glenn Beck said last week on his eponymous show that Christians should leave churches that preach "social justice." Mr. Beck equated the desire for a just society with--wait for it--Nazism and Communism.
I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes.
This means that you would have to leave the Catholic Church, which has long championed that aspect of the Gospel. The term "social justice" originated way back in the 1800s (and probably predates even that), and has been underlined by the Magisterium and popes since Leo XIII, who began the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching with his encyclical on capital and labor, Rerum Novarum in 1891. Subsequent popes have built on Leo's work, continuing the church's meditation on a variety of issues of social justice in such landmark documents as Pope Pius XI's encyclical on "the reconstruction of the social order," Quadregismo Anno (1931), Paul VI's encyclical "on the development of peoples," Populorum Progressio (1967) and John Paul II's encyclical "on the social concerns of the church" Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987).
The Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Church, published by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, says this:
The Church's social Magisterium constantly calls for the most classical forms of justice to be respected: commutative, distributive and legal justice. Ever greater importance has been given to social justice., which represents a real development in general justice, the justice that regulates social relationships according to the criterion of observance of the law. Social justice, a requirement related to the social question which today is worldwide in scope, concerns the social, political and economic aspects and, above all, the structural dimension of problems and their respective solutions....
Social justice is not just some silly foreign idea. American Catholics know that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have an Office of Justice, Peace and Human Development. On that website the U.S. bishops say: "At the core of the virtue of solidarity is the pursuit of justice and peace. Our love for all our sisters and brothers demands that we promote peace in a world surrounded by violence and conflict."
Get it? Social justice is an essential part of Catholic teaching. It's part of being a Catholic. So Glenn Beck is, in essence, saying "Leave the Catholic church."
But Glenn Beck is saying something else: "Leave Christianity." Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus mentions our responsibility to care for the poor, to work on their behalf, to stand with them. In fact, when asked how his followers would be judged he doesn't say that it will be based on where you worship, or how you pray, or how often you go to church, or even what political party you believe in. He says something quite different: It depends on how you treat the poor.
In the Gospel of Matthew (25) he tells his surprised disciples, that when you are meeting the poor, you are meeting him. They protest. "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."
But our responsibility to care for "the least of these" does not end with simple charity. Giving someone a handout is an important part of the Christian message. But so is advocating for them. It is not enough simply to help the poor, one must address the structures that keep them that way. Standing up for the rights of the poor is not being a Nazi, it's being Christian. And Communist, as Mr. Beck suggests? It's hard not to think of the retort of the great apostle of social justice, Dom Helder Camara, archbishop of Recife, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
The attack on social justice is the tack of those who wish to ignore the concerns the poor and ignore the social structures that foster poverty. It's not hard to see why people are tempted to do so. How much easier it would be if we didn't have to worry about the poor!
But ignoring the poor, and ignoring what keeps them poor, is, quite simply, unchristian. For the poor are the church in many ways. When St. Lawrence, in the fourth century, was ordered by the prefect of Rome to turn over the wealth of the church, he presented to him the poor.
Glenn Beck's desire to detach social justice from the Gospel is a move to detach care for the poor from the Gospel. But a church without the poor, and a church without a desire for a just social world for all, is not the church.
At least not the church of Jesus Christ. Who was, by the way, poor
Posted: March 8, 2010 05:15 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
Glenn Beck to Jesus: Drop Dead
Glenn Beck said last week on his eponymous show that Christians should leave churches that preach "social justice." Mr. Beck equated the desire for a just society with--wait for it--Nazism and Communism.
I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes.
This means that you would have to leave the Catholic Church, which has long championed that aspect of the Gospel. The term "social justice" originated way back in the 1800s (and probably predates even that), and has been underlined by the Magisterium and popes since Leo XIII, who began the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching with his encyclical on capital and labor, Rerum Novarum in 1891. Subsequent popes have built on Leo's work, continuing the church's meditation on a variety of issues of social justice in such landmark documents as Pope Pius XI's encyclical on "the reconstruction of the social order," Quadregismo Anno (1931), Paul VI's encyclical "on the development of peoples," Populorum Progressio (1967) and John Paul II's encyclical "on the social concerns of the church" Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987).
The Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Church, published by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, says this:
The Church's social Magisterium constantly calls for the most classical forms of justice to be respected: commutative, distributive and legal justice. Ever greater importance has been given to social justice., which represents a real development in general justice, the justice that regulates social relationships according to the criterion of observance of the law. Social justice, a requirement related to the social question which today is worldwide in scope, concerns the social, political and economic aspects and, above all, the structural dimension of problems and their respective solutions....
Social justice is not just some silly foreign idea. American Catholics know that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have an Office of Justice, Peace and Human Development. On that website the U.S. bishops say: "At the core of the virtue of solidarity is the pursuit of justice and peace. Our love for all our sisters and brothers demands that we promote peace in a world surrounded by violence and conflict."
Get it? Social justice is an essential part of Catholic teaching. It's part of being a Catholic. So Glenn Beck is, in essence, saying "Leave the Catholic church."
But Glenn Beck is saying something else: "Leave Christianity." Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus mentions our responsibility to care for the poor, to work on their behalf, to stand with them. In fact, when asked how his followers would be judged he doesn't say that it will be based on where you worship, or how you pray, or how often you go to church, or even what political party you believe in. He says something quite different: It depends on how you treat the poor.
In the Gospel of Matthew (25) he tells his surprised disciples, that when you are meeting the poor, you are meeting him. They protest. "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me."
But our responsibility to care for "the least of these" does not end with simple charity. Giving someone a handout is an important part of the Christian message. But so is advocating for them. It is not enough simply to help the poor, one must address the structures that keep them that way. Standing up for the rights of the poor is not being a Nazi, it's being Christian. And Communist, as Mr. Beck suggests? It's hard not to think of the retort of the great apostle of social justice, Dom Helder Camara, archbishop of Recife, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
The attack on social justice is the tack of those who wish to ignore the concerns the poor and ignore the social structures that foster poverty. It's not hard to see why people are tempted to do so. How much easier it would be if we didn't have to worry about the poor!
But ignoring the poor, and ignoring what keeps them poor, is, quite simply, unchristian. For the poor are the church in many ways. When St. Lawrence, in the fourth century, was ordered by the prefect of Rome to turn over the wealth of the church, he presented to him the poor.
Glenn Beck's desire to detach social justice from the Gospel is a move to detach care for the poor from the Gospel. But a church without the poor, and a church without a desire for a just social world for all, is not the church.
At least not the church of Jesus Christ. Who was, by the way, poor
Sunday, March 7, 2010
The New York Review of Books
Since Freddy purchased a subscription for me Christmas before last, I have so enjoyed The New York Review of Books. How did I live so long without it?
In the current issue there is a funny article about Palin inside the Tea Party. There is an article about the movie "Avatar." As much as anything I always enjoy the publisher's ads for forthcoming titles.
Thanks again, Freddy, for getting me started on this wonderful reading.
In the current issue there is a funny article about Palin inside the Tea Party. There is an article about the movie "Avatar." As much as anything I always enjoy the publisher's ads for forthcoming titles.
Thanks again, Freddy, for getting me started on this wonderful reading.
My Point
This email from a NY Times readers says what I say: that I prefer the book because I have the book for a lifetime. It's there. I know where it is. Short of fire or theft, it isn't going anywhere. It will be there as long I wish for it to be there. What about ebook content? Will it be there 10 years from now, 20 years from now? I doubt it.
* * * * *
Mod's claim that -- essentially -- print is dead, is similar to other claims along these lines, in that they purposely ignore a key ingredient in the equation: DRM. Books don't have it, but most digital media do.
If I buy a book, I can do what I want with it. I can share it with someone else. I can sell it. I can donate it to a library. I can store it away and re-read it, years later, knowing it will still work.
Digital media, on the other hand, generally can do none of those things. I cannot buy a Kindle book and share it with someone, or sell it, or donate it to a library. And I cannot be sure it will still be there if I put my Kindle away and decide to come back to it in 10 years; the Kindle may have died and not be replaceable, or the license may expire.
When people like Mod blather on about this topic, but refuse to take the straitjacket of DRM into account, they reveal their total ignorance of the topic at hand. It IS true, as they say, that content matters ... but because of that, something else also matters enormously, and that is ACCESS to the content. With DRM you have limited and/or tenuous access to what you've bought.
Thus, I say to Mr Mod and others of his type: Stop trying to delude everyone by ignoring the existence of DRM in digital media. The sooner you do that, the more credibility you will have.
* * * * *
Mod's claim that -- essentially -- print is dead, is similar to other claims along these lines, in that they purposely ignore a key ingredient in the equation: DRM. Books don't have it, but most digital media do.
If I buy a book, I can do what I want with it. I can share it with someone else. I can sell it. I can donate it to a library. I can store it away and re-read it, years later, knowing it will still work.
Digital media, on the other hand, generally can do none of those things. I cannot buy a Kindle book and share it with someone, or sell it, or donate it to a library. And I cannot be sure it will still be there if I put my Kindle away and decide to come back to it in 10 years; the Kindle may have died and not be replaceable, or the license may expire.
When people like Mod blather on about this topic, but refuse to take the straitjacket of DRM into account, they reveal their total ignorance of the topic at hand. It IS true, as they say, that content matters ... but because of that, something else also matters enormously, and that is ACCESS to the content. With DRM you have limited and/or tenuous access to what you've bought.
Thus, I say to Mr Mod and others of his type: Stop trying to delude everyone by ignoring the existence of DRM in digital media. The sooner you do that, the more credibility you will have.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Shelf Life
BY Virginia Heffernan
New York Times
4 March 2010
People who reject e-books often say they can’t live without the heft, the texture and — curiously — the scent of traditional books. This aria of hypersensual book love is not my favorite performance. I sometimes suspect that those who gush about book odor might not like to read. If they did, why would they waste so much time inhaling? Among the best features of the Kindle, Amazon’s great e-reader, is that there’s none of that. The device, which consigns all poetry and prose to the same homely fog-toned screen, leaves nothing to the experience of books but reading. This strikes me as honest, even revolutionary.
But I have to stop being so marmish. I’m not a literacy promoter; I don’t run some kind of Reading Rocket Club. And binding sniffers are not illiterate, anyway. No less a reader than the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, as card-carrying a man of letters as the world has ever seen, savored the physicality of books. In his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting” — one of those essays that’s often called “famous,” though we’re not talking Hello Kitty here — Benjamin turns euphoric while surveying his dusty books. He’s enchanted by each one: “the period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership.” In acquiring books, often in mock-heroic ways, he says he has managed “to renew the Old World.”
Benjamin even pre-empts my skepticism. “The nonreading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors?” His answer: Yes! Book collectors don’t always read! Should a person read all the books she buys? No more — Benjamin writes — than you should use your best china every day.
Hmph. Benjamin is not to be gainsaid. If he says not reading books can be as sophisticated and European as reading them, I believe him, and I will try to think of my books as Sèvres china. But Sèvres china, if I had any, would be for display on its days off, wouldn’t it? So how do I display or otherwise admire all these books I keep buying for the Kindle?
Unpacking my Kindle library, I click “menu” on my screen and find . . . a list. First, the words “The Happiness Project,” the title of a book by Gretchen Rubin, in stout dark gray lettering, underscored by a lighter, less stout line.
This might be depressing. I can’t tell if I’m supposed to consider this underlined title to be the “book” I ordered from Amazon. Maybe it’s more like a catalog listing. If I click on it, I’ll get to the words in the book. Maybe it’s analogous to a book’s spine.
I want to rhapsodize, as Benjamin does, when he remembers the tactics he employed to acquire the book “Fragmente aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers” (Johann Wilhelm Ritter, 1810) after a Berlin auction. But the only memory I have of purchasing “The Happiness Project” is no memory at all. I’ll have to search my e-mail to see when I clicked “Start reading ‘The Happiness Project’ on your Kindle in under a minute” on Amazon. I think I had seen that “The Happiness Project,” a franchise with a blog I read, had become a best seller, and that seemed exciting; if I clicked, a credit card on file at Amazon would be out a theoretical $9.99, and in under a minute I’d be able to see for myself whether the book had more in it than the blog. That is the sweeping, romantic story of my acquisition of “The Happiness Project.” As Benjamin reminds us, Habent sua fata libelli. Books have their destiny!
Going down the gray list, further unpacking my dustless, odorless, weightless Kindle library, I find “Devotion,” by Dani Shapiro; “Let the Great World Spin,” by Colum McCann; “Wolf Hall: A Novel,” by Hilary Mantel; “Lit,” by Mary Karr; “Manhant,” by James Swanson; “DANCING IN THE DARK” — some titles are unaccountably given in all caps — by Morris Dickstein; and “Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Recipes for Entertaining” (a modern classic).
I have literally no memory of opting to get any of these on Amazon. Most of these books were bought impulsively, more like making a note to myself to read this or that than acquiring a tangible 3-D book; the list is a list of resolutions with price tags that will, with any luck, make the resolutions more urgent. Though it’s different from Benjamin’s ecstatic book collecting, this cycle of list making and resolution and constant-reading-to-keep-up is not unpleasurable.
Beholding “the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me,” Benjamin exclaims: “O bliss of the collector! Bliss of the man of leisure!” With nothing piled up around me but the Kindle and its charger, I may be missing out. But even Benjamin, who managed to see the future of media and technology more than once, knew he was writing an elegy for a way of experiencing books. I like to think he would be the first to recognize that the Kindle delivers a new kind of bliss.
New York Times
4 March 2010
People who reject e-books often say they can’t live without the heft, the texture and — curiously — the scent of traditional books. This aria of hypersensual book love is not my favorite performance. I sometimes suspect that those who gush about book odor might not like to read. If they did, why would they waste so much time inhaling? Among the best features of the Kindle, Amazon’s great e-reader, is that there’s none of that. The device, which consigns all poetry and prose to the same homely fog-toned screen, leaves nothing to the experience of books but reading. This strikes me as honest, even revolutionary.
But I have to stop being so marmish. I’m not a literacy promoter; I don’t run some kind of Reading Rocket Club. And binding sniffers are not illiterate, anyway. No less a reader than the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, as card-carrying a man of letters as the world has ever seen, savored the physicality of books. In his 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting” — one of those essays that’s often called “famous,” though we’re not talking Hello Kitty here — Benjamin turns euphoric while surveying his dusty books. He’s enchanted by each one: “the period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership.” In acquiring books, often in mock-heroic ways, he says he has managed “to renew the Old World.”
Benjamin even pre-empts my skepticism. “The nonreading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors?” His answer: Yes! Book collectors don’t always read! Should a person read all the books she buys? No more — Benjamin writes — than you should use your best china every day.
Hmph. Benjamin is not to be gainsaid. If he says not reading books can be as sophisticated and European as reading them, I believe him, and I will try to think of my books as Sèvres china. But Sèvres china, if I had any, would be for display on its days off, wouldn’t it? So how do I display or otherwise admire all these books I keep buying for the Kindle?
Unpacking my Kindle library, I click “menu” on my screen and find . . . a list. First, the words “The Happiness Project,” the title of a book by Gretchen Rubin, in stout dark gray lettering, underscored by a lighter, less stout line.
This might be depressing. I can’t tell if I’m supposed to consider this underlined title to be the “book” I ordered from Amazon. Maybe it’s more like a catalog listing. If I click on it, I’ll get to the words in the book. Maybe it’s analogous to a book’s spine.
I want to rhapsodize, as Benjamin does, when he remembers the tactics he employed to acquire the book “Fragmente aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers” (Johann Wilhelm Ritter, 1810) after a Berlin auction. But the only memory I have of purchasing “The Happiness Project” is no memory at all. I’ll have to search my e-mail to see when I clicked “Start reading ‘The Happiness Project’ on your Kindle in under a minute” on Amazon. I think I had seen that “The Happiness Project,” a franchise with a blog I read, had become a best seller, and that seemed exciting; if I clicked, a credit card on file at Amazon would be out a theoretical $9.99, and in under a minute I’d be able to see for myself whether the book had more in it than the blog. That is the sweeping, romantic story of my acquisition of “The Happiness Project.” As Benjamin reminds us, Habent sua fata libelli. Books have their destiny!
Going down the gray list, further unpacking my dustless, odorless, weightless Kindle library, I find “Devotion,” by Dani Shapiro; “Let the Great World Spin,” by Colum McCann; “Wolf Hall: A Novel,” by Hilary Mantel; “Lit,” by Mary Karr; “Manhant,” by James Swanson; “DANCING IN THE DARK” — some titles are unaccountably given in all caps — by Morris Dickstein; and “Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Recipes for Entertaining” (a modern classic).
I have literally no memory of opting to get any of these on Amazon. Most of these books were bought impulsively, more like making a note to myself to read this or that than acquiring a tangible 3-D book; the list is a list of resolutions with price tags that will, with any luck, make the resolutions more urgent. Though it’s different from Benjamin’s ecstatic book collecting, this cycle of list making and resolution and constant-reading-to-keep-up is not unpleasurable.
Beholding “the several thousand volumes that are piled up around me,” Benjamin exclaims: “O bliss of the collector! Bliss of the man of leisure!” With nothing piled up around me but the Kindle and its charger, I may be missing out. But even Benjamin, who managed to see the future of media and technology more than once, knew he was writing an elegy for a way of experiencing books. I like to think he would be the first to recognize that the Kindle delivers a new kind of bliss.
Google is Making Me Stupid
The Atlantic Home Saturday,
Google Is Making Me Stupid
05 Mar 2010 09:17 pm
by Chris Bodenner
The Pew Research Center recently released an opinion survey of nearly 900 "prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers" regarding the impact of the Internet on intelligence and learning. The lead question was the Nick Carr-inspired, "Will Google make us stupid?", based on his ever-popular Atlantic cover story. Carr's essay was especially formative for me. I have re-read it several times since working for the Dish, in an effort to cope with the never-ending fire hose of information that the job entails. His words are mine:
I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. [...]
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.
In other words, your brain is forced to distinguish between fluffy prose and nuggets of wisdom within the same broad argument (as opposed to the scattered arguments of the web). Even the seemingly nonessential details you absorb from a book may fuse into new insights after bouncing around your head for a while. I, for one, come to the most interesting insights during what Julian Jaynes calls the three Bs (bed, bath, and bus), or any moment of passive contemplation after reading a long piece of writing. The condensed chunks of information on blogs, however, often remove those spaces of ambiguity - and thus opportunity for unique thought.
Anyway, below are some of the more thought-provoking quotes from the long list of Pew contributors. The first two are actually generalized statements culled from multiple people:
A fourth “R” will be added to the basic learned skills of “reading, ‘ritin, ;’rithmatic”: Retrieval. Maybe the ability to write computer code will be a necessary literacy. Maybe it will be the ability to write smart search queries.
The nature of writing has changed now, especially since so much of it takes place in public. The quality of the new material will get better over time, in part because these new social media creators will get feedback and learn.
“The Internet will drive a clear and probably irreversible shift from written media to visual media. Expressing ideas in the future will just as likely involve creating a simulation as writing an expository essay. Whether that will make our renderings of knowledge less intelligent is unclear, but I think its likely that there are tremendous opportunities to enhance it. For instance, would it be more intelligent to render our knowledge of politics in Ancient Egypt as a book-length essay or a realistic, interactive role-playing simulation?” – Anthony Townsend, research director, Institute for the Future
“Spelling and grammar have gotten worse. People don't think things through or edit as much before publishing or sending as they once did. But on the other hand, the Internet has improved my Chinese reading and writing ability. The hyperlink enables me to communicate in non-linear ways that adds layers of meaning to my writing that could not exist on paper. The fact that I can mix visuals, sound, and text when making an argument or telling a story often enhances the effectiveness of my work.” – Rebecca MacKinnon, Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
“The question is all about people's choices. If we value introspection as a road to insight, if we believe that long experience with issues contributes to good judgment on those issues, if we (in short) want knowledge that search engines don't give us, we'll maintain our depth of thinking and Google will only enhance it. There is a trend, of course, toward instant analysis and knee-jerk responses to events that degrades a lot of writing and discussion,” – Andy Oram, editor and blogger, O’Reilly Media
“My conclusion is that when the only information on a topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist,” – Peter Norvig, Google Research Director
I think Norvig nails it; books and blogs can coexist because they are complementary channels of learning. It just takes vigilance to keep the Internet from consuming us. (And perhaps a Dishtern or two.)
Google Is Making Me Stupid
05 Mar 2010 09:17 pm
by Chris Bodenner
The Pew Research Center recently released an opinion survey of nearly 900 "prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers" regarding the impact of the Internet on intelligence and learning. The lead question was the Nick Carr-inspired, "Will Google make us stupid?", based on his ever-popular Atlantic cover story. Carr's essay was especially formative for me. I have re-read it several times since working for the Dish, in an effort to cope with the never-ending fire hose of information that the job entails. His words are mine:
I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. [...]
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.
In other words, your brain is forced to distinguish between fluffy prose and nuggets of wisdom within the same broad argument (as opposed to the scattered arguments of the web). Even the seemingly nonessential details you absorb from a book may fuse into new insights after bouncing around your head for a while. I, for one, come to the most interesting insights during what Julian Jaynes calls the three Bs (bed, bath, and bus), or any moment of passive contemplation after reading a long piece of writing. The condensed chunks of information on blogs, however, often remove those spaces of ambiguity - and thus opportunity for unique thought.
Anyway, below are some of the more thought-provoking quotes from the long list of Pew contributors. The first two are actually generalized statements culled from multiple people:
A fourth “R” will be added to the basic learned skills of “reading, ‘ritin, ;’rithmatic”: Retrieval. Maybe the ability to write computer code will be a necessary literacy. Maybe it will be the ability to write smart search queries.
The nature of writing has changed now, especially since so much of it takes place in public. The quality of the new material will get better over time, in part because these new social media creators will get feedback and learn.
“The Internet will drive a clear and probably irreversible shift from written media to visual media. Expressing ideas in the future will just as likely involve creating a simulation as writing an expository essay. Whether that will make our renderings of knowledge less intelligent is unclear, but I think its likely that there are tremendous opportunities to enhance it. For instance, would it be more intelligent to render our knowledge of politics in Ancient Egypt as a book-length essay or a realistic, interactive role-playing simulation?” – Anthony Townsend, research director, Institute for the Future
“Spelling and grammar have gotten worse. People don't think things through or edit as much before publishing or sending as they once did. But on the other hand, the Internet has improved my Chinese reading and writing ability. The hyperlink enables me to communicate in non-linear ways that adds layers of meaning to my writing that could not exist on paper. The fact that I can mix visuals, sound, and text when making an argument or telling a story often enhances the effectiveness of my work.” – Rebecca MacKinnon, Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
“The question is all about people's choices. If we value introspection as a road to insight, if we believe that long experience with issues contributes to good judgment on those issues, if we (in short) want knowledge that search engines don't give us, we'll maintain our depth of thinking and Google will only enhance it. There is a trend, of course, toward instant analysis and knee-jerk responses to events that degrades a lot of writing and discussion,” – Andy Oram, editor and blogger, O’Reilly Media
“My conclusion is that when the only information on a topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist,” – Peter Norvig, Google Research Director
I think Norvig nails it; books and blogs can coexist because they are complementary channels of learning. It just takes vigilance to keep the Internet from consuming us. (And perhaps a Dishtern or two.)
My Reading Plan for March/April 2010
Having just finished HUCKLEBERRY FINN, I plan to reread TOM SAWYER leading up to a discussion of the latter March 20 at the Birmingham Public Library. Indeed, March/April will be Mark Twain months. I plan to read 3 biographies including one coming out March 31 that may be the definitive Twain biography for our time.
There is a new entertaining book about libraries and librarians which I have on my stack. I'm sure I'll blog on it.
Then I plan to squeeze in Toni Morrison. This is my reading plan for the next two months.
There is a new entertaining book about libraries and librarians which I have on my stack. I'm sure I'll blog on it.
Then I plan to squeeze in Toni Morrison. This is my reading plan for the next two months.
Friday, March 5, 2010
A Long Article on Ebooks and Print
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/the-bookless-future?page=0,4
Once Again: The Difference Between Democrats & Republicans
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 4, 2010
So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers,
But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.
Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment. That’s because the economy’s problem right now is lack of sufficient demand, and cash-strapped unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.
But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”
In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.
And the difference between the two universes isn’t just intellectual, it’s also moral.
Bill Clinton famously told a suffering constituent, “I feel your pain.” But the thing is, he did and does — while many other politicians clearly don’t. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the parties feel the pain of different people.
During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.
Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.
Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.
So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe.
More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?
The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?
Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.
Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.
Published: March 4, 2010
So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers,
But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.
Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment. That’s because the economy’s problem right now is lack of sufficient demand, and cash-strapped unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.
But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”
In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.
And the difference between the two universes isn’t just intellectual, it’s also moral.
Bill Clinton famously told a suffering constituent, “I feel your pain.” But the thing is, he did and does — while many other politicians clearly don’t. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the parties feel the pain of different people.
During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.
Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.
Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.
So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe.
More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?
The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?
Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.
Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.
Democrats vs. Republicans on Health Care: The Cultural Divide
Once again Jonathan Chait lays it out clearly. This article lays bare the stark differences between the two parties on healthcare. Read this and you know exactly why I am a Democrat.
Sink or Swim
The GOP’s Dickensian fix for health care.
by Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor of The New Republic
More Utterly Sincere Advice For Democrats From The GOPWhen you consider the differences between Democrats and Republicans on health care, you probably think in terms of scale. Democrats want to enact a big reform, while Republicans favor incremental progress. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor coos, “We want to take a much more commonsense, modest, incremental approach, trying to address the first issue first, which is cost, and then go on to try to deal with some of the things that the president and Speaker Pelosi want to do.” Within a recent six-month span, Republicans on the Senate floor used the phrase “step-by-step” to describe their approach to health care an astonishing 173 times.
The reality is quite different. What separates the two parties is not how far to go, but in which direction to go. The divide is simple. Democrats propose to shift resources from the rich and the healthy to the poor and the sick. Republicans want to do just the opposite. Republican health care plans reflect the party’s increasingly widespread belief that good health, like other forms of prosperity, is a matter of personal responsibility. Democratic plans to help the sick at the expense of the healthy therefore amount to socialism.
Health insurance, if you think about it, is a redistribution scheme. It transfers money from the winners (people who don’t need much medical care) to the losers (people who do). It differs from other redistribution schemes because, unlike programs that redistribute from rich to poor, the winners and losers can’t be sure in advance which category they’ll be in. That’s why people enter into it voluntarily--today I might be healthy, tomorrow I may contract some horrible disease.
The problem with this system is that, while you can’t be certain who will win and who will lose in the medical lottery of life, you can make some educated guesses. The health insurance industry is good at making those guesses, and getting better all the time. The business of insurance is to keep expensive customers out and cheap customers in.
Left to their own devices, millions of Americans could not afford to buy health insurance, because their expected medical costs are too high--they’re the losers of the medical lottery--or their incomes are too low. Obviously, many Americans are left to their own devices, with horrifying results. But many more are not, because they’re lucky enough to get insurance through their job. In an office insurance pool, everybody pays the same rate, meaning the healthy subsidize the sick.
The Democrats’ health care plan aims to create pools for people outside of the employer market, joining healthier individuals together with the sick, so that the former effectively subsidize the latter. The common element of all the Republican plans is to do the opposite-to separate the healthy from the sick.
Republicans have long championed Health Savings Accounts, which give individuals who buy insurance a tax deduction for money they set aside for a high-deductible plan. Since tax deductions are worth more to people in higher tax brackets, and since high-deductible plans appeal more to those with lower medical expenses, the plans attract the rich and healthy, leaving the poor and sick behind.
The thrust of the GOP ideas currently on offer is to reduce health insurance regulation. Republicans would create financial incentives that, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), would encourage states to cut regulation; they would also let businesses and individuals buy insurance from other states. (Health insurance is regulated by state governments.) As a result, health insurance regulation would sink to the level of whichever state offered the laxest regulations. If it worked like the credit card industry, governors would be competing to undercut each other’s regulations in order to lure insurers to their states.
Some state regulations are meant to protect all consumers, by requiring licensing of doctors, a fair appeals process for claims, and so on. But many are specifically aimed at helping sick people. Some regulations require that certain procedures must be covered--cancer screenings, diabetes treatment, and so on. Others limit the degree to which insurers can charge higher rates to small businesses or individuals that have higher health risks. Reducing these regulations would reduce costs for the healthy, but raise them for the sick. The GOP’s solution for those with preexisting conditions is to shunt them into state high-risk pools, which (as my colleague Jonathan Cohn has explained) work very poorly and which the Republicans would deny adequate funds.
Republicans boast that the CBO says their plan would reduce insurance premiums. This is true. The CBO predicted this would happen because the GOP plan would reduce premiums for healthy people, bringing more of them into the insurance pool, and raise premiums for sicker people, driving more of them out.
Why would Republicans favor a result like this? The better question might be, why wouldn’t they? The modern Republican domestic agenda is, above all, an attack on redistribution, a crusade to free society’s winners from shouldering the burdens of its losers.
The core of this philosophical divide was on display in last week’s health care summit. Senator Tom Harkin, a traditional liberal, denounced policies that “allow segregation in America on the basis of your health.” Harkin’s point was that the only way to protect the sick is to pool them with the healthy. Conservatives seized upon Harkin’s remark. “Having people pay their own way,” mocked an incredulous Jeffrey Anderson, a former health care speechwriter in the Bush administration, “is apparently an injustice akin to segregating them by race or creed.”
“Pay their own way”--that gets to the heart of the party’s new vision of health as a consequence of personal morality. “I think a national health care act substitutes for a lack of personal responsibility,” complained Republican Representative Steve King last August. Newt Gingrich gloats that Americans have moved “away from the idea of government-run health care and toward more personal responsibility.”
Liberals have reacted with astonishment to conservative accusations of socialism against Obama, whose plan relies mostly on private insurance and closely resembles proposals put forward by Senate Republicans in 1993 and Mitt Romney in 2005. It is, however, socialistic in the broad sense of spreading the risk of medical misfortune. This is a goal that Republicans increasingly abhor.
Sink or Swim
The GOP’s Dickensian fix for health care.
by Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor of The New Republic
More Utterly Sincere Advice For Democrats From The GOPWhen you consider the differences between Democrats and Republicans on health care, you probably think in terms of scale. Democrats want to enact a big reform, while Republicans favor incremental progress. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor coos, “We want to take a much more commonsense, modest, incremental approach, trying to address the first issue first, which is cost, and then go on to try to deal with some of the things that the president and Speaker Pelosi want to do.” Within a recent six-month span, Republicans on the Senate floor used the phrase “step-by-step” to describe their approach to health care an astonishing 173 times.
The reality is quite different. What separates the two parties is not how far to go, but in which direction to go. The divide is simple. Democrats propose to shift resources from the rich and the healthy to the poor and the sick. Republicans want to do just the opposite. Republican health care plans reflect the party’s increasingly widespread belief that good health, like other forms of prosperity, is a matter of personal responsibility. Democratic plans to help the sick at the expense of the healthy therefore amount to socialism.
Health insurance, if you think about it, is a redistribution scheme. It transfers money from the winners (people who don’t need much medical care) to the losers (people who do). It differs from other redistribution schemes because, unlike programs that redistribute from rich to poor, the winners and losers can’t be sure in advance which category they’ll be in. That’s why people enter into it voluntarily--today I might be healthy, tomorrow I may contract some horrible disease.
The problem with this system is that, while you can’t be certain who will win and who will lose in the medical lottery of life, you can make some educated guesses. The health insurance industry is good at making those guesses, and getting better all the time. The business of insurance is to keep expensive customers out and cheap customers in.
Left to their own devices, millions of Americans could not afford to buy health insurance, because their expected medical costs are too high--they’re the losers of the medical lottery--or their incomes are too low. Obviously, many Americans are left to their own devices, with horrifying results. But many more are not, because they’re lucky enough to get insurance through their job. In an office insurance pool, everybody pays the same rate, meaning the healthy subsidize the sick.
The Democrats’ health care plan aims to create pools for people outside of the employer market, joining healthier individuals together with the sick, so that the former effectively subsidize the latter. The common element of all the Republican plans is to do the opposite-to separate the healthy from the sick.
Republicans have long championed Health Savings Accounts, which give individuals who buy insurance a tax deduction for money they set aside for a high-deductible plan. Since tax deductions are worth more to people in higher tax brackets, and since high-deductible plans appeal more to those with lower medical expenses, the plans attract the rich and healthy, leaving the poor and sick behind.
The thrust of the GOP ideas currently on offer is to reduce health insurance regulation. Republicans would create financial incentives that, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), would encourage states to cut regulation; they would also let businesses and individuals buy insurance from other states. (Health insurance is regulated by state governments.) As a result, health insurance regulation would sink to the level of whichever state offered the laxest regulations. If it worked like the credit card industry, governors would be competing to undercut each other’s regulations in order to lure insurers to their states.
Some state regulations are meant to protect all consumers, by requiring licensing of doctors, a fair appeals process for claims, and so on. But many are specifically aimed at helping sick people. Some regulations require that certain procedures must be covered--cancer screenings, diabetes treatment, and so on. Others limit the degree to which insurers can charge higher rates to small businesses or individuals that have higher health risks. Reducing these regulations would reduce costs for the healthy, but raise them for the sick. The GOP’s solution for those with preexisting conditions is to shunt them into state high-risk pools, which (as my colleague Jonathan Cohn has explained) work very poorly and which the Republicans would deny adequate funds.
Republicans boast that the CBO says their plan would reduce insurance premiums. This is true. The CBO predicted this would happen because the GOP plan would reduce premiums for healthy people, bringing more of them into the insurance pool, and raise premiums for sicker people, driving more of them out.
Why would Republicans favor a result like this? The better question might be, why wouldn’t they? The modern Republican domestic agenda is, above all, an attack on redistribution, a crusade to free society’s winners from shouldering the burdens of its losers.
The core of this philosophical divide was on display in last week’s health care summit. Senator Tom Harkin, a traditional liberal, denounced policies that “allow segregation in America on the basis of your health.” Harkin’s point was that the only way to protect the sick is to pool them with the healthy. Conservatives seized upon Harkin’s remark. “Having people pay their own way,” mocked an incredulous Jeffrey Anderson, a former health care speechwriter in the Bush administration, “is apparently an injustice akin to segregating them by race or creed.”
“Pay their own way”--that gets to the heart of the party’s new vision of health as a consequence of personal morality. “I think a national health care act substitutes for a lack of personal responsibility,” complained Republican Representative Steve King last August. Newt Gingrich gloats that Americans have moved “away from the idea of government-run health care and toward more personal responsibility.”
Liberals have reacted with astonishment to conservative accusations of socialism against Obama, whose plan relies mostly on private insurance and closely resembles proposals put forward by Senate Republicans in 1993 and Mitt Romney in 2005. It is, however, socialistic in the broad sense of spreading the risk of medical misfortune. This is a goal that Republicans increasingly abhor.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Absolutely, absolutely among the best books I have ever read.
The prose is lyrical and poetic. I cannot believe that there is an American writer today who writes more majestically. Few American writers heretofore wrote with more splendor. Her prose is as beautiful as Fitzgerald and Faulkner.
The story focuses on a set of characters, the center of which is Milkman Dead. Most of these characters are named from the Bible. Milkman's grandfather was Macon Dead. Macon Dead had two children, Macon Dead and Pilate. Macon Dead had three children, Macon Dead (usually called Milkman Dead), Magdalene (usually called Magdalene called Lena), and First Corinthians. Pilate had one child, Reba, who had one child, Hagar.
This novel is replete with themes. It is about family, identity, and class conflict among others.
I have only two critiques of the story. First, the end is like a movie, with too much action and adventure. Most of the story is a more realistic depiction of humanity. Second, it perpetuates stereotypes of blacks as buffoons and susceptible to believing myths and spirits.
However, I loved this book and plan to read more of Toni Morrison. I do not know that I have ever fallen head over heals for a writer, but I felt smitten with her after finishing this book. I believe that she is among our best writers today.
The prose is lyrical and poetic. I cannot believe that there is an American writer today who writes more majestically. Few American writers heretofore wrote with more splendor. Her prose is as beautiful as Fitzgerald and Faulkner.
The story focuses on a set of characters, the center of which is Milkman Dead. Most of these characters are named from the Bible. Milkman's grandfather was Macon Dead. Macon Dead had two children, Macon Dead and Pilate. Macon Dead had three children, Macon Dead (usually called Milkman Dead), Magdalene (usually called Magdalene called Lena), and First Corinthians. Pilate had one child, Reba, who had one child, Hagar.
This novel is replete with themes. It is about family, identity, and class conflict among others.
I have only two critiques of the story. First, the end is like a movie, with too much action and adventure. Most of the story is a more realistic depiction of humanity. Second, it perpetuates stereotypes of blacks as buffoons and susceptible to believing myths and spirits.
However, I loved this book and plan to read more of Toni Morrison. I do not know that I have ever fallen head over heals for a writer, but I felt smitten with her after finishing this book. I believe that she is among our best writers today.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Huckleberry Finn (5)
At the end of the novel Jim is free, but what about his wife and kids? Nothing is said about them. How on earth would Jim have ever freed them? Twain says nothing about this.
E.J. Dione - The Difference Between Democrats & Republicans
The point is not that Republicans are heartless and Democrats are compassionate. It's that Democrats on the whole believe in using government to correct the inequities and inefficiencies the market creates, while Republicans on the whole think market outcomes are almost always better than anything government can produce.
That's not cheap partisanship. It's a fundamental divide. The paradox is that our understanding of politics would be more realistic if we were less cynical and came to see the battle for what it really is.
That's not cheap partisanship. It's a fundamental divide. The paradox is that our understanding of politics would be more realistic if we were less cynical and came to see the battle for what it really is.
The Enthusiasm Gap
Robert ReichFormer Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley
Posted: February 28, 2010 02:56 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
The Enthusiasm Gap
I had dinner the other night with a Democratic pollster who told me Democrats are heading toward next fall's mid-term elections with a serious enthusiasm gap: The Republican base is fired up. The Democratic base is packing up.
The Democratic base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on everything the base cares about. For a year now it's been nothing but compromises, watered-down ideas, weakened provisions, wider loopholes, softened regulations. Health care went from what the Democratic base wanted -- single payer -- to a public option, to no public option, to a bunch of ideas that the president tried to explain last week, and it now hangs by a string as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid try to round up conservative Democrats and a 51-vote reconciliation package in the Senate.
The jobs bill went from what the base wanted -- a second stimulus -- to $165 billion of extended unemployment benefits and aid to states and locales, then to $15 billion of tax breaks for businesses that make new hires. Financial regulation went from tough new capital requirements, sharp constraints on derivative trading, a consumer protection agency, and a resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act -- all popular with the Dem base -- to some limits on derivatives and a consumer-protection agency inside the Treasury Department and a rearrangement of oversight boxes, and it's now looking like even less.
The environment went from the base's desire for a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade carbon auction then to a cap-and-trade with all sorts of exemptions and offsets for the biggest polluters, and now Senate Democrats are talking about trying to do it industry-by-industry.
These waffles and wiggle rooms have drained the Democratic base of all passion. "Why should I care?" are words I hear over and over again from stalwart Democrats who worked their hearts out in the last election.
The Republican base, meanwhile, is on a rampage. It's more and more energized by its mad-as-hell populists. Tea partiers, libertarians, Birchers, birthers, and Dick Armey astro-turfers are channeling the economic anxieties of millions of Americans against "big government."
Technically, the Democrats have the majority in Congress and could still make major reforms. But conservative, "blue-dog" Democrats won't go along. They say the public has grown wary of government. But they must know the public has grown even more wary of big business and Wall Street, on which effective government is the only constraint.
Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess: Against Goldman Sachs and the rest of the big banks that plunged the economy into crisis, got our bailout money, and are now back at their old games, dispensing huge bonuses to themselves. Against WellPoint and the rest of the giant health insurers who are at this moment robbing us of the care we need by raising their rates by double digits. Against giant corporations that are showing big profits by continuing to lay off millions of Americans and cutting the wages of millions of more, by shifting jobs abroad and substituting software. Against big oil and big utilities that are raising prices and rates, and continue to ravage the atmosphere.
If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the singular means of protecting the public from these forces it is now. Yet the White House and the congressional Democrats' ongoing refusal to blame big business and Wall Street has created the biggest irony in modern political history. A growing portion of the public, fed by the right, blames our problems on "big government."
Much of the reason for the Democrats' astonishing reluctance to place blame where it belongs rests with big business's and Wall Street's generous flows of campaign donations to Democrats, coupled with their implicit promise of high-paying jobs once Democratic officials retire from government. This is the rot at the center of the system. And unless or until it's remedied, it will be difficult for the President to achieve any "change you can believe in."
To his credit, Obama himself has not scaled back his health care ambitions all that much, and he appears, intermittently, to want to push conservative blue-dog Democrats to join him on a bigger jobs bill, tougher financial reform, and a more effective approach to global warming. (His overtures to Republicans seem ever more transparently designed to give blue-dog Democrats cover to vote with him.)
But our president is not comfortable wielding blame. He will not give the public the larger narrative of private-sector greed, its nefarious effect on the American public at this dangerous juncture, and the private sector's corruption of the democratic process. He has so far eschewed any major plan to get corporate and Wall Street money out of politics. He can be indignant -- as when he lashed out at the "fat cats" on Wall Street -- but his indignation is fleeting, and it is no match for the faux indignation of the right that blames government for all that ails us.
Posted: February 28, 2010 02:56 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
The Enthusiasm Gap
I had dinner the other night with a Democratic pollster who told me Democrats are heading toward next fall's mid-term elections with a serious enthusiasm gap: The Republican base is fired up. The Democratic base is packing up.
The Democratic base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on everything the base cares about. For a year now it's been nothing but compromises, watered-down ideas, weakened provisions, wider loopholes, softened regulations. Health care went from what the Democratic base wanted -- single payer -- to a public option, to no public option, to a bunch of ideas that the president tried to explain last week, and it now hangs by a string as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid try to round up conservative Democrats and a 51-vote reconciliation package in the Senate.
The jobs bill went from what the base wanted -- a second stimulus -- to $165 billion of extended unemployment benefits and aid to states and locales, then to $15 billion of tax breaks for businesses that make new hires. Financial regulation went from tough new capital requirements, sharp constraints on derivative trading, a consumer protection agency, and a resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act -- all popular with the Dem base -- to some limits on derivatives and a consumer-protection agency inside the Treasury Department and a rearrangement of oversight boxes, and it's now looking like even less.
The environment went from the base's desire for a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade carbon auction then to a cap-and-trade with all sorts of exemptions and offsets for the biggest polluters, and now Senate Democrats are talking about trying to do it industry-by-industry.
These waffles and wiggle rooms have drained the Democratic base of all passion. "Why should I care?" are words I hear over and over again from stalwart Democrats who worked their hearts out in the last election.
The Republican base, meanwhile, is on a rampage. It's more and more energized by its mad-as-hell populists. Tea partiers, libertarians, Birchers, birthers, and Dick Armey astro-turfers are channeling the economic anxieties of millions of Americans against "big government."
Technically, the Democrats have the majority in Congress and could still make major reforms. But conservative, "blue-dog" Democrats won't go along. They say the public has grown wary of government. But they must know the public has grown even more wary of big business and Wall Street, on which effective government is the only constraint.
Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess: Against Goldman Sachs and the rest of the big banks that plunged the economy into crisis, got our bailout money, and are now back at their old games, dispensing huge bonuses to themselves. Against WellPoint and the rest of the giant health insurers who are at this moment robbing us of the care we need by raising their rates by double digits. Against giant corporations that are showing big profits by continuing to lay off millions of Americans and cutting the wages of millions of more, by shifting jobs abroad and substituting software. Against big oil and big utilities that are raising prices and rates, and continue to ravage the atmosphere.
If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the singular means of protecting the public from these forces it is now. Yet the White House and the congressional Democrats' ongoing refusal to blame big business and Wall Street has created the biggest irony in modern political history. A growing portion of the public, fed by the right, blames our problems on "big government."
Much of the reason for the Democrats' astonishing reluctance to place blame where it belongs rests with big business's and Wall Street's generous flows of campaign donations to Democrats, coupled with their implicit promise of high-paying jobs once Democratic officials retire from government. This is the rot at the center of the system. And unless or until it's remedied, it will be difficult for the President to achieve any "change you can believe in."
To his credit, Obama himself has not scaled back his health care ambitions all that much, and he appears, intermittently, to want to push conservative blue-dog Democrats to join him on a bigger jobs bill, tougher financial reform, and a more effective approach to global warming. (His overtures to Republicans seem ever more transparently designed to give blue-dog Democrats cover to vote with him.)
But our president is not comfortable wielding blame. He will not give the public the larger narrative of private-sector greed, its nefarious effect on the American public at this dangerous juncture, and the private sector's corruption of the democratic process. He has so far eschewed any major plan to get corporate and Wall Street money out of politics. He can be indignant -- as when he lashed out at the "fat cats" on Wall Street -- but his indignation is fleeting, and it is no match for the faux indignation of the right that blames government for all that ails us.
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