Freedom from Blog

Live Blogging the First Florida Debate

2012-01-23T21:00:00.015-05:00

OK, not sure how long this will last . . .

9:01. Brian Williams skips the introductions. "Everyone knows each other," indeed. More like, "Everyone hates each other."

9:02. Three candidates get congratulated for winning something. Sorry, Ron Paul.

9:02. Gingrich asked whether he's erratic. Is Williams trying to throw the fastball down the middle? Wait, Gingrich doesn't attack the question? He compares himself to Reagan, instead. First mention of "the Washington establishment." "Manage the decay" line. He's prepared to be controversial.

9:04. How have you changed, Newt? He goes back to his record as Speaker. He's selling his record by highlighting Clinton's accomplishments!

9:05. First Romney question: electability? No, Romney says, its leadership. And Gingrich wasn't a leader . . . he resigned in disgrace. Hits "disgrace" twice. Calls Newt an "influence peddlar," Ouch. So off to a battle of records.

9:06. "I'm not going to spend the evening chasing the Governor's misinformation." Newt calls it "the worst kind of trivial politics." I wonder what the four wrong things were?

9:07. Romney asked, why don't Southern GOPpers like you? He falls back on New Hampshire. Which is south of Canada.

9:08. Romney back to attacking Newt's record, "resigned in disgrace" again. Didn't Jim Wright resign too? (Yes, the missus looked it up.) And now "Freddie Mack." Mitt's coming out blazing. And he says he learned this in South Carolina. Maybe he learned this from his own ads?

9:10. Newt wants more than 30 seconds to respond. Newt asked the House Republicans to reprimand him, "to get it over with." The reprimand greased the skids for the tax cuts and balanced budget. Imagine what great things would have happened if they had fined him!

9:11. Santorum comes in, "a choice b/w an erratic and a moderate." Like Santorum's tie. What is his path to victory? He offers a clear contrast with Obama. Yeah, that makes him special in this field. Ron Paul offers no contrast with Obama.

9:13. BW throws Santorum's 18-pt loss in his face. He says, a rising tide sinks all Republicans, but he stood tall and took the loss like a "consistent conservative."

9:14. Ron Paul gets his first question. BW: Do you have a path to the Oval Office? Are you running as a third-party candidate? Not sure I'm following his argument . . . he says he might get delegates in Iowa?

9:16. Paul disagrees with Newt's history of his fall. But not terribly clearly.

9:17. Paul "not an absolutist." Would he support Newt? Likes Newt on the Fed and gold, but not foreign policy . . .

9:17. "A gold commission"? Interesting to see Paul and Newt playing nice with one another, sort of, on policy.

9:18. Romney on taxes: "what's in there?" BW asks. Romney: "No surprises." But is that we expect surprises? Romney pivots to the taxes of the American people. Pushes his tax cut for middle- and low-income Americans on interest and capital gains, which wouldn't make much of an impact, of course.

9:20. "I'm proud that I pay a lot of taxes."

9:21. Newt goes flat tax, calls it the Mitt Romney flat tax. Then Romney says that under Newt's plan, he wouldn't pay any taxes. Is that a selling point?

9:22. Romney putting out two years of tax returns, not twelve. "The right number."

9:23. "I do not apologize for being successful." Is this a winner? "I'm not going to apologize for free enterprise"?

9:24. Santorum says he hasn't attacked Romney on Bain (he hasn't). Where is he going with this . . . oh, "if you believe in capitalism so much, why did you [Romney and Newt] support the bailout of capitalism?" OK, BW, Santorum is doing your job now.

9:26. Romney wants to see Newt's "work product" for Freddie Mack. This is a good one. Newt says it was consulting, not lobbying. OK. BW: "You never peddled influence?" (What does that mean?) Newt: "I have never, never done any lobbying." He has an expert who defined the bright-line b/w participation and lobbying. I would love to hear that expert.

9:28. Romney, "they don't pay historians that much." "You were hired by the chief lobbyist."

9:29. Newt: "I offered strategic advice." I know what this means (I think), but does this resonate with voters?

9:30. Newt asks Romney how much Bain made. Romney doesn't like this. Is BW going to just let these guys go at it?

9:31. Newt steps back again, where is he going . . . oh, he defends his support for Medicare Part D . . . in Florida! He hits it hard. Newt: "I did what any citizen could have done."

9:32. The only money Romney doesn't like is money that Newt made. BW steps in to stop the fight, but only to cut to commercial.

First commercial break thought: I re-iterate that Newt needs a better way to describe what he did as a "consultant." I think that it's very likely that he didn't do anything that looks like traditional lobbying. (That would probably be too much like real work for Newt.)

9:36. Santorum gets a question about Florida real estate. BW: "Was it too easy to own a home?" Santorum saw the problem, voted a bill out of committee to constrain the GSEs. He signed a letter (with 24 other senators). (Only senators consider signing a letter an action.) Now, he would let "capitalism work."

9:38. Let folks deduct losses on real estate from taxes. That's interesting. Need to look into that. Doubt that it could be temporary, as Santorum says.

9:39. Paul raises Community Reinvestment Act. Paul favors letting housing prices fall some more. Will that be popular in Florida?

9:40. I've heard it said that Newt is what a dumb person thinks a smart person sounds like. I think that Ron Paul is what a conspiratorial thinker thinks a smart person sounds like.

9:41. Newt: Repealing Dodd-Frank would improve the economy tomorrow?

9:42. BW: "Is the finance industry really over-regulated?" Newt, yes.

9:42. Romney, "you have to have regulation." Oops, a Kinsley gaffe!

9:43. BW goes 3 am phone call. But Cuba? I guess Cubans in boats are now a national security crisis. "Thank Heavens that Fidel has rejoined his Maker." Not Mormon nice.

9:44. Newt: "Fidel isn't going to meet his Maker." Mormons don't really believe in Hell. Newt clearly does.

9:45. Newt would use covert forces in Cuba.

9:46. Paul: "I would do the opposite. . . . The Cold War is over." Paul is right that the U.S. as enemy was/is a valuable asset for the Castro regime.

9:47. BW goes meta on Santorum, question of Chinese dissidents in a state "like Florida." This is a very strange question. Is Santorum supposed to answer this? Good that he didn't try.

9:48. Santorum: Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua are working with jihadists, and they want platforms to attack across the Southern border. Does he have anything to back that up?

9:49. Romney gets the Straits of Hormuz question. Romney wants to build 15 ships a year instead of nine. BW, obvious follow up: How would you pay for that? Not asked.

9:50. BW to Newt, are the American people tired of war? Newt says that the Americans never want to go to war. "We like peace." But we will fight for freedom of the sea. Newt: "Dictatorships respond to strength."

9:51. Romney wants to "beat" the Taliban. We can accomplish this (and a working Afghan military) in a couple of years. But I'm sure he wasn't brain-washed.

9:52. Even Paul wouldn't negotiate with the Taliban. Paul says that the U.S. is blockaded Iran, and that's an act of war. It's true, a blockade is an act of war. But are we blockading Iran? "The people don't want a hot war in Iran."

Second commercial break thought: Debate moderators should never ask Republican candidates about foreign policy. I would almost say, any candidates. But last time, the debate b/w Obama and Clinton was actually pretty substantive. Obama has basically done what he said he would on many things, including targeting Bin Laden in Pakistan. But on the GOP side, it's saber rattling, all raging is, except Paul. (And the GOP won't adopt his views on foreign policy.) It's very unlikely that anything these candidates say about foreign policy (including Paul) will have any impact on a future GOP administration.

9:58. Adam Smith (obvious joke?) and Beth Reinhardt join Brian Williams.

9:59. Santorum gets an Iran question. BW asks about "the target list." That's the military problem with attacking Iran? Santorum warns about Iran getting a nuclear weapon. "The threat that Iran poses to the world and the United States." The government of Iran is "equivalent to al Qaeda running a country with oil"?

10:00. Santorum: "A long list of attacks" from Iran. "It would be reckless not to do something" to prevent their getting a nuclear weapon! Oh, my.

10:01. Santorum on off-shore drilling. Need oil for tourism, lady. But will the off-shore drilling reduce energy prices?

10:02. English as official language question, hypocrisy slant. Newt actually avoids the frame and pivots to number of languages, beyond just English and Spanish.

10:04. Romney agrees with Newt. Goes foreign language teaching in Massachusetts. Note that he never said "Massachusetts." "Home state." Compare to how many times Santorum says "Pennsylvania."

10:05. Paul: "If Florida wanted ballots in Spanish, I wouldn't support a national law" to require English (locally). Not a bad answer.

10:06. DREAM Act to Gingrich: he wouldn't veto the DREAM Act, would create path to citizenship through military service. So going to college, no. Military service, yes. Romney agrees.

10:07. Romney gets the deportation question. "The answer is self-deportation." Oh, why hasn't anyone thought of that before? The illegals can deport themselves! Smith follows up: "Don't we have self-deportation already?"

10:08. Santorum says self-deportation is going on now. Lots of talk about enforcing the laws that exist now. Not rewarding breaking the law.

10:10. Newt gets ethanol/sugar subsidies question. "Too many beet sugar states." I agree. "Hard to get to" doing away with farm subsidies. He's right.

10:11. Romney: "people in Florida hurting." Pivots from sugar to employment. I guess the clock is running out, and he wanted to hit the Florida economy and NASA. "He plays 90 rounds of golf." "We're heading to a Greece-style collapse."

10:12. Paul getting Everglades question. He would commit to preserving the Everglades.

Third commercial break thought: Not new, but immigration is one of the most difficult issues in U.S. politics right now. Probably more difficult than the deficit and budget. There, one could actually imagine a policy solution, however bad the politics. I.e., tax increases and budget cuts could actually balance the budget. But there are so many illegals, even if you could agree to a "path to citizenship," it would be very difficult to process that many applications in anything resembling a thorough process (without creating a massive but temporary bureaucracy). Then there's the amnesty problem: politically, there must be a sanction for being in the country illegally (to avoid the "amnesty" label). But if there's a sanction that is actually a sanction, it discourages applicants for legal status. So you need a sanction severe enough to punish (not reward), but weak enough not to deter. There is a name for that: impossible.

10:17. Santorum gets a Terri Schiavo question. Santorum went to her bedside? No, he didn't. Whew. He didn't call for a federal intervention, but for a federal court to hear the case. Hmm. All Southerners know that the federal courts aren't really federal. But Santorum actually gave a good response.

10:19. Santorum doesn't think that do not resuscitate orders are not immoral.

10:19. Newt: Death row inmates have lots of appeals. Schiavo was effectively on death row. But there was lots of judicial review in that case.

10:20. Paul: we should all have living wills. Paul wanted decision made at state level. So he disagrees with Santorum?

Battery power is low, and my energy is low, too.

10:21. Lady claims that Florida put men on the moon? Nonsense. Romney wants to have a vision for NASA. Would use NASA for military development. I know that that's the direction NASA has gone (Shuttle Atlantis), but still think this is a bad idea. NASA was set up as a civilian agency so it wouldn't be dominated by the Air Force.

I'm going to stop typing and just watch. Enjoy.

Aye of Newt

2012-01-21T00:26:00.002-05:00

Predictions for tomorrow's SC primary: Newt 42%; Mittens 24%; Santorum 15%; Paul 12%; Cain/Colbert 7%

Wishful thinking?

Still reeling

2012-01-20T18:45:00.004-05:00

After seeing that Rolling Stone rated Appetite for Destruction higher (#61) than Led Zeppelin IV (#66). And how does Led Zeppelin (#29) rank higher than IV? And why isn't IV in the top 10?

And how does Physical Graffiti rank (#70) when Led Zeppelin II and Houses of the Holy are clearly better Zeppelin records?

And how is it that the Beatles, a band which is basically un-listen-able today--ask yourself, when was the last time that you sought out a Beatles song?--have three of the top five albums, and the Beach Boys have one of the top five?!?

The Beach Boys. I know that you listen to them . . . ironically, if at all.

Feel free to disagree in comments.

Stenographialism

2012-01-18T17:49:00.004-05:00

So I talked to a reporter from one of the major legal news journals in the United States this afternoon. She seemed completely unaware that, sometimes, people have self-serving reasons to misrepresent the facts, stretch the truth, let alone lie. And here I thought journos were supposed to be skeptical, even cynical.

And that's your first new word for 2012.

And, just to be clear, I wasn't misrepresenting the facts, stretching the truth, or lying. I was bringing the knowledge. As the kids were saying 10 years ago. (15?)

FFB Champs

2012-01-17T19:40:00.004-05:00

Having fun with three posts in one day . . . but I would like to announce that my fantasy football team, the Dead Lions, won the League this year, in a spectacle of statistical bravado . . . it was a great draft, followed by great waiver wire pick-ups. We led the League in points scored from Week 2 . . . it was an eventuality that we would take home the trophy . . . and we did, in week 15. Like I said, there was an eventuality there. But if it were baseball . . . 16 games is 10%.

Which is why I am QUITTING fantasy baseball forever . . . but starting my own fantasy football league. I still need at least FOUR teams (I am old, without many friends). Sign up. Unless your first or last name is Wilson . . . JK! (No, seriously.) Wilson, email me.

I am still old--one year on.

2012-01-17T18:57:00.002-05:00

I am still old. Favorite album of 2011 was Bob Seger's hits album. (More to come!)

Old and L-A-M-E.

In comments . . . best Bob Seger song?

Ennui

2012-01-17T16:48:00.004-05:00

And this is an 3-ways inside joke aimed at TMcD, which he might not get . . . thrice.

I am almost certainly one of the world's most privileged and advantaged people, ever. Not one of the 1%, currently, but on a historical scale, pretty much 1%, or 0.0001%. (I won't die of the bubonic plague, or cholera, or starvation, or malaria . . . or, at least, I have a reasonable expectation that I won't.) Not to brag, but I have a job that I like, and everything else in my life is good. I have my health (I ran 9 miles Sunday, on a hilly course, at 9 min./mi. pace, so that's at least a sign of health . . . for now). I have a beautiful daughter.

If I had one complaint, and we are deep in "why should I care?" country, it is that I am bored most of the time. I can do my job, most days, without a major effort. I think I am a good father and a good husband, most days, but except for the pressure cooker (new post coming soon), I can cook, and clean, and get folks to school etc. without much new thought. Even at work, most of what I do, I can do without stretching.

My sense is that my best friends at work suffer from the same problem. (Discussion over coffee break.)

But after discussion today, it's clear that no one wants more excitement!

We want to have a boring life, but one that seems less boring! Was Freud right, after all?

And, appreciating TMcD's situation, acknowledging that "non-boring" does not equal "good", not sure how to close. Hope that this is not close to the nerve!

Be prepared for more updates on BOREDOM. I'm sure that this is what killed my interest in blogging. For instance, I find the current political scene as boring as Gilligan's Island. Those people ain't never goin' to escape!

Getting the Band Back Together

2012-01-15T23:06:00.002-05:00

I heard a rumor that TMcD wanted to get the band back together. Well, I need a separate dressing room and bottled water . . . but I might be willing to do some blogging in 2012. Have to think about this a bit.

Zombie Music Post, 2011 Adios

2012-01-04T10:39:00.013-05:00

On a winter's Sunday I go
To clear away the snow
And green the ground below

April is an ocean away
Is this the better way to spend the day?
Keeping the winter at bay

~ "January Hymn," the Decemberists

How many ways can you polish up a turd?

~ "Hell Broke Luce," Tom Waits

Oh FFB, I've missed you! Have time for a "last" post? Sure you do. Our parting was so abrupt and unceremonious, a couple of curt lines from #3 and an overwrought if undercooked rant about Ron Paul (still a racist!) from me. Sorry I haven't been in touch. As an apology gift, how about my new mix tape? Yeah, no one listens to mix tapes anymore, but I'm feeling nostalgic, especially for things no one does anymore. Like casual, long-form blogging. Facebook? Ha! Oh, you mean you want me to update my "status"? Well, as you know, this has been a rough year for the TMcDs. Remember all those fun stories about sinister spiders and septuagenarian survivalists? So 2010. Good times. 2011? Not so much. But 2012 will be the year I pick up the pieces and rebuild. . . something.

So I'm going to clear the decks, toss out the mental clutter of a year undone, if you'll help me FFB. It's time, once again, for the year in music. A surprisingly good year, although for a while I thought I wouldn't have ten new records to talk about. I spent a lot of this year losing myself in old, venerable music I had more or less overlooked: the Band's Music From Big Pink, Dylan's Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks (yeah, I know that last one is a cliche, but damn it's good), Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, John Mellencamp's No Better Than This, a nearly perfect break-up record that just came out last year but feels fifty years old. Best musical memory of the year? Driving through the mountains of NC, putting in Blonde on Blonde, and hearing Bay (2 1/2), from the backseat, chanting the chorus to "Rainy Day Women": "everybody must get STONED!" Amen, sister. Meanwhile, some of this year's most celebrated music left me cold: Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Radiohead.

That said, I didn't have much trouble coming up with my superlative list, and I'm even leaving off a couple of good CD's, which means it must have been a pretty decent year overall. The first five or six entries on my list all could have been my number 1 and might have been in weaker years. So, without further ado, I humbly submit my favorite music from a shit-ass year:

1) the Decemberists, The King Is Dead. The best REM album in 15 years came out, and it wasn't even REM. OK, so Peter Buck plays guitar on several tracks, making it an arty, Oregonian step-child. I had lost interest in these guys over their last couple of albums, which were too self-indulgent in their prog-rock pretense. But this one is a folky miracle from "Don't Carry It All" to "This Is Why We Fight."

2) Middle Brother, Middle Brother. A bit like the Avett Brothers, but way better. Barroom belters and campfire singalongs from an indie "super-group" made up of the singers from Dawes, Deer Tick, and Delta Spirit. Just try to get "Blue Eyes," "Theater," "Wilderness," "Me, Me, Me," "Thanks for Nothing," "Million Dollar Bill," and "Portland" (a Replacements cover) out of your head. I've woken up with them on mental play every morning since I got this at Christmas.

3) Tom Waits, Bad As Me. Another Christmas acquisition and maybe his best record since Rain Dogs (1985), which is saying something. The most gut-wrenching record of the year. "Satisfied" is a kick-ass Stones tribute and "Last Leaf (On the Tree)" brings in Keith Richards to break hearts, like a drunken reading of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree. He ends with the family tragedy of "New Year's Eve," everyone singing "auld lang syne," cleaning out their belongings, and hitting the road.

4) Steve Earle, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive. How did the critics overlook this? This holds up against Earle's string of perfect records from the mid-1990s (in particular, Train A-Comin', one of my favorite records by anyone ever), and even charted at #24 on Billboard, his second best showing ever. "Waitin' On the Sky (to Fall)" and "Little Emperor" start it off strong, and "Heaven or Hell" (yup, minus his ambivalence) and "This City" (a hopeful ode to some underwater southerners) send it off in style.

5) Wilco, The Whole Love. Best Wilco since the epic Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001), which was my best album of the last decade. I'd love "Dawned On Me" even more if it weren't such a perfect inversion of my current existence.

6) Drive By Truckers, Go-Go Boots. Yet another that didn't get the critical props it deserves, maybe because it came so close on the heels of last year's The Big To-Do, which was a mild disappointment. This one is excellent, with "I Do Believe," "Used To Be A Cop," "Everybody Needs Love," and "Mercy Buckets" as standouts. As always, these guys are a PhD dissertation on southern culture sung at 1 AM in a honky tonk.

7) REM, Collapse Into Now. Not quite in the same league with their classic albums from the 80s and 90s, but a fitting valedictory. So long, guys, and thanks.

8) Lucinda Williams, Blessed. Not a lot of representation here from the fairer sex, and this isn't quite on par with either Car Wheels (1998) or Little Honey (2008). Still, a strong set of tunes that fit my mood pretty well, especially "Buttercup."

9) Ryan Adams, Ashes and Fire. As I often say, Adams can make B+ rock in his sleep. But it's been a while since he made a classic album on par with Stranger's Almanac, Heartbreaker, Demolition, or Gold. This isn't it either. A very mellow B+.

10) My Morning Jacket, Circuital. I love these guys, and this is one of the best-reviewed CDs of the year, but it's not quite as compelling as I had hoped. Lots of good pieces but the whole lacks something. Songwriting? Cohesion? I'm not sure, but there's still plenty to like here, especially the title track and "Outta My System."

So that's my list. What did I leave off? Ron Sexsmith, the Black Keys, the Jayhawks, and (Murfreesboro's beloved) the Features all made good records this year that could have taken my final couple of spots, but for one reason or another didn't. I have also been enjoying a record put out by Peter Cooper, the Tennessean's long-time music critic, called Mission Door, which sounds like a silkier blend of Todd Snider and James McMurtry. Not bad for a shit-ass year. Enough of me. I'll let the real writers close it out.

I'm actually fine with how things are turning out I guess
And all my good friends call me wilderness
~ "Wilderness," Middle Brother

I will bring you buckets of mercy
And hold your hand as you're crossing the street
Pay your bail if you need it
And I will be your saving grace
~ "Mercy Buckets," Drive By Truckers

Blood in the water and hell to pay
Sky tear open and pain rain down
Doesn't matter, 'cause come what may
I ain't ever gonna leave this town
This city won't wash away
This city won't ever drown
~ "This City," Steve Earle

Where am I?

2011-05-18T05:28:00.001-04:00

I've basically migrated to Facebook. If you want to be friends, send me a message.

Ron Paul is a Racist Sack of Crap

2011-05-14T12:20:00.003-04:00

And you can quote me on that.

We're really not allowed to say this, of course. By the official standards of our political discourse, the only racists in America today are, ya know, "the blacks." But Paul can't just get a free pass on this. A southern white man of his age has no excuse when it comes to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If you claim that it was "totalitarian" for the federal government to ban discrimination by private businesses, while Jim Crow was merely a reasonable exercise of a businessman's "freedom," you are a sick, twisted son of a bitch. Paul has a long history of racist sympathies, including the race-mongering of his own Ron Paul Newsletter and his longstanding ties to the neo-Confederate von Mises Institute. Such behavior may be forgivable for ideologically-minded adolescents and undergrads who, by definition, tend to lack perspective on reality. But at Paul's age? No charity. In the South, "I'm a Libertarian" has long been polite code for "racist." What were all those tyrannical federal interventions about anyway?

Need more proof? According to little Paul (the Senator), providing poor people--and black people--health insurance means you support "slavery." Because, in Obama's America, the real slaves are rich, white doctors. Like Rand Paul.

Sick. Twisted. Son. Of. A. Bitch.

They're Baaaaaack

2011-05-13T18:47:00.002-04:00

Some of you may have had occasion to be in Nashville back in 1998, the last time the 13-year cicadas made their autochthonous crawl from the earth. If you missed it, they make it sound like you're spending every moment of every day for several weeks inside an electrical substation. They do make great playthings for the girls, however.

bin Laden bin Deaden

2011-05-02T00:37:00.002-04:00

Yippie-kai-ay, MF! Finally, a President with more cattle than hat.

Chuck Todd said on NBC tonight that this would likely go down as the most important achievement of Obama's (first) term. Sorry, no. It will likely go down as the most popular achievement of his (first) term. For importance, HCR beats this by a mile. Stimulus and financial reform may beat it too, and I've got a soft spot for no-more-torture. Given ObL's greatly reduced status as operational leader, this is somewhere between nice symbolism and "thank God, this wasn't Jimmy Carter's Iranian rescue mission." But I can't deny the satisfaction of imagining what FOX, Rush, and the Donald are going through tonight--a sleepless night at the Pee Pants Corral.

Karl Marx's Favorite American President

2011-04-22T19:47:00.002-04:00

I suspect that the von Mises Institute is happier about this than is FOX News. Maybe that's why Obama used his Bible for the Inaugural.

Manny Being Manny

2011-04-09T06:34:00.002-04:00

Manny Ramirez has retired. In true Manny-style, he retires rather than serve a 100-game suspension for testing positive for a banned substance.

Manny was a great hitter. In 19 major league seasons, he had over 2,500 hits and hit 555 HR. He averaged 181 hits and 39 HR a season over that span. His career OPS is .996, which is pretty amazing; his career OBP is .411. He also played in 111 postseason games, with 29 postseason HR.

Stats here.

Of course, we think we know that Manny was using "banned substances." He was rumored to be one of the 2003 players--back when baseball tested but didn't act on the tests, he was one of about 100 players who allegedly tested positive. Then there was the 50-game suspension. Now this.

But if you followed the Cleveland Indians in the 1990s, there's a limit to how much you are going to care about that. The last remaining members of that team are reaching the ends of their careers--Thome, Vizquel.

Pencil Pushing Hump Talking Class Actions

2011-04-06T17:52:00.002-04:00

From the symposium last week in Cincinnati. I think at this point I was discussing something, um, kind of boring.

Survivor: Tea Party Island

2011-04-05T20:13:00.003-04:00

"We're survivalists, you know." "Survivalists?" I repeated the word so that I could absorb it, process it, figure out what the hell to say next. "Well, of course," she said, "we need all of those gas tanks. When Obama finishes sabotaging the world economy, people are going to be wandering through the streets scavenging, begging for food, looking for a place to go. We won't be like them. We'll be ready!" Now I knew. This was no ordinary ranch house, and that was no typical apartment we were renting. It was ground zero at the Obamapocalypse.

I'll back up. You guys already know the beginning of the story. Spiders. We had been making progress fighting them, but there were additional steps we could take more easily if we vacated the house for a while. A few weeks, maybe a month. It also seemed like a good opportunity to do some needed renovations: a new roof, new H/AC, some bathroom updating. (The downstairs bathroom was "Mamie Eisenhower pink," circa 1957, from floor to ceiling, and the upstairs had its light switches in the shower.) Apparently, work of this sort can scare the residual creepies down from the attic or out from the walls into human territory, and not surprisingly, we didn't want to be around for that. But renting for a short time is usually difficult and expensive.

Luckily, our realtor gave us the name of a woman who had a perfect set up. Jackie and Jay were wealthy retirees who lived on a quiet road just east of campus. They had a large, immaculate orange-brick rancher with a pool and an enormous lot. They had turned one wing of the house into a two-bedroom rental apartment, but, even better, they had several fully furnished one-bedroom guest cottages behind the house and beautiful grounds and gardens where kids could run around and play. The cost was reasonable, and she would rent on a week to week basis. The apartments typically went to foreign businessmen on short assignments or relocating families waiting for a new house to be finished. So we bit.

Before we went to see the place, Mrs. TMcD warned me that she thought they were pretty conservative. "Don't talk politics," she said, "let's keep this simple." No problem. Of the two of us, I'm the "diplomatic" one, I reminded her--even the local Jehovah's Witnesses like to parley with me. She rolled her eyes, and I promised to be good. When we got to the ranch house, Jackie showed us around her house and the two available apartments: the one in the main house, which was clean but a bit dank, and a spacious one-bedroom with a deck, vaulted ceiling, and skylights that sat on top of the barn/second garage. No question, we wanted the loft. As we discussed details, Jackie pivoted to politics. "I hear you teach at the university. What department?" Politics, I said. "Ohhhhh," she said, "then I'm sure you know my friend, G." Which, of course I did, since he had been teaching in my department for forty-some years. "We're old friends," she went on, describing years of social interaction, "but of course we don't agree on politics, because, you see, I'm a constitutionalist." This, I could tell, was going to be an adventure.

Still, I kept my mouth shut, even as she showed us pictures of herself cavorting with Michelle Bachmann at some right-wing confab. She had them posted on her fridge. Jackie, it turns out, was no ordinary landlady. She was one of the key organizers of the local Tea Party, mobilizing right-thinking Americans against socialism, death panels, and creeping Sharia. Her husband, a retired military officer and pilot, stood by, silent but approving, as his wife discoursed on the threat to America. But we had just met them, and she kept it relatively short, so I had no trouble keeping mum. Besides, they seemed like nice enough folks, just under the not atypical sway of Obama derangement syndrome. My grandmother would have loved them.

We started renting the apartment several weeks before we actually moved in. Work crew delays meant we didn't need to be out of the house quite yet. Plus, Mrs. TMcD had found some, er. . . you-know-what's living in our new apartment. It's been that kind of year. So she wanted time to spray and bug-proof before we actually moved anything in, especially before we brought the girls there.

When we finally moved in, in November, it was the night before the midterm elections. Timing! I was relieved, however, that no Tea Party festivities appeared to have been planned for the estate itself. And luckily, most of our stay proved uneventful, aside from an occasional failed appliance or eight-legged friend in a window-well. Making the stay even smoother, Jackie and Jay spent most of their time at their multiple lake houses, which, judging by the pictures she had showed us, were even more swanky than their regular digs. The loft apartment was a truly lovely place to hunker down during renovations. Good thing too, because the work that we had expected to last a few weeks ended up taking a few months. There were glitches, however.

Case in point, the gas cans. For a couple of weeks we noticed that the apartment reeked of fumes. When Mrs. TMcD went poking around in the barn below, she discovered a surprisingly large number of gas cans, typically without tops. "Why don't you go ask her to move them," she said to me when I got home, "I don't think I can deal with her today. Just ask her to move them to their main (attached) garage. And don't talk politics!" Sure, I said.

That, of course, is when I got the survivalist speech. Now how exactly am I supposed to not talk politics when I'm told by my landlady that she doesn't want to move her gas tanks (and spare my young children the fumes) because the four horseman of the FOX-apocalypse are on the ride? To be honest, there's also a big part of my brain that wanted to hear what she had to say. Exactly how far out there is she? How does the fevered right-wing mind work? She was going to show me, and I invited that carnival right up on stage.

"He's sabotaging the world economy?" I asked. Jackie tossed out a few slams on "Marxism," so I couldn't help myself. "The markets are all substantially up since Obama came in, corporate profits are soaring, and economic growth has returned after cratering under Bush. What are you worried about? Besides, it was Bush who created all those deficits, through his tax cuts and the Iraq War." Jackie didn't believe me. She started railing about bailouts, so I asked if she knew that the bailouts were a Bush program initiated with strong bipartisan support, including people like Boehner and Palin. Her response was pretty typical, although delivered with great passion: "the Tea Party isn't about a Party! We stand against the big spending socialism of BOTH parties!!" She grabbed her picture of Bachmann off the fridge and started waving it around furiously. "I never paid attention to politics before, but with Obama, I can see he hates America and he's trying to bring us down, so now I'm standing up for my country!" This last bit was a lie, of course. I knew from her friend G. that she had always been a right-wing nut, notorious for sending around unhinged e-mails long before the Kenyan stole the White House.

"OK, Jackie," I said, "did you support the Iraq War? the Bush tax cuts? If so, you created this budget mess. Why should anyone listen to you now?" That set her off on a rant about how we needed to invade Iraq because of 9/11 and how tax cuts always pay for themselves, etc. Boilerplate. Then she started going off on how it's all part of George Soros's scheme to bring down world governments. "He's done it before!" she screamed. "Still," I responded, "Obama inherited a $1.3 T annual deficit along with an epic economic collapse, you can't act like the bad economy is some left wing plot to destroy the world. Soros is a wealthy capitalist--and last I looked conservatives generally like those guys. The countries that Soros helped undermine were communist autocracies, and he brought them down a lot more cheaply than George Bush took 'democracy' to Iraq. Shouldn't you be cheering him on?" Her head looked like it was about to explode. Grasping for a response, she decided to save her bacon by arguing that American military intervention is the ONLY legitimate path of regime change.

But she quickly returned to her main obsession: Obama's war on the Constitution. Apparently, health care reform is a totalitarian plot that has the founders planning a zombie attack from the grave. "None of this stuff is in the Constitution!" she wailed. "Show me where it is!" OK, I said, easy. Commerce and general welfare--the founders were all nationalists: Washington, Hamilton, Madison. They hated this states' rights stuff. "Doesn't matter! They didn't say anything about health care."

She was getting pretty agitated, so I redirected to Jay. "Jay, what branch of the service were you in?" "Air Force," he said. "So where, exactly, does the Constitution mention the Air Force?," I asked. The dervish that is Jackie looked momentarily stunned, before blurting out "It's a militia!!!" "Jay," I laughed, "Is the Air Force a 'militia'!?" He shook his head gently. "Look," I added, "I know you don't like these policies, but they're all pretty moderate--based on GOP plans going back decades--and they're clearly constitutional. You can't just assume everything you dislike is an affront to the founders." Flummoxed, Jackie had one final card to play. "Yes they are!" She grabbed for the remote. "I can prove it! I've got it all right here on my TiVo." And I'm sure she did. But how to find it among the 129 episodes (!! I shit ye not) of Glenn Beck that she had so carefully saved as a testimony to the future generations born in servitude?

Anyway, that was a distilled version of an hour plus conversation. In the end they agreed to move the gas tanks, but the smell never fully went away. When time came for us to finally move out, Mrs. TMcD scrubbed that place down like she was prepping for the Queen. No surprise, Jackie came through with the white glove treatment, looking for dust behind the pictures hanging on the wall, all the while complaining about everything under the sun. She seemed pissed off that she couldn't find anything wrong. "I've got a full month before I have to return your deposit!" she barked. Almost two months later, we still haven't gotten back a dime. I bet it all went to Michelle Bachmann.

Opening Day 2011

2011-04-03T06:19:00.004-04:00

Last week I was in Cincinnati, for work, but I was able to catch the Reds' home opener against the Brewers. The Brewers led off the game with back-to-back home runs--making my fantasy draft selection of Edinson Volquez look a little questionable. The Brew Crew led until the final at-bat of the game, when the Reds catcher hit a three-run homer into the visitors' bullpen to win, 7-6. Six home runs in the game, including one by reigning NL MVP Joey Votto.

Not exactly an Opening Day, but definitely baseball (playoff) related, see here for a much younger version of me.

Laundry mishap

2011-04-03T06:16:00.001-04:00

Ever wash (and dry) say, a dozen (large-size no less) crayons in the pocket of your favorite hoodie sweatshirt? No, then you haven't had any fun doing laundry lately, folks.

The logic of leaving, or a Libya post (sort of)

2011-03-16T07:15:00.003-04:00

New poll on the public's support for the Afghan war in the Washington Post says that 64% of respondents say that conflict is no longer worth it.

It is somewhat remarkable what a superpower can (and can't) do (but the can first). Even without public support (31% still support the Afghan war), a superpower can field over 100,000 troops, an equivalent number of contractors, planes, drones, etc., in the vain effort to . . . build a modern state in Afghanistan? Kill all the Taliban? Not sure what the point is at this point . . . but we are expending a lot of resources over there.

What it can't do . . . well, we've been in Afghanistan almost ten years. What can't we do? Put in place a legitimate government, for starters. Stamp out a culture of corruption. Bring the undefeated to the bargaining table. And we can't defeat or even delegitimize an indigenous force that refuses, and has refused for centuries, defeat by outside forces. And we certainly can't do it when we are killing boys collecting firewood with our million-dollar weapons.

So the last few weeks, talk of intervention in Libya. And some happy talk about the "success" of the surge in Iraq, and how it has emboldened the United States. Whatever. The war to remember here is Afghanistan. Now, the two countries are very different, sure. But when the current Libyan government falls, it will have to be replaced. By what? Can the United States put in place a legitimate government by force of arms? We certainly haven't done so--not in Iraq, and not in the Longest War.

The logic of leaving is that you want to, but you can't, because leaving is losing, and no one will admit that "they" ("we") lost. The domestic political price is too high, especially if you're a Democrat. It seems that even the president's supporters think so. Not a mass movement to get out of Afghanistan, despite majority support for doing so. And remember, Obama ran as a kind of Afghan war "hawk."

So let's not get ourselves involved in another war. Because there's no end in sight in at least one of the wars that we already have.

NPRacism

2011-03-10T15:48:00.004-05:00

Odd fact: in America today it is a worse racial offense to call racists "racists" (in a private conversation, no less) than it is to actually be a racist. Is "racist" the new N-word? Are they allowed to call themselves that, as in "You my racist, dawg!"? Or is it now "racyst"? The bigot liberation movement has come a long way. Thanks, Rush!

Deficit Whores

2011-02-17T17:47:00.001-05:00

Why I love E. J. Dionne.

Happy Valentine's Day!

2011-02-14T05:54:00.002-05:00

Another one of those occasions when the onus is on the men to perform, so to speak. (The list includes, at minimum, the anniversary, the birthday, Mother's Day for many, and this one.) Having been married for 15 years this coming June--yes, you read that correctly, you are all getting old--I have basically given up on the creative Valentine's day gift. It's a short list of options, when you get down to it, really.

I was talking to a (younger) work colleague, who is married, and he was like, "Oh, we don't really celebrate Valentine's Day. It's commercial, blah blah blah." A word of advice (and I did share this with him, as is my wont): Your wife/partner/significant other can believe this, but still appreciate a thoughtful present at the same time! More importantly, your w/p/so can believe this, and still note the lack of a gift at the same time. It isn't necessarily one or the other.

Any big plans out there?

Full disclosure: Jewelry. (Like I said, not a long list of options.)

Salinger's War Record

2011-02-14T05:49:00.002-05:00

"It's hard to think of another American writer who had more combat experience." This is interesting. I remembered this a little from Hasting's Armageddon.

Of course, one can think of "American writers" with substantial combat experience, but they tend to be folks who actually wrote about the war. Eugene Sledge, for example, or Bob Leckie. Both featured in the HBO miniseries . . . If you haven't watched The Pacific, I would recommend it, if you like that sort of thing. But it's no Band of Brothers, just as the Pacific War was not the European theater.

The Winter of Our Content

2011-02-11T19:12:00.002-05:00

Allahu Akbar! . . . Mazel tov!. . . . Yee haaaa!!

Searching for the right words for our friends in Egypt. It is a glorious day. May the Egyptian sun shine upon many, many more.

Patriots and Pinheads

2011-02-10T00:19:00.002-05:00

Lots of buzz about the freshman Tea Party reps who voted against reauthorizing the Patriot Act. I wouldn't get too excited about these guys "libertarian" bona fides. Since all the polls show that the actual TPs have no such high-minded instincts (they're just uber-wingers who hate abortion, gays, and Obama, but love torture, imperialism, and Glenn Beck), there's a simpler explanation: this is just another knee jerk anti-Obama vote. They think he's using the census to stock his concentration camps, after all. I'll believe these clowns care about civil liberties when they vote to limit the power of a GOP president. Once Sarah Palin comes calling, asking for power to grill a few Muslims on the White House lawn, this crowd will smile, salute, and pass the slaw.

Our Porcelain Overlords

2011-02-07T19:23:00.003-05:00

On Hardball tonight they discussed Obama's image problem with the American business community. Even after saving global capitalism, backing TARP, resurrecting Detroit, and defending Wall Street against radical reform, Obama gets no love. Why? on Hardball, one lead theory was that Obama's "populist rhetoric" hurt their widdle iddle feeeewwwings. We've been hearing this a lot lately, especially from Politico, driver of Beltway narratives.

It does seem a paradox, at least if you think that politics centers on economic interests. But it doesn't. Identity trumps interests. The problem is that we're so used to thinking about "identity politics" as a left-wing phenomenon that we don't see how great its influence has been on the right, with white southerners, Christian evangelicals, farmers, and especially the business community. For the latter, Obama's real sin is not the populist rhetoric--when the hell was that supposed to have happened!?!?--it's that he shatters their illusion of triumphal, even messianic, self-sufficiency and virtue. As ideology, laissez-faire has always been a patent fraud, false as history and idiotic as policy. The American business community was built, brick by brick, by the federal government. It was Hamilton's great legacy, and it makes every businessman in America a "welfare queen." But as in so many things, Americans walk Hamiltonian but talk Jeffersonian. As we groom ourselves in the mirror, we see how good we think we used to look, back when we were young and free. As Nietzsche argued, no one is so impressed with the glorious freedom (and righteousness) of its own will as is the ruling class. They mistake the feeling of power (a practical effect) for the self-justifying morality of private conscience (a mythic cause). "Of course, I have free will--I won, and I'm awesome!"

No matter how much money Obama puts in their pockets, he will always be the guy who revealed their feet of clay. He said that government had a critical role to play in improving the economy, and he was right. No matter how many pretty speeches Obama gives to the Chambers of Commerce, he just can't repent a sin that stains as deep as having been right when those who by definition cannot sin were so wrong.

Any Bets?

2011-02-06T16:33:00.001-05:00

I'm gonna pick Team Rapist over Team Communist 20-17.

Full Force Gail

2011-02-05T10:49:00.003-05:00

It's rarely noted, but NYT's Gail Collins, week in and week out, is one of America's very best columnists. And funniest. Aside from her acute moral sense, her greatest gift may be her ability to savagely puncture her target's pretensions while somehow never coming across as angry or mean, a remarkable feat in the blog era, one that I have never been able to replicate myself, and yet one that I envy.

This week she goes after the pro-life hit on Planned Parenthood (by some James O'Keefe epigones), a column that might as well have been titled "Return of the Ratfuckers," were it not for her gentility and the Times's censors. At what point are we allowed to call what the right is doing what it is: "class warfare"?

You're Lucky If You Don't Have a Family Member Who Has

2011-02-02T08:32:00.002-05:00

Angry Fox Geezer Syndrome.

I try to watch Glen Beck from time to time. I actually do. But it is completely unwatchable. I must be immune, despite my premature aging.

400 Years

2011-02-02T06:47:00.003-05:00

The King James Bible turns 400 this year! Hard to imagine, isn't it? Seems like the English Civil War was just yesterday . . . oh, hush. It's a cliche, of course, but to we English-speaking folks, it's up there with Shakespeare in shaping our language and thought. It also contains some of the most beautiful writing. (But of course God writes masterfully in his Mother Tongue!)

A few favorites of mine, starting with Genesis, Chapter 1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry [land] appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry [land] Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that [it was] good.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, [and] the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed [is] in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
And the earth brought forth grass, [and] herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed [was] in itself, after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
And the evening and the morning were the third day.
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: [he made] the stars also.
And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that [it was] good.
And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl [that] may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which [is] upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which [is] the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein [there is] life, [I have given] every green herb for meat: and it was so.
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, [it was] very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Nothing influential in there, eh? One major, usually un-noted influence, was the run-on sentence. God clearly does not consider starting a sentence with a conjunction to be a sin. But even yet, the best opening of any book I've read. Lays it right out for you. And of course the 23rd Psalm:

The LORD [is] my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou [art] with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

Maybe a bit from the New Testament later. Have to get moving now.

Pyramid Scheming

2011-01-31T19:21:00.003-05:00

Having no special understanding of Egypt, I can't offer much fresh on the extraordinary events of the last week. But I can comment on some of the commentary. Maybe the least surprising aspect of the uprising has been the aggressive jockeying of one and all on this side of the pond to claim the foreign policy high ground. Leon Wieseltier at New Republic caught my eye today, and as always the question is whether his eloquence outstrips his intellectual vanity or vice versa.

For all his insight, alternately prescient and pompous, Wieseltier fears nothing so much as losing a war for moralistic nuance. Obama drives him crazy. People seem to think that this mere whelp of a pol is an eloquent and nuanced intellectual, not having seen the real item. So whenever LW writes on Obama it reads like the desperate grasping of an overshadowed older brother. What provoked the Salieri complex this time? Obama's famed Cairo speech of 2009, where the new president addressed the Muslim world and called for a new beginning based on mutual respect, democracy, human rights, and shared interests in peace. Here's LW's take:

There is nothing wrong with crisis management in a crisis, but the problem that the Obama administration now confronts is precisely that it has not been a cornerstone of American policy toward Egypt to stand up for the rights of the Egyptian people. It has preferred cronyism with the regime occasionally punctuated by some stirring remarks. What we are witnessing, in the confusion and the dread of the administration, are the consequences of its demotion of democratization as one of the central purposes of American foreign policy, particularly toward the Muslim world. There were two reasons for the new liberal diffidence about human rights. The first was the Bush doctrine, the second was the Obama doctrine. The wholesale repudiation of Bush’s foreign policy included the rejection of anything resembling his “freedom agenda,” which looked mainly like an excuse for war. But whatever one’s views of the Iraq war, it really does not seem too much to ask of American liberals that they think a little less crudely about democratization—not only about its moral significance but also about its strategic significance. One of the early lessons of the rebellion against Mubarak is that American support for democratic dissidents is indeed a strategic matter, and that the absence of such American support can lead to a strategic disaster. Such are the wages of realism. It is a common error that prudence is thought about the short-term; the proper temporal horizon for prudential thinking is distant and long. Realism does not equip one for an adequate appreciation of the historical force of the democratic longing. In this sense, realism is singularly unrealistic. It seems smart only as long as the dictators remain undisturbed by their people, and then suddenly it seems incredibly stupid.

LW goes on to complain that Obama has practiced foreign policy in a "vigorously multicultural spirit" that has "the effect of aligning America with regimes and against peoples," as if academic gripes from two decades ago somehow haunt the American left's (i.e., Obama's) inability to call a dictator a dictator. A straightforward reading of Obama's speech reveals no such relativistic shibboleths, however. I'm not sure where LW finds the specter of autocratic "acceptance" in a speech that trumpets American exceptionalism so unapologetically. Surely the breach that Obama sought to heal in that speech was NOT the one between the US government and an Egyptian dictator who already liked us (and our $2B/year) just fine thanks. Obama was repairing our relations with the fabled "Arab street," relations which had been sorely tested by eight years of Bushian neo-conservatism. That speech could only have encouraged democracy to the Arab world, and if, as LW says, it threatened Mubarak not one whit, well it should have, whether we intended it to or not.

If, in the aftermath of Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution," we have had trouble sufficiently distancing ourselves from Mubarak, it has little if anything to do with Obama's overconfident rhetoric, multiculturalism, or supposed fears of democracy promotion. Indeed, our failures have one simple source that somehow LW never found the nuance (or the moral courage) to acknowledge: Israel. Full Stop.

We like "Democracy." We also like Israel. But in countries like Egypt the former has been a mere abstraction since, well, forever, while support for Israel is a cold, hard fact, and one of the few such facts in the region that has prevented our constant headaches from turning full-on migraine for the last 30+ years. There's no real blame here. These facts just are what they are, and no matter how much we would like to pretend otherwise there is no coherent or magical foreign policy that somehow threads this needle. I do not say this to disparage our support for Israel, which, as you know, I share, but to recognize the complex and tragic nature of all political action. TNR used to have such a Niebuhrian sense. Now I have to find it elsewhere--who would have guessed Douthat!? There are, indeed, "wages of realism." Wieseltier just refuses to pay them.

Sprawl Killed the Car Pool?

2011-01-29T07:11:00.002-05:00

Interesting story in the Times on the decline of car pooling, despite efforts to encourage it (HOV lanes).

Link

Of course, DC is perhaps one of the last weakholds of the car pool, what with all our HOV lanes: "What remains, of course, is traffic, and in places like Washington, where it adds hours to commutes, people car-pool to take advantage of the fast-track car-pooling lanes."

Traffic was especially an issue this week, with the snow. Not much snow, but it was preceded by ice, and as everyone knows, an hour of ice is worth about 6-8 inches of snow in terms of causing problems, traffic and otherwise. At least one large limb fell on our street, and 100's of 1000's were without power for a day. I heard horror stories from colleagues at work--who drive--of 12-hour, 8-hour trips home.

As someone who walks to work, and my walk takes 20 minutes at a leisurely (toddler) pace, all I can say is, I can't imagine.

On Feeling Old

2011-01-24T07:00:00.003-05:00

TMcD's music post is as good an opportunity as any to open this topic. I rarely listen to new music, as I think we've discussed before. Going even further, I've come to the conclusion that "music" is something young people "do." In the sense that when I was young(er), I used to "get into bands." Now, it's difficult to imagine the energy or interest in, say, listening to the same record over and over again . . . at least, to a record that is new to me. I still do this, on the iPod, of course, with music that I once obsessed over. But I can't remember the last "new to me" record that was thus--probably The Soft Bulletin?

I have been feeling old lately. Partly this is chronological--none of us are getting any younger, as they say. Partly it's having a child--nothing like a toddler to make you feel old, except, probably, an older child. But that will come, I guess. Partly it's work. Having a lot of responsibility at work has its upside, but also its burdens, obviously. There is certainly less opportunity to pass the buck. And one can only hold and carry so many bucks.

So chronology, parenthood, work . . . and probably the weather. Not that it's THAT cold here, but I think that one feels older in the winter than in warmer months.

Music Roundup 2010

2011-01-23T16:10:00.003-05:00

Has it only been a year since I last did this? Feels like five. Which would be the number of different places we've lived/stayed for at least a week this year (at least 2 months each in 4 of 5!). More on that in a future post. But 2009 seems like a lifetime ago. Maybe that's partly why this year in music feels so much fuller than last--the boom that follows the bust. The top half dozen or so albums on my list for this year all could have been my #1 for last year. So, without further ado, here's my annual metaphysical perfection.

1) Band of Horses, Infinite Arms. Good to see this CD get a Grammy nom, but it still slipped under the radar of most critics, many of whom seemed confused by its more subdued pace than Cease to Begin (2007). For me it was a slow reveal, but with songs like "Laredo," "On My Way Back Home," "Dilly," "Evening Kitchen," and "Older," I'll be listening to this one for years to come. Sounds a bit like Neil Young singing campfire songs with My Morning Jacket.

2) Patty Griffin, Downtown Church.

3) Justin Townes Earle, Harlem River Blues. Smooth, old school rockabilly that sounds a bit more like his middle-namesake than his dad. I saw him play guitar on a few songs with his old man in an epic three hour show at 328 Performance Hall back when I was in grad school and he was maybe 13. Go watch this clip of him on Letterman a couple of weeks ago, singing the indelible title track. A few more faves: "Christchurch Woman," "Workin' for the MTA," and "Rogers Park." Mrs. TMcD needs to hear this CD at least twice a day and gets the DT's if it's not within arms reach at any given moment.

4) Kings of Leon, Come Around Sundown.

5) Black Keys, Brothers.

6) Arcade Fire, the Suburbs.

7) Spoon, Transference.

8) John Mellencamp, No Better Than This. Speaking of old school. The 13 songs here were all recorded in mono, mostly at Memphis' Sun Studios, but a few at Savannah's First African Baptist Church, and one in room 14 of San Antonio's Gunter Hotel, where Robert Johnson recorded his first blues classics. They sound like lost recordings from more than half a century ago.

9) Robert Plant, Band of Joy. Is this as good as Raising Sand? Probably not. But it's got some really great tunes, notably covers of Richard Thompson's "House of Cards," Low's "Monkey," and (my favorite) Townes Van Zandt's "Harm's Swift Way."

10) the National, High Violet. A close call between this and Vampire Weekend's much loved Contra. But the epic brood of "Bloodbuzz, Ohio" edges the eponymous pop of "Holiday" by a nose.

One oddity of this year's list is that half of it involves either Nashville acts (#s 2, 3, 4, 5; the Keys are recent transplants) or Nashville recording (2, 9). Add in the White Stripes, Raconteurs, Dead Weather and whatever other side project Jack White decides to start next week, and Nashville has quietly become the center of the rock and roll universe. So I'd be amiss not to mention another act that almost made my list, Glossary, the belles of the Boro. These guys (and girl) have been around for a decade or so, and they're our local answer to the Drive By Truckers. Feral Fire sounds like Thin Lizzy playing the honkey tonk. "Lonely is a Town" is especially great: barroom stomp with surprising poetry. The album as a whole can feel repetitive, but I do love this band.

Did you guys hear anything good this year?

Countdowner

2011-01-21T22:43:00.003-05:00

Maybe he should have changed the segment to "Worst TV Executives in the World!"

I'm finding it hard at the moment to find words that adequately express my shock at MSNBC's unprovoked firing of Keith Olbermann, their highest rated host and the man who, quite literally, made their network work. I would add the word "single-handed," but that would miss the genius of KO. Unlike the preening FOX cele-(not-too)-brities, who are rival sharks in a shared tank, KO spent a lot of time finding smart liberals and helping them launch their own shows at his network, even giving up his own prime air to do so.

Yeah, he could be infuriating, especially when he took his own rhetoric too seriously or applied his searing moralism to minor tactical disputes within the Dem coalition (say, Hillary's campaign rhetoric or the tax cut compromise). But you knew his heart was in the right place, even when his head wasn't. The frequent self-deprecation helped, as when he chortled with glee at Ben Affleck's brilliant parody of him on SNL. I always thought you had to cut KO a lot of slack for his occasional lapses. From roughly 2005-8, he was the voice of freedom in a dark, dark time. Aside from Jon Stewart, tolerated by the DC press corps only because he could be dismissed (wrongly) as just-a-comic, KO was for many years the only host on my TV who could or would speak the truth and name names. Best of all, he reveled in the fight against FOX and made it fun. He even managed to get under their skin, rattling O'Reilly & Co. into paroxysms of hilarious hate.

The big question tonight is whether Comcast, which completed its purchase of NBC Universal just days prior, made the firing of KO their first priority. If so, a horrible omen. By sacking KO, Comcast will have undermined the credibility of TV's only liberal-leaning network with much of its core base, and it is hard to imagine there not being blowback that damages the other key shows as well. If liberals stop watching to protest Comcast, the bastards win. If liberals keep watching and the other hosts now pull punches, the bastards win.

Tonight, though, the focus should be on the man done wrong and the wrongs he did right. God bless you, Keith, you made my day more times than I can count. Don't stay gone long.

Kid Book Cringing

2011-01-16T22:03:00.002-05:00

Welcome back, 3! While I'm mulling over Chicago politics, I have a random question. What's the most offensive kid's book you know?

We've been reading Amelia Bedelia some lately, and that gets my vote for now. If you don't remember this insanely popular series, Amelia Bedelia (they always say the whole name) is a staggeringly stupid housekeeper who misunderstands every instruction she's ever given, effectively ruining the home of her benevolent, rich employers. But as angry as they get at her, and as incapable as she is of ever learning anything, they keep her around because she bakes great pies, cookies, and cream puffs. Well, at least she's white, I think to myself. Except that, according to Wikipedia, her real life inspiration was a black African maid. And the author is a white woman from rural, heavily black, plantation country in lowland South Carolina. Can you top that?

A New Hope

2011-01-16T06:02:00.003-05:00

So, I "decided" to take a long hiatus at the blog. Not deliberately, but things steamrolled me, and then I hadn't done it in a long time. Hard to start back. Then I found that I had little to say other than that I am deeply troubled by the state of the world . . . and had little (interesting) to say, other than that. "I am deeply troubled by the state of the world."

But TMcD called me yesterday to see what was going on. And I promised him that I would blog again, even if just to type "I am deeply disturbed by the state of the world," maybe as often as once a day.

But yesterday, as well--fate?--there was this curious article in the WP on Rahm's bid to become mayor of Chicago. Worth a looksie, especially to the vast number of readers of this blog who reside in Chicago. The point of the article seems to be that Rahm's opponents are seeking to use his associations with Obama (and, to some extent, Clinton) against him with . . . black and Hispanic voters. Even though, as the article points out, a couple of times, Obama is incredibly popular with Chicagoans of color.

It's almost like the reporter doesn't know very much about Chicago politics?

The Cornel West quotes are the best, though. I guess if you're a national reporter doing a story on racial politics in a Chicago mayoral primary, it makes sense to call Cornell West for a quote!

Don't Cry For Me, Arizona

2011-01-13T22:05:00.002-05:00

I don't have a lot to add to the discussions of yesterday's speech-off between Palin and Obama. Her decision to release that video the morning of the Arizona memorial was a train wreck in slow motion. You knew she was going to do it even before she did, you knew the tone would be all wrong--a preening, whiny, narcissistic mess--and you knew she would probably toss out some ill conceived red meat of victim chic ("blood libel"?!) that would look petty and shrill next to the high-minded mourner-in-chief role that Obama was likely to knock out of the park. Which she did, and he did. Just an extraordinarily moving and cathartic service. But you knew that already.

One interesting thing here, however, was watching the left's scramble toward the high ground, which began really early. Despite Palin's lament about how's she's the real victim of Tuscon, the liberal pundits and sites I read--Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall, Steve Benen, Salon, Jonathan Alter, etc.--were falling over all over themselves to exonerate her long before she spoke out herself. If there was a unified lynch mob on the left, I missed it. The standard line seemed to be that (a) she was obviously not responsible for the psychotic Loughner's actions, but (b) purely independently, it sure would be nice if she took it down a notch.

Really? Isn't this a bit too easy? Given her long history of incendiary rhetoric, Palin's like a raging drunk who emerges from a car crash only to discover that it was the meth head in front of her who started the pile up. So if she didn't cause the wreck, it was by sheer dumb luck. Good for her. Now she wants a good driver award. One of the things not mentioned enough so far is that it's not just the tone of her rhetoric that's the problem. It's the lies. Death panels, socialism, "pallin' around with terrorists," apologizing for America, etc. It's one thing to react with passion to things that actually happened, it's quite another to start burning torches over things that exist only in her fevered imagination. Is blaming her for the spree kill fair? No. But she's not really in a position to demand fairness, is she? Political careers, of much better people, have been torpedoed over much, much less (Muskie and Gore come to mind). And, really, no one should be happier about this than the GOP elders. They knew she'd lose to Obama by 25 points, but they were powerless to stop her. Now they aren't.

Crazing Arizona

2011-01-08T16:48:00.002-05:00

Horrible news from Arizona. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Tuscon) shot and in critical condition, and Fed. Judge John Roll dead at the scene. So far, six are dead (including Giffords's regional director) and twelve more wounded.

Early report is that Jared Loughner, 22, is the shooter. Here's his Youtube site. From the looks of his videos, he's a mentally disturbed Ron Paul-ite, obsessed with the "terrorist" federal government, the gold standard, and creating your own currency. Giffords, who represents a swing district--"targeted" by Sarah Palin's infamous rifle-bull's eye and an M16 party by her GOP challenger--had been stalked and vandalized by crazed Tea Partiers as a result of her vote on HCR and her strong opposition to AZ's draconian immigration law. Neither of those issues figured into the videos I saw, however. He does appear to be fixated on "grammar" and "conscience dreaming," and his rather odd commentaries make it look like he took at least a few philosophy and writing theory classes, although his frequent grammar errors and twisted syllogisms suggest he did not do very well in them. Then there's the video where he dresses up in a garbage bag and Scream-like mask and burns an American flag in the dessert. Just bizarre. What happens when mental disease meets conspiracy radio.

True Grit a Hit

2011-01-05T00:28:00.003-05:00

If you see only one movie this year, make it True Grit. Which I can say because I've seen only one movie this year. I think that includes rentals.

Anyway, TG was well worth being "it." I saw it nearly two weeks ago, and I'm still thinking about it. A few critics dismissed it, in part because the bar for Coen Brothers movies is now set pretty damned high, especially after they won an Oscar for No Country. The thing about the Coens is that you can't always tell immediately how good one of their films really is. O Brother got mixed reviews--and still pops up as a two star film on my Comcast guide--but it's one of their best, a film that gets better and funnier every time I see it. I still don't fully get The Big Lebowski (too LA?), but it has become one of the great cult movies of our age. And hardly anyone seemed to notice Miller's Crossing, although it still burns in my memory years later ("Ahn-achy!"). True Grit, on the other hand, seemed great the first time through, and it made me want to sit through a second show, although I compromised by just watching the trailer on-line over and over again (kudos to the Johnny Cash!).

The other reason for the early critical ambivalence may be that this was a "remake," which didn't go so well when the Coens did Ladykillers, maybe their weakest film. A lot of critics have fond memories of the Duke in the original. All apologies to the Man Marion, but the new one kicks his ass six ways to sundown. Far better film-making, and all around better actors this time, with the caveats that it is hard to top either Robert Duvall (Lucky Ned) or Strother Martin (of Cool Hand Luke fame, here as the horsetrading Colonel), but the excellent Barry Pepper and Dakin Matthews at least fight those duels to a draw. Meanwhile, Stanley Fish, who I like only intermittently, has a great review here, explaining its thematic superiority to the elder version.

Somehow, TG turned into the big popular hit of the Oscar season. Really love to see some nominations here: Bridges, Steinfeld, Damon, etc. And I can say that with confidence, because I've seen one movie this year.

Barbour Shaves His Own Nuts

2010-12-21T19:44:00.002-05:00

Haley Barbour's recent defense of the White Citizens Council of Yazoo City isn't hard to decipher. Like a lot of conservative southerners of his generation, he saw (and still sees) the problem of racism as little more than one of incivility: the KKK displayed bad form; they made the natural white power structure look trashy and exposed the South's dirty laundry, whereas the WCC were more respectable. I doubt that Barbour is a hard core racist. He's just utterly oblivious to matters of racial injustice, and he assumes that the old boy network from which he emerged is just good Christian folks. Barbour's a smart guy and smooth operator. If he had an ounce of racial self-awareness, he would have been wily enough to conceal his own wretched backwardness.

So one more serious (but not really serious) GOP presidential aspirant commits political suicide, joining Mark Sanford in the loser line. Barbour never had a chance anyway. The 2012 race is going to be between (a) Sarah Palin and (b) NOT-Sarah Palin, and the moneycons are desperately seeking someone to fill slot (b), for which the defining qualification is "do not embarrass the party!" Haley was always a long shot for that role. As good a money guy as he is, someone who comes across like W.C. Fields after he swallowed George Wallace does not make a compelling challenger to our first not-exactly-Yazoo-City-mayoral-candidate-worthy president. Who does that leave for the GOP in 2012? HCR is a big cross Romney will have to bear (along with other better known crosses). Huckabee can't compete against Sarah! for the exact same slice of the GOP pie. McCain is done 4evs. Chris Christie is a cartoonish baffoon who cannot wear well with anyone who is not a DC reporter. Pawlenty? A-Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!! Rubio is too green, McDonnell too polarizing. Thune looks the part to me, and he's both dumb enough and pliable enough for the moneycons to see as a convenient tool (see also, Bush, George W.). This is the weakest bench I can ever remember on the GOP side. Who's the "white" horse?

To Wong Fu, With Honor, Thanks for Everything, Joe Lieberman

2010-12-18T16:40:00.005-05:00

In this hour of triumph on DADT, let's just take a moment to note that for all the drama, the Dems not only did the right thing, they did it the right way.

Obama, with the help of Bob Gates, argued time and again that it was really Congress' job to repeal DADT and that a change of this social import shouldn't be left to the courts. Amen to that. Not only does the court's traditional deference to the military make them an unreliable savior, but there is a real difference in the legitimacy courts and Congresses have on matters of social change. Brown v. Board was far less effective than the Civil Rights Act a decade later. And Obama showed great restraint in not preempting Congress, first by refusing to unilaterally suspend the policy, and second by appealing an anti-DADT decision at the US District Court (to the great confusion and chagrin of the LGBT community and their allies in the Dem base). It sets a bad precedent for presidents to manipulate the law when they simply don't like its outcomes, a lesson the base should have absorbed from eight years of GWB. We are a constitutional system, and matters of potentially divisive social change, Congress should take the lead.

Unfortunately, Congress (by which I mean "the Senate") is badly broken thanks to GOP filibuster madness. No matter. They still got it done today, great credit to the oft-maligned Harry Reid. He's got a far harder job than Nancy Pelosi, but he's done himself proud over the last two years. Two key moves that made it possible? The Obama tax deal, of course. But also not kicking Joe Lieberman out of the Dem caucus when everyone was screaming for his scalp two years ago. Sometimes shameless ass kissing to scumbags pays off. Joe, you're still on my shit list. Today, shalom!

Music Trivia Amidst Grading Tedium

2010-12-11T19:37:00.004-05:00

Every once in a while I look at a music chart and I think, damn!, this popular music today sucks. So, magic of Wikipedia "discography," I checked for some historical context. Turns out that a lot of rock legends have had, shall we say, "limited" chart success.

To break up the tedium of grading, I present you the top 20 rock artists who never scored a #1 single on the US Billboard charts. Following each band will be their highest chart position, # of top 10, and # of top 40 singles. I rank them by # of hits in the top 10, then top 40, then chart position as final tie break.

20) White Stripes/Raconteurs (26//0, 1)
19) Radiohead (31//0, 2)
18) Elvis Costello (19//0, 2)
17) Dave Matthews Band (16//0, 4)
16) Smashing Pumpkins (12//0, 4)
15) John Mayer (12//0, 9)
14) Beck (10//1, 1)
13) Grateful Dead (9//1, 1)
12) the Clash (8//1, 2)
11) Nirvana (6//1, 2)
10) Talking Heads (9//1, 3)
9) Pearl Jam (2//1, 4)
8) Led Zeppelin (4//1, 6)
7) the Who (9//1, 16)
6) REM (4//3, 9)
5) Tom Petty (3//3, 16)
4) Bob Dylan (2//4, 12)
3) the Kinks (6//5, 11)
2) CCR (2//9, 11)
1) Bruce Springsteen (2//12, 19)

Did I miss anyone? OK, here are your trivia questions, answered below the fold: Which of those bands (there are 9) never had a #1 album in the US? Which (there are 2) never had a top 10 album?

Ritalin, Anyone?

2010-12-07T23:04:00.002-05:00

I haven't seen much MSNBC lately, but when I tuned in tonight at the end of Olberman's "Special Comment," I could tell that it was ON, bitches! Nostrils flaring, ears steaming, ready to rumble with the Republicans, ON!!! Except that he wasn't raging at the GOP, but Obama. Seems Keith no likely the tax cut compromise. Bordering on Glenn Beck hostility. Oh.

Maddow, always ready to be "talked off a ledge," would have to be better right? Sorry, no. This was by far the worst Maddow show I've ever seen (have I seen a bad Maddow show before? I can't remember one). A really dishonest analysis of the tax deal. First, she acts like Dems gave the GOP everything they wanted on taxes. Not true. They wanted permanent extension of the Bush rates. They got two years. And Obama stated clearly that he drew a "line in the sand" on making that permanent. In following this debate over the last several weeks, it has seemed a pretty standard expectation that about the best the Dems could do, after having foolishly punted this from pre-election to post-election, was to offer a temporary compromise exactly like what we got. Senate Dems tried to approve the middle-class only cuts--but they failed to get 60 votes. Nice try, but it's about the VOTES! This wasn't Maddow's only misrepresentation of events. When she chalks up what the Dems got and what they lost, she never mentioned the 13-month extension of unemployment benefits. Come on, that was key here. Sherrod Brown finally came on and mentioned them, but only to dismiss their significance, since "Republicans always cave on that," albeit at the last possible moment.

Now, this is deeply misleading. True, the GOP usually caves on this, but they're facing a vastly improved legislative environment in just a month, and this is not the only bill Dems are trying to push through the lame duck Congress. Getting a deal on taxes should open the door for consideration of DADT and START, both of which are hugely important. And yet absolutely no one on Maddow saw fit to mention this. Brown's argument seemed to be that Obama should have trusted Senate Dems to beat down the GOP over the next two weeks, as if you can ever trust Senate Dems to beat down anybody. Dude, you're in the Senate--have you even met your colleagues? Meanwhile, there are several Republicans who have said that they would vote for those other measures if a tax deal got worked out first. If Dems want to take the tax fight "to the mattresses" they have to know that they're most likely strangling in the crib all the other issues they're supposedly fighting for right now. It is, of course, possible that Obama has failed to get solid commitments from Snowe, et al. on DADT and START, and we're still going to lose those. But this play could work, while if we go with the left's preferred strategy, we get bupkis. Will I allow the rich to get their Bush tax cuts for two more years so that I can get DADT repeal and START? Hell yes I will. Unlike the GOP two-year tax reprieve, those would be accomplishments that can't be rolled back.

Thank God for Lawrence O'Donnell. Finally someone with an understanding of legislative process. I was a little worried when his panel of guests included three lefty "purists" (Adam Green, Jane Hamsher, and Roger Hodge) and one lonely pragmatist (Ezra Klein). But then Larry diced and sliced the hard liners so expertly I thought I was watching Morimoto on Iron Chef. Without even mentioning the DADT and START issues, O'Donnell made a powerful case that there was simply no practical alternative to doing a deal much like this one. If the Dems hold out for symbolic reasons and tax rates go up for all Americans in January, Congress won't be able to do a retro-fix, and Obama will get tagged as the guy who raised everyone's taxes during a recession. And Obama managed to get big stimulus tax cuts for the working class while he was at it, in amounts that Klein pointed out dwarfed the estate tax provisions that they had to trade for them.

I can't say for sure that Obama got a great deal, or that he couldn't have gotten a better one. But I'm pretty sure he got a decent one and that the Senate Dems didn't have any better plan. I should have known the freak out was coming when I caught the tail end of Obama's press conference on NPR earlier today--the part where he went after the "sanctimonious" purists in his base. His rhetoric of pragmatism was clearly aimed for guys like me who have never minded occasionally "punching the hippies," as Atrios has so memorably called it. But the hippies have gotten tired of getting punched, and they want to prove they're up for the fight, even if they're mainly flailing wildly at the older brother who's trying to keep them from getting their asses kicked, once again, by the schoolyard bullies. Nice gumption, guys. Let's start throwing those punches where they belong.

One final thought. Everything Maddow said about Obama tonight played right into GOP narratives about Dems in disarray. She even used FOX News clips as trustworthy evidence. And she did an entire segment on how thrilled the GOP was at this "compromise," meaning that Obama got rolled. Oops. Don't look now, but it looks like DeMint and the Tea Party may not be on board. Her best evidence for this claim was an edited set of remarks from McConnell's press avail. Did she notice that he looked as if he had swallowed a shit pie? Or acknowledge that since he was the chief negotiator for the GOP, he HAD to defend the deal just as Obama did. His supporting HIS deal has absolutely no bearing on whether or not he WON that deal. Come on, people, this is Politics 101. Can't anyone here play this game?

Post-Turkey, Pre-Xmas Music Thoughts

2010-11-26T16:24:00.004-05:00

I'll do my annual music review after the new year. In anticipation, let me just say that 2010 has been a pretty good year for the perennially dying "rock & roll." For several months, I thought it was going to be tough to top the killer spring trio of records from the Black Keys (Brothers), Arcade Fire (The Suburbs), and Band of Horses (Infinite Arms). They're an exceptionally good and stylistically diverse batch: raucous Ohio blues punks, epic Montreal stadium romantics, and twangy S. Carolina power-popsters.

Comparing them to each other, my head says Arcade Fire made the best, a visceral and literate concept album that turned moody Cure meets Bowie atmospherics into a Springsteen-style street party. They answered the question of whether they'd ever be able to match the melancholic perfection of their debut CD, Funeral. But like all of their music, I find it hard to handle in large doses. It's just too emotionally taxing--arty folk rock goes Wagnerian opera. Easier to admire than to fully enjoy. Good thing the Black Keys just go out and kick ass. Not a lot to think about on Brothers. Just blast it out of the car. This is probably their best overall record, at least since Rubber Factory. Nice to see it sold a lot of copies, even if "Tighten Up" never quite became the hit it should have been. And then there's Band of Horses with, the sleeper. Infinite Arms really merits repeat listens--while unlikely to top the others in year-end lists, it's the one I suspect I'll still be listening to a few years from now. "Laredo," in particular, is a simple but achingly beautiful song that reminds of Big Star. The whole thing is worth a listen.

To my surprise then, an even better mainstream rock record showed up a few weeks ago. From Kings of Leon, no less. I've discussed Nashville's KoL in previous posts. Despite the facts that they can't write coherent lyrics and their (early, at least) live shows were mediocre, their first two records are fantastic bursts of cow punk joy. The next two were frustrating messes, even if Only By The Night (2008) was a monster seller. Meh. Two big hits and a lot of filler. They've clearly been struggling to transform from indie rock guilty pleasure to stadium rock juggernaut, and those first attempts at becoming TN-U2 just couldn't measure up. So I was cautious about Come Around Sundown, which, following Only By, could have been lazy cashing-in. Thankfully, no. Instead, it may be their best record and likely my favorite of this year. The whole damn thing is exceptional--not a weak song. And the highs are really high. I don't know if "Pyro," "Mary," and "Birthday" will come close to "Use Somebody" as pop radio songs, but they are all light years better as rock music. Caleb Followill may be the best young belter in the rock cosmos. Who cares if he has a bland stage demeanor and looks like J. Crew's catalog imitation of a lead singer? OK, I do. That bugs me a little. But Come Around is still great, and I'm not too hip to admit it.

And yet, for all that, Patti Griffin's gospel-leaning Downtown Church, recorded in Nashville's Downtown Presbyterian, may be better than the lot. Go figure. Have you guys heard anything good? This seems like a year where the top keeps getting topped.

Vaya Con Dios, Davis Kidd

2010-11-21T19:12:00.002-05:00

All you Nash-Vegas ex-pats will be sad to hear about the passing of a much beloved institution, the best place to peruse books that the city ever knew or ever will. So long, old friend. Once you moved to the mall, we knew it was over. The magic might have been gone, but at least the memory was alive. A great story about the demise is here.

Asymmetrical Civility

2010-11-18T17:14:00.005-05:00

This is kind of cheating, but we've been slow on posts lately, so I'm going for it anyway. Here's the text version of a talk I gave to the local League of Women Voters earlier this week. I'm sure you'll find lots to object to, you fish-eyed, Palin-brained, stink hounds. So enjoy.

I’d like to thank the League of Women Voters for inviting me to speak to you today on the topic of civility in public discourse, a virtue that has been in seemingly short supply recently. Before I begin, out of curiosity, let me ask, how many of you are concerned about a loss of civility in American political discourse? Why? So what, then, qualifies as “civility”? Is it politeness, or respect, or tolerance, or merely a good faith adherence to fair play and human decency?

The concept itself, you may be surprised to learn, is relatively recent—a product of the modern age and its celebration of “civil society” (a notion going back to the Renaissance of the 15th century). The ancients did not discuss “civility” as a characteristic of republican government. Aristotle, for example, the greatest Greek expounder of citizenship and its virtues comes closest to it when he briefly discusses the “concord” that arises “when people agree about what is beneficial, rationally choose the same things, and carry out common resolutions” (172). He contrasts this with “civil strife” and notes that concord, as a kind of political friendship, can only exist “among good people.” But this doesn’t seem to be exactly what we’re looking for, since we’re seeking an attitude of respect that exists primarily in cases of good faith disagreement about what goods ought to be sought in the public realm. Indeed, Aristotle seems to presume, probably naively, a world where all good people will agree about what the good things are, thus making such healthy disagreements unnecessary.

In the 18th century (1742), the Scottish philosopher David Hume discussed civility in more detail, defining it as a “mutual deference. . . which leads us to resign our own inclinations to those of our companion, and to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance, so natural to the human mind.” Interestingly, Hume argues that civility is primarily found in monarchies and their courts, where “politeness of manners” and hierarchical respect are the standard expectations. In republics, by contrast, “such refinements of civility are apt to be little practiced,” since popular equality and utility are the guiding ideals. Gently chiding Europe’s two working republics, he notes that “the good-manners of a Swiss civilized in Holland” is a French joke about the boorish rubes to their east and north (126-7).

Fittingly, Benet Davetian, Director of the Civility Institute (Canada), and author of the epic Civility: A Cultural History, argues that the concern for “civility” (from Latin civis, or “city”) arises in the Renaissance as a way of fostering a more cosmopolitan and egalitarian counterpart to medieval “courtesy.” But as Hume’s comment indicates, it takes centuries before civility will throw off its medieval association with patterns of hierarchy and deference.

Indeed, it may NEVER have fully done so. As a more contrarian scholar of civility, James Schmidt of Boston Univ., has detailed, the teenage George Washington learned his rules of civility from a 16th century French book of courtly manners. Along with dictates about not crossing your legs and how to kill bugs without anyone noticing, the manual spent an excessive amount of time on rules governing relations with social betters and lessers (how to tip your hat, when to start eating your meat, etc.). It’s hard to see what any of this has to contribute to improving political discourse in a pluralistic democratic society. Indeed, we might worry that civility can be a tool that elites use to conceal conflict and artificially constrain debate. GWash himself practiced a kind of pre-partisan politics that assumed that a president would be able to rise above factional disputes to govern as a “patriot king.” No subsequent president has ever had such a luxury—nor, arguably, should they.

Indeed, almost immediately after Washington left office, partisan combat began, peaking in the election of 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The Jeffersonian press accused Adams of being “a blind, bald, crippled, toothless man who wants to start a war with France. . . [is] importing mistresses from Europe and trying to marry his sons to the daughters of George III.” He is, they said, a “hideous, hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Meanwhile, Federalists claimed that “if Jefferson is elected, murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly talked and practiced. . . [and] the soil will be soaked with blood.” Not to be outdone in ad hominem, they dubbed Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father. . .[and] raised on hoe cakes.” Today’s invective may be more pervasive, but it is certainly less creative.

On the other hand, there are certainly many disturbing examples of uncivil behavior today: cable news hosts who yell at each other across the dial; Tea Party protestors who carry assault weapons or wave signs that equate the president with Hitler and Stalin; venomous e-mails that accuse the president of being a Muslim and an illegal alien with a missing (or forged) birth certificate; TV hosts who threaten physical violence on reporters they dislike [O’Reilly toward Dana Milbank; also note Zell Miller vs. Chris Matthews], or simulate the poisoning of former Speaker Pelosi [Glenn Beck]; national party leaders who outline “guerrilla tactics” to bring down their opponents [GOP powerpoint, via NYT], or scream their pride to be a “party of Hell No!!” [Palin, Boehner], and “you lie!” [Joe Wilson]; and governors who threaten nullification or even secession if they dislike federal policies [Rick Perry (TX), Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey (TN), etc.].

There have even been acts of political violence inspired by these intemperate voices: the gunman at the Holocaust Museum in DC; the listener Glenn Beck inspired to go shoot up the offices of the ACLU and the Tides Foundation in SF (caught in a shootout with police before he could get there); the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in Wichita; and even an attack on a Unitarian Church in Knoxville (David Adkisson killed two people by shotgun, hoping to target Democrats, 7/08). Not to forget the small acts of intimidation and disrespect: the protesters who spat at members of the Congressional Black Caucus [Emanuel Cleaver, John Lewis] while yelling racial epithets; the routine demonization of political opponents as “socialists” and “fascists”; the racist billboards put up across the country to decry Mexicans, Muslims, and President Obama. These measures also SEEM to be having a debilitating effect on our government. Mired in the worst economy since the Great Depression, our leaders in Washington appear incapable of any serious compromise, and lawmaking is blocked at every turn by obstructionist tactics: filibusters, anonymous holds, pointless hearings, backroom negotiations that go nowhere, etc., etc.

If you find these incidents to be matters of concern, I have good news and bad news for you—I’ll start with the BAD: at least in the near term, civility in politics is likely to decay and continue to decay for a long time, and there is very little that any of us can do about it. It doesn’t really matter what we teach at college, or in the public schools, or in our civic groups. The reason is simple: the recent decay of civility is not educational or accidental, it is structural and intentional, and the forces that drive it are intensifying rather than weakening. Since politics is driven by interests rather than by abstract philosophical commitments, the incentives toward polarization and demonization will, for the foreseeable future, remain much stronger than are those toward moderation and accommodation. Indeed, even the best-intentioned attempt to restore civility may be counterproductive because, paradoxically, such an effort would play into the hands of the forces of incivility.

More directly, civility has NOT disappeared as part of some generalized, civilizational decay. It has been crushed as part of an overt political strategy for gaining and holding power. If this were a who-dunnit, the crime would be murder and, as all of the evidence in the examples above clearly show, the killer would be. . . the Republican Party. Now, describing the death of civility as a “murder” is a bit melodramatic. Those of us who study politics have an obligation to be analytical rather than emotional about these matters, so allow me to explain.

Partisan competition in a democracy tends to be “asymmetrical.” By which I mean that the competing parties have different and often antithetical interests, which means they will take dramatically divergent stances toward our governing institutions and the norms by which they operate. It is often noted that Republicans, unlike Democrats, engage in voter suppression tactics: hassling voters for ID in Dem-leaning precincts, distributing fliers in inner city neighborhoods reminding people to “Vote this Wednesday!” or to pay all outstanding tickets and clear any outstanding warrants first. This year, GOP backed groups ran radio and TV ads telling Latinos NOT to vote (send Harry Reid a message!). There is no counterpart on the other side of the aisle. Democrats do not patrol the precincts of Williamson County trying to trick wealthy white people out of voting. But there’s an obvious reason for this—when voter turnout goes up, Dems tend to DO BETTER since “registered voters” consistently poll more Democratic than do “likely voters.” So Dems have an interest in mobilization, Repubs in suppression. It is hard to give Democrats moral credit for behavior from which they reap disproportionate benefit.

Civility is a similar phenomenon. Much of this relates to the changing dynamics of the American two party system over the last half century. For more than a century following the Civil War, the lines of division between the parties were more historical and organizational (based in patronage) than ideological: you had both liberal and conservative Democrats, and both liberal and conservative Republicans. But as politics becomes increasingly nationalized in the 20th century, the parties “sort out” on ideological grounds. Conservative southern Dems migrate to the GOP, and progressive Teddy Roosevelt or Nelson Rockefeller Republicans flock to the Dems. As of 2009, the most liberal member of the GOP was more conservative than the most conservative Dem in both houses of Congress.

Republicans have seen a distinct advantage in this environment. Polls of American ideological preferences have consistently shown that roughly twice as many voters identify as “conservative” rather than “liberal” (Gallup: 1992: 17/36; 2009: 21/40). As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue in their exceptional study, Off Center (2005), Republicans going back to at least Newt Gingrich and the GOP takeover of Congress in 1995 saw polarization as a path to power. The electorate is NOT, as we often think a “normal” bell curve where the action is in the center. It is “bimodal,” and if you can polarize the debate by stigmatizing your opponents as morally perverse and dangerously un-American, you can reap huge rewards. No one practiced this technique better than the man called “Bush’s Brain”: Karl Rove. His goal was to use polarization to create an enduring pro-Wall Street GOP majority, much like McKinley’s from the 1890s. So he aggressively courted the right-wing base and painted his opponents as perverts, traitors, and terrorist sympathizers.

Furthermore, FOX News and talk radio allow conservatives to cultivate a militant “bunker of Doom” (as Colbert called it) mentality that liberals, who generally prefer the balanced, informational approach of NPR or PBS, cannot match. After all, Democrats must win by stitching together liberals and moderates, so their efforts to counter-mobilize will usually fall short. Nonetheless, with MSNBC and the internet, they are trying, but it is not an equal terrain. We might also note that the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC allows wealthy GOP donors to dump millions of dollars into anonymous attack ads, which by a 9:1 margin this year went to slamming Democratic congressional candidates as Pelosi-loving, America-hating socialists. Since Dems typically depend on a broader but poorer donor base, they will likely prove unable to match that onslaught.

Finally, note the ideological differences. Liberals believe in democracy and the benefits of “good government.” So when they lose an election, they are most likely to submit and accept the popular verdict, allowing the GOP to govern (mostly) as they see fit. But Republicans don’t like government, and distrust democracy, which is little more than a tool of power. So they have no trouble burning down the house when they’re in the minority—the worse government works, the better for them politically. Ironically, their lack of sentimentality for democracy often makes them more effective practitioners of it.

So, what’s the GOOD news? This may come as weak consolation, but, historically speaking, civility has been (at best) an intermittent quality of American democracy—as the earlier example from 1800 showed. We have survived even less civil periods in the past and we’re likely to survive this uncivil moment as well. And Republicans are right to see civility as, at best, an instrumental good, a means to an end. As a virtue, I certainly value civility less than justice or integrity. Earlier in this decade, the demand for civility hushed disputes over the election recount of 2000 and the war in Iraq, debates that we would have been better off having, even if they were not civil. It is no accident that the most famously “civil” region in America is the South, with its history of quasi-aristocracy and racial hierarchy.

Interestingly, Andre Comte-Sponville, whose A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues (2001) is one of the best recent books on the topic of virtue, analyzes 18 virtues, none of which is “civility.” The closest he gets is “politeness,” which he describes as the first virtue, while noting that it may NOT even BE a virtue, but instead a childlike precondition of virtue—the imitation of virtue without the possession of it. After all, by itself, politeness is vacuous. Is a Nazi any better for being polite? No, in fact, his politeness makes his barbarous behavior seem even more offensive for its hypocrisy. Like politeness, which is part of civility if not its whole, civility runs the risk of being empty—an enforced set of manners that serves no higher cause, whether justice or compassion or truth. The problem with Republicans today is NOT that they are uncivil. It is that their incivility serves no virtue higher than their own self-interested quest for power.

IF I object to the Tea Party it is less because they are uncivil and more because they are insane, spouting nonsense and slander with the angry confidence of the fanatic. I object not to their style, but to their substance. Asking them to be civil will not resolve that issue or improve our discourse. Calling them out as intolerant, and fighting the institutional structures that give them succor will be a far more effective strategy. But it will not exactly be “civil.”

Election Night Thoughts

2010-11-02T22:13:00.002-04:00

Still early. Looks like Russ Feingold is going down, sadly. And the Prince of Evil has won the Kentucky Senate race. But Dems may still do better than expected in the Senate, if worse in the House. I wonder if Citizens United is having an impact here. The House races really got carpet bombed by the new anonymous money groups. Around here, it was one after another on every channel all night long--all of them sliming the Dems, often the same ad rerun with a different Dem name and picture thrown in. Senate races are high enough profile that candidates can get their message past the commercial barrage. Of course, if the close races right now where Dems are up (Giannoulias in IL, Sestak in PA, Bennett in CO, and ??? Reid in NV) all flip it could end up being a very different story.

Other thoughts: Nikki Haley had a surprisingly tight race in SC. Tancredo's late surge in CO fizzled. TN was a bloodbath, but that was always a done deal and the Tea Party has had very little impact here, surprisingly enough. Our new GOP Gov is an old line "moderate."

Also, whose speech was more obnoxious, Rand Paul's victory or Christine O'Donnell's concession?

Mad Menace

2010-10-05T15:16:00.002-04:00

Ok, FFBers, here's your question of the day: What's the most morally repellant ad campaign on TV?

My vote goes to GE Capital, in a little post-financial sector meltdown PR. Deb Barker isn't just another heartless corporate executive, she cares about the small business man, and she's "bringing music to people." Why, she's so damn brilliant that she can pick up a guitar for the very first time and play like a classical virtuoso: "I didn't know you could play!" "I didn't either!" Because, as we all know, financial sector executives are our modern renaissance (wo)men, possessing almost superhuman talents they don't even know they have. Now, you Marxists (and old timey Christians) out there may be thinking, deal with the devil? Hush your mouth. Just another one of Ayn Rand's righteous overmen, paving the way to a brighter tomorrow.

Hey, I wonder what GE Capital was doing a couple of years ago? (See also here.)

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

2010-09-28T23:48:00.002-04:00

Obama's comments to Rolling Stone are causing a predictable hissy fit in the lefty base. How dare he say he doesn't suck! And that libs who bail now aren't really "serious" about reform? Doesn't he know that nothing will inspire the Dems to fight for victory like a full body grovel, Wayne and Garth style ("We're not worthy!")?

Is there anything in politics more predictable than the Democrats' circular firing squad? Honestly, I don't know what annoys me more, the routine, spineless wankery of the Blue Dogs or the whiny, self-loathing purism of the Fire Dogs. The reader comments at the various center left blogs are enough to make me wonder if the Dems will ever be able to assemble a stable governing coalition.

A few basic points: 1) the Fire Dogs seem to complain that Obama should go on offense more, but they only seem to go on offense against Obama. Adam Green was on Lawrence O'Donnell tonight bitching about how Big O didn't kneecap Lieberman or Snowe to ram through purer versions of HCR or FR or DADT, etc., rather than cutting deals. Fine. But that's some high risk, bad cop behavior for a guy with a razor thin cloture margin. Maybe, just maybe, he should play good cop while someone else does the dirty work. Like Adam Green. The real issue, however, is that you can't play offense if your team didn't bother to study the playbook or figure out which end zone they were supposed to be attacking. I sometimes think the Dems are a team with a Hall of Fame quarterback (Obama), a Swiss cheese offensive line (Congress), and Terrell Owens as media spokesman (the prog blogs).

2) As much as the Blue Dogs suck, you can't expect them to defend Obama when even the liberals won't trumpet what is the most progressive legislative record in roughly 75 years. Sure, raise hell at Congress over their waffling on a tax cut vote. But don't pee on your own party when it comes time to win an election, especially when you're getting killed by the "enthusiasm gap." I completely get Obama, Biden, Gibbs, and Emmanuel when they bemoan their bad blockers in the base. They've got FOX envy: the GOP has a reliable outlet that will always step up at game time, while MSNBC is still trying to hold Obama's feet to the fire. No disrespect to Maddow. She's the best journalist on TV--and generally a strong team player. But the rest of that crowd lacks discipline.

3) My two consolations are (a) that Obama and Biden do seem to understand this game pretty well, and they almost always call the right play, and (b) that most of the lame media narrative is epiphenomenal--more effect than cause. At 45% approval, thanks to the slow recovery, the media narrative will be negative by default. Still, I'd like to see a united front against that narrative rather than a reflexive ratification of it. The game's not over. The other team just has the ball.

Takedown

2010-09-13T21:59:00.000-04:00

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2010-09-07T00:10:00.002-04:00

As I write, tiny prehistorical killing machines are stalking my family. Sorry. Getting ahead of myself. I'll start at the beginning. Disclaimer: if you are easily creeped out, do NOT read this.

Lesson 1: Trust no one. Back in March, we moved into a new house. We loved the old house, a rock and brick cottage about two miles from campus, which I bought before I had met my wife and then had two beautiful daughters. So we were looking for something a little bigger, with a good yard and a better "neighborhood" feel, closer to campus. And we got it: a charming 1930s brick bungalow in the old downtown area, just a ten minute walk from my office. After several viewings, months of haggling, and a fair amount of hand wringing, we signed the deal. Although the house looked to be in pristine condition inside, we knew there would be some repairs: an old roof (tricky, because steep pitched with odd ridges and valleys), suspect H/AC, and some plumbing concerns in the basement. Nothing too exotic.

We moved in and spent the next couple of months scurrying to prep our beloved rock cottage for sale in the market from hell. That proved to be the easy part. Mrs. TMcD did such an exceptional job of fixing, primping, and staging that we sold it in a week. Pricing to sell didn't hurt. Still, what had once been a major source of stress turned out well. The real drama was three miles away at the new house. We started discovering kinks. Funky wiring that kept going out. GFCIs that weren't really grounded. A leaky roof. Heating problems. Cooling problems. Water in the basement during the great Tennessee flood. Our first Friday night, the college kids living behind us had a blowout bash, and we were up until 1 or 2 AM keeping drunk kids from cutting through our lawn and peeing in our yard. They kicked down our old lattice fence to get across. Just appetizers.

During our original home inspection, Mrs. TMcD had spotted a few dead spiders in a basement cabinet and asked the inspector about them. He took a quick glance and said, "Nothing to worry about." "They're not brown recluses?" "No, just little brown house spiders--everybody's got them." Mrs. TMcD was not so sure, but we had a lot of issues to hash out and this one got pushed to a back burner, past plumbing, roof, fence, and garage door openers. Once we moved in, we had an exterminator come out in the first couple of weeks. Again, the Mrs. pushed her spider question: "Are these brown recluses?" "No, no. They're nothing," quoth the bug man, casting a furtive glance toward the suspicious arachnids. When he left, she noticed that he had checked every bug treatment box on his form except for "brown recluse." Which seemed odd. But then, we'd had two experts tell us that these were just house spiders. Who doesn't have those? Brown recluses are notoriously hard for amateurs to identify. And yet there's the natural fear that you somehow got the deadly ones. What are the odds?

That's how I rationalized not worrying--"not worrying" being one of my few true skills--despite the increasing number of spiders we seemed to be finding, in drawers, in piles of clothes, even in the girls' toys. In my defense, I had a lot going on. We moved mid-semester, with papers and exams looming, and my uncle was in poor health, spending the last couple of weeks of term in intensive care. So I didn't need any additional, speculative stresses. That's my wife's domain, and she has a genius for it. I trust the "experts."

Lesson 2: Trust nothing. Then my uncle died. A big deal around here. Aside from being a second father in many ways, he'd been loved and respected in this community for decades. His funeral was like a Boro version of the Kennedy funeral, with ribald eulogies and a receiving line stretching on for hours and never completed. Mrs. TMcD was running late that day and grabbed a Kleenex box on the way out of the house. As she reached for a tissue in the car, a rather large brown spider appeared at the lip of the box, prompting her to open the door and kick the box out. Suspicions. She had been doing some web research on how to distinguish recluses from southern house spiders, their most common false positive. The bug man had left some traps and we caught a few. As she would tell me a few days later while I was desperately trying to finish my grading, she was pretty sure these were recluses. The "fiddles" on their backs were fairly distinct, and most tellingly, they seemed to have six eyes in a triangle pattern rather than the normal eight for other spiders. You've got to get damned close to pick that up.

I was skeptical. But she made a good case, so we started doing more research. If you get the chance, look at some web pictures of recluse bites. Or don't. They've got a "necrotic" bite that rots your flesh off and cannot be treated. They don't usually kill you, of course. Most bites are routine spider bites. It takes force--a swat, a foot jammed into a shoe, a roll over in bed, etc.--to release the worst toxins, and even then it's most dangerous to kids under seven. Hey, we got those! The day after I turned in grades, Lang and I were getting ready to read stories before I put her to bed. She came running into the family room in her PJs. From the other corner of the room, a big brown spider came galloping across the carpet. As we had learned from our fact finding, this was a bad sign. The "recluse" is non-aggressive and prefers to remain hidden. If you start seeing them in the open, especially in a loud room, you know they're so populous as to need to take risks to gain space.

We also learned that normal extermination tactics have little effect and may make things worse. The recluse is immune to the most common pesticides, but they love the insect buffet those chemicals create. They can also hold their breath for three days and go without food for months. So you need specialists who can go old school on these dudes. On the web, there's a debate in the recluser community about whether they actually can be beaten, or whether you just have to move. Even then, you can't take any of your stuff, because, well, they like to hide in it, and they will follow you to wherever you move. Yeah. We chose to go with the theory that they are killable, just with patience and smarts. The next day, we got the recluse guy out to take a look. "You win the prize," he told us. "You should probably stay somewhere else for a couple of days." Our house resembled Arachnophobia, that old John Goodman, Jeff Daniels flick. I used to like that movie. When the reclusist went into the attic above our bedrooms, he said they started descending from the rafters like rain. "I don't have enough chemicals in my truck for what you've got," he said.

That's when we moved in with my aunt, whose house outside town was a bit emptier than it had been just days before. Thank God for Aunt J! We might be facing some creepy shit, but we had a safe refuge and a gracious host.

Lesson 3: Trust noplace. We thought we'd be out of the house for a few days, but it turned into a few months. We had a lot of work to do too. Most of our stuff was stacked in cardboard boxes in the garage. Not good. Recluses love cardboard. We had to spend the better part of three days going through each and every box, emptying them onto sheets in the driveway, shaking out every book and piece of clothing, and then squishing whatever nasty boys happened to fall out. The cardboard really was a draw; we'd often have an open plastic crate with nothing right next to a sealed box with a big daddy. We estimated that we probably saw a few dozen. Much of our stuff just got tossed--not the worst thing in the world. We took a lot of things that we couldn't go through closely, wrapped them up tight in garbage bags, and took them to storage. The whole endeavor was a stress fest, like working for the poor man's CDC or on the wimpiest bomb squad ever. Whenever we walked into the garage we looked up to make sure nothing was going to go kamikaze on us.

At the same time, we got a mega pack of glue traps and lined baseboards, shelves, and closets throughout the house. A trip to the house became like a mission into a minefield, complete with security protocols: check the traps, sweep the walls for webs, inspect the dark crannies. Then there was the plastic. Recluses don't like it much, they're just not "sticky" enough to scale it easily. Which turned us into the paranoid plastic people. We spent (are still spending) weeks, now months, putting everything we own into plastic storage containers, giant Ziploc bags, and hermetically sealed hanging bags. Don't laugh. The alternative is shaking out every single article of clothing before putting it on. I already have to do that for towels, shoes, and blankets; if I had to do it for literally everything I touched I would go OCD. We've had some surprise encounters. The day we went to close on the old cottage, we were both sweaty from working around the spider house all day. Mrs. TMcD went to grab a clean shirt from the middle of a stack of clothes atop a standalone metal rack in the bathroom. A healthy recluse smiled up at her, inducing her to fling the shirt up in the air where it promptly fell back on the spider, now on the floor.

It seemed like every day we caught a new spider somewhere, anywhere in the house. Not a room, closet, pantry, or breezeway came clean. One day I was in the family room and decided to check the DVD player and VCR, which had been covered with a shirt and garbage bag for the foggings. When I lifted the DVD player up and looked underneath, I found a veritable coven: one dead adult and more than a dozen dead babies, each in a little circle indentation around the feet of the player, as if they were plotting dark hexes around their tiny cauldrons. Goodbye DVD player, I hear you're obsolete anyway. I used a mirror to look in the near upper corners of the pantry above the door frame. Another coven. Dead, thankfully. Most sightings, however, involved solitary spiders: a thermos bag left near the fireplace, the door frame in the breezeway, a step halfway up the stairs. Often dead or dying, but not always. Maybe the fogging was having an impact. They told us the first treatments would get 80% of them. But since May-August is the active season, we'd likely keep seeing them for a while. Usually, they said, they can solve the problem in three months; for us, they couldn't make any guarantees, even after six.

It was nice to be able to go back to my aunt's and feel safe, but it made trips to our house rough: anxious reminders that we were unwanted alien invaders in what was supposed to be our own home. Mrs. TMcD decided that the house hated us and was trying to scare us out. Or kill us. I replied that the house just wanted our help. Somehow that didn't reassure. After about six weeks, however, we decided we could move back, and for about five days before our July 4th trip to the SC, we did OK. We were still finding spiders, but fewer, and being back in the house felt empowering. So we were optimistic about getting back home post-holiday. We returned about 8:30 in the evening, and Mrs. TMcD went upstairs to do a bed check. She came down looking like she had seen a ghost. "Can we go back to the J's?" she asked. There were a dozen new ones in our bedroom traps: five in Lang's room, four in ours, and three big ones in Bay's. It looked like they had been coming out of her closet and trying to run up the legs of her crib.

Damn. A big step backward. Adding to the difficulty, we knew that my aunt had some recluses too, although her problem was under control. There were some dead ones in the play room, and we had found one or two dead in other locations, but that seemed like a sign her bug guys had it covered. Recluses are not uncommon around here, we've discovered; the issue is whether they've invaded your living space. Then one morning I got up to go to the bathroom and found one smirking at me from the sink. Better than the bathroom rug! Plus, Mrs. TMcD had a very exhaustive bedtime protocol, the time when we'd be most vulnerable. She'd spend about a half hour spider-proofing the bedrooms before we put the girls down: remaking all the beds, taking off every sheet and blanket and shaking them out, inspecting all the available hiding spaces, etc. When we went to bed, we'd take flashlights for a reinspect--in part because Bay was sleeping in our room. Two nights after the sink incident, I was doing the flashlight check of our bed. All good. Then the Mrs. came in and did a re-check. When she picked up her pillow, a recluse zipped up from behind the bed and jumped right onto that pillow and roared. We switched on the overhead light and I smashed Brownie with my shoe. Then we sat on the bed to talk about what we were going to do. That's when we saw the second one. It was frozen on the wall, right over the (sealed) suitcase with all my clothes. Crap.

Goodbye, safe refuge. There was no way we could sleep there after that. We packed up the car and the girls and by midnight were on the road to a hotel. The next day we checked into an extended stay hotel--a single room, but with a kitchenette. As cramped and defeated as we felt, at least we slept pretty well there. Each day, we'd drop the girls at the sitter, and then head to the house; then I'd go to teach.

Lesson 4: It's a long crawl out when you're "in the weeds." By now we felt like we were being stalked. We even found one climbing on the wall in a classroom at church. The house was due for another round of gassing. When Mrs. TMcD went in afterward, she found a couple of big ones that looked like they had fallen out from under Bay's crib and gotten caught in the sticky tape underneath. This was getting old, and we didn't have a long range plan. Where, exactly, were we going to stay after our hotel week? I pushed for a move home, spiders be damned, but it was a tough case when we kept finding new ones in freaky places. We started looking for apartments we could rent on a month by month basis, but that's not easy when all the local landlords are holding out for the student infusion just about to hit town.

My favorite reality show expression (heard mostly on my guilty pleasure, Top Chef) is "in the weeds," meaning, you're in the thick of a challenge, and everything is a mess. That's where we were. The beauty of "reality" shows is that you know you're out of the weeds in a TV hour--there's a time limit. Not for us. To use another horror movie reference, I felt like I was in Fatal Attraction. I just didn't know how far into the movie I was. Did I just break up with Glenn Close? Did I just find the rabbit on the stove? Is she in the bathtub yet? Of course, all that is pretty melodramatic as a description of a spider problem. They're just frickin' spiders! They rarely actually kill you! Our plight pales next to all those folks who lost their homes in the Nashville flood or the Good Friday tornado. We've still got our home, it's a nice place, and we can even live here. A big part of my brain says, suck it up, this isn't that unusual. Then we'd have some bizarre conversation where the Mrs. and I would talk about how if someone had to get maimed, we'd rather it be us than the girls. It gets hard to keep perspective when you're dealing with some threat of unknown probability. A little like fighting terrorists: we don't know how many there are, where they're hiding, what the chance of a major attack is, or how many resources we need to devote to the problem, and we don't have a very good exit strategy.

I tend to cope with the spider stress by telling the spider story. Which drives Mrs. TMcD crazy. "No one will want to come to our house. We'll be 'those crazy spider people!'" So true. But if I've got to spend every day on spider patrol, I'm going to bitch about it and try to make an entertaining story out of it. I have discovered that when you tell someone around here you've got brown recluses, they've all got their own stories, about themselves or someone they know. They commonly end in one of three ways: 1) the wound never healed, 2) they had to amputate that X (insert body part here), or 3) they left that house and never went back. Sometimes financial ruin is thrown in, and I got a a coma story once. Ack. Then again, I've had a couple people say, "Yeah, we've got a few of those, but they're not a big deal. We just avoid that closet, etc." Still, I like telling my story as epic drama, and as of now, no one has gotten bitten, so our ending--not yet written--may be a happy one.

We moved back into the house a few weeks ago. And things certainly seem like they're getting better, despite occasional glitches. We've had a mouse infestation to compete with the spiders. I've also still got a lot of spider-proofing work to do. Last week I cleared off the ivy on the house, which the exterminator told us was a big problem. We've got a lot of it, growing on many of the walls, especially around the patio. Infested. Filthy with the bastards. The most I've seen since we've been here. A kind of spider superhighway that allows them to zip all over the house, from basement to attic. We also need to get the roof done soon, and that's going to stir up a few nests. The killer ivy, at least, is mostly gone, and our overall prospects are looking up. For now, however, the tenaciousmcd's remain hopeful, on alert, and in the weeds.

Who Was That Mosqued Man?

2010-08-27T00:17:00.002-04:00

This is where I live. Yes! Our bigotry has gone national. Glad to see my congressional candidate of choice appear as our resident "bad ass." But he also just lost the Dem primary by a couple hundred votes, leaving us with a bit of a dud who, luckily for him if not for us, had access to a much deeper pocket than Ben Leming had. But not Republican deep. So the GOP, already holding the edge to take the open seat, now has a pretty easy road to replace Bart Gordon. Both primaries were bizarre three way races where win, place, and show were separated by mere hundreds of votes and fractions of a percent. Diane Black, the GOP nominee, is pretty crazy, but she's not the worst they had. Which is saying something.

Bee

2010-08-18T20:25:00.002-04:00

Memory Whole, pt. 2: This American Life

2010-08-12T21:34:00.005-04:00

A Comment on Green Lanternism

2010-07-23T06:48:00.004-04:00

This post is a brief reflection on what MY and others have called the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics. This theory, in a nutshell, is that willpower--not firepower, not alliances, not other factors--is the deciding factor in war, especially. This is an old idea, but found it's most recent manifestation in the neocon fantasies of the 2000's. The phrase, "Green Lantern theory" is, of course, mocking the theory, so although the theory has many proponents, they probably wouldn't call it that.

Like I said, it's an old idea. I am reading Hastings's Winston's War (2010) right now, and of course Winston Churchill was something of a believer in the theory, although it had not yet been formulated as such.

Reading WW, I have a new corollary to the Green Lantern theory: Willpower alone is never sufficient to win a war. You need something, some kind of advantage, to actually win a war. (Sometimes, facing an enemy with inferior morale ("willpower") may be close to enough.) So the Green Lantern theory is wrong, sort of. But, and here's the corollary: Willpower is often enough to prevent losing a war.

Take the situation of the Brits in 1940, after the fall of France. It is not inconceivable that HMG might have sought terms with Hitler at that point and thus lost the war. Indeed, that would not have been a particularly unreasonable course of action, even though it would have been a bad result. The Brits, without allies, simply could not conceive of a course of action for winning. The British Army was not an effective fighting force, was under-equipped and poorly led, for the most part. The RAF and Royal Navy were better, but fighting a land war on the Continent was not a realistic possibility, even with Dominion and imperial forces.

Churchill's only real hope was to bring in the United States, but he couldn't actually do that. It was the Japanese, who in one of the worst manifestations of the Green Lantern theory ever, succeeded in doing that.

But Churchill refused to give up, and that was important. He was never able to instill his "will" in his fighting forces. The British forces surrendered at Singapore (three times the losses sustained in France in 1940) to smaller numbers of Japanese attackers, for example. But simply refusing to quit was enough to avoid losing.

That and, of course, the English Channel.

The same basically holds for Stalin and the U.S.S.R. after June 22, 1941. The refusal to capitulate was enough to prevent losing, but without more, not enough to win; vast distances, weather, massive resources, allies were enough to win.

Now, of course, in our contemporary situation: the will to continue may be enough to forestall losing in, say, Afghanistan--if "losing" has any meaning in that context--but given the difficulties of the war, it is almost certainly not sufficient for "winning"--and again, I'm not sure how one defines that in this context.

FOX Unbound

2010-07-21T11:15:00.004-04:00

The best analysis I've seen so far of the Shirley Sherrod incident comes from David Frum, whose recent commentary on conservatism has been especially astute. Aside from an unmerited swipe at Dan Rather, there's not much to disagree with there.

What's missing so far, I'd say, is that not many liberals have seen this as the golden opportunity to strike at FOX itself that it surely is. The conservative movement long ago took a structural approach to battling liberalism: attack the institutions of liberalism and of rational discourse and you weaken your opposition. Hence the endless slandering of unions, universities, social security, the establishment media, etc. Doesn't matter if the complaints are true, just repeat the grievance and eventually the narrative will sink in. Liberals, maybe because of their greater ideological sympathy for pluralism, free speech, and fair play haven't had much stomach for reciprocity in that kind of battle. But here's a case that exposes the rotten core beneath FOX News in an especially glaring way: a racially motivated hit piece against an innocent (and even noble) public servant. Why not denounce their behavior and then hammer it home? For Pete's sake, they fumbled the ball in their own end zone. Fall on the ball!!!

It never ceases to amaze me that other news outlets treat FOX as if they're just another set of concerned and objective "journalists," albeit conservative-leaning ones. FOX has been pushing their luck for quite some time now. It wouldn't take much for liberals to take them down a notch--just some guts.

Better Headline

2010-07-20T23:39:00.002-04:00

How about "FOX Frames Official to Stoke Racial Fears"? More accurate and "objective" than these.

Partisan Emotions

2010-07-20T06:26:00.003-04:00

This post over at Plain Blog About Politics, one of my new-ish daily reads, raises an interesting point, obliquely. When folks like Eric Erickson call for a filibuster of Kagan, I don't think that it's that they think that such a tactic will work, in the sense of actually achieving an end. For the partisan, it can be that the tactic is the point.

Many people derive psychological utility from partisanship, or the actions of their co-partisans, in much the way that, say, fans of the Dallas Cowboys derive satisfaction from the performance of their team. Partisans like it when their team adopts a more confrontational posture, for its own sake. They often like to talk trash. They like to see the other team bruised, humiliated. Just like in hockey, they love their own team's goons and hate hate hate the other teams'.

I actually think that this is part of the reason that many on one side of the aisle have been disappointed in Obama. It's not just that he hasn't done things that they would have liked him to do. It's also that he has adopted too conciliatory a tone. He hasn't provided his partisans with enough red meat.

Again, I'm not saying that a more confrontational posture is desired for its practical effects. I'm saying that it is desired for its own sake, by some people.

In many ways, the Old School Senator is as frustrating to certain folks as is "Obama as Spock" to others. If one really carries oneself in such a way as to maintain the dignity and decorum of the institution, then folks in certain parts of the system are going to be dissatisfied, even if you have an extremely conservative voting record. This is almost certainly the problem McConnell has in Kentucky. Like him or hate him, but McConnell is pretty old school. Maybe Inglis in South Carolina (on the House side), too.

So would an "active filibuster" of Kagan "do any good"? In all likelihood, it wouldn't change the final outcome. But it's not just about delay, for the partisans, on the outside looking in. It's about "not conceding." Not giving up. It's about playing the entire game. And yes, many folks are completely fixated on the game.

Memory whole, pt. 1: The Bicentennial

2010-07-19T19:05:00.009-04:00

You may (or may not!) be old enough to remember the bicentennial. Maybe not as a rising senior at a high school in Texas (that would kind of be the plot of Dazed and Confused), but maybe as a seven-year-old whose birthday is July 4. No? Maybe that's just me.

Well, on that august occasion, some of my cousins made me an exploding birthday 'cake.' I use the scare quotes because it was really firecrackers (M80s or whatever) embedded in cake and frosting. The picture below is of my cousin Mike lighting the 'cake.' I'm the extremely thin little boy, with my sisters, Lisa, center, and Angie. And I'm sure that none of us are wearing 'sunscreen.' I don't believe that that concept had been invented in 1976!

And lest you are interested, it blew cake and frosting EVERYWHERE! I don't seem to have a picture of that. But, yes, it did. We are actually standing too close, in hindsight, and I don't remember this, exactly, but Mike must have been really 'frosted.' It was a pretty short fuse.

I know that any number of readers of this blog (it does have readers, no?) have heard this story. But here's proof of a sort.

Go Partisan

2010-07-18T18:07:00.004-04:00

We all know how bad a year 2010 should be for Dems in Congress. There seems to be a lot of hand wringing about whether or not we're sufficiently panicked about the situation. But that's a pretty stupid way to look at the situation. Freaking out would undoubtedly make things even worse. The real question is, given a toxic environment, what do the Dems actually do?

Here's one man's suggestion: go partisan. Hard. I recognize that this crosses the wires of every synapse in the hunker & survive brains of Dem congressmen and their high paid consultants. Oh my, oh my, off-year election!, distance yourself from your president and party and just hope the voters don't know!!!! How can I say this in a cliche? Recipe for disaster. Bringing a knife to a gunfight. Burning a winning lottery ticket. Pissing in your own kitchen. I think you get it. They want us to run scared. If we do, we'll forget to play our best card: they're Republicans!

OK, so here's my logic. We all know why Obama's numbers are low right now, and it's not because he's too rational (thanks, Maureen Dowd), or he's "snakebit" (Peggy Noonan), or too partisan & liberal (Broder!), or he hasn't been to the Gulf enough (David Vitter), or not focused enough on jobs (Charlie Cook). That's all just beltway B.S.--the media "frame" to personalize a much more prosaic story. Which is: the economy still sucks. That's it. And guess what, voters are more likely to blame the GOP than the Dems, and less likely to trust the congressional GOP than even Pelosi and company. Many Dems get this, which is why we've started to hear them argue that this race is a choice between parties, not a referendum on Obama. (So says Obama himself.) OK, so let's double down on that. I want to see every Dem commercial this year throwing the word "Republican" around like the Tea Party uses the word "Communist." It's a "brand"--use it like one. The beauty is that this isn't a new narrative. The public already knows it, and likes it. They just need to hear it. Over and over and over.

Have some fun with it too. I want to see reels and reels of footage of the tea parties with their Hitler-Obama signs. I want to see cartoons with Sharon Angle in a tinfoil hat, John Boehner handing out checks from Wall Street on the House floor, and Rand Paul on his knees sucking on BP's pipe. The script writes itself: these mofos are craaaaazzzzyy!!!! Also, can we talk about Bush & Cheney a bit more? Please? I know the media won't like it (that was soooo 2009!). Screw them. Those grovelling wanks can respect us when we win. I'd also like a bit more aggression with respect to GOP candidates: put them on the spot over stimulus, health care, and financial reform repeal. Ask them if they want to investigate Obama's citizenship. Ask if they want to impeach him. Ask them if they think Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are ever wrong. Or, better, accuse them of slavish devotion to radio crackpots and force them to deny it. With specifics. That always goes well with Rush & Glenn too--I'm sure they'll forgive those who betray them. Then put it all in your commercials with some scary voice overs. You know, like the Republicans would if they were running your campaigns for you. Make them say crazy ass shit. Believe me, they will do it. They can't help themselves. It absolutely pains them to act like they have normal beliefs. Every time I see Rand Paul on TV I feel like Tom Cruise strategizing in A Few Good Men about getting Jack Nicholson to confess on the stand that he ordered the code red: he wants to say it! Just ask him. Is that clear? Chrystal.

Let me add that I think this advice will be especially important in the south and midwest. One thing the GOPers around here do not lack is confidence. Another is hubris. Use this. The candidates around here are the ones most likely to overplay their crazy hands. I can't tell you how sick I am of all the political ads around here. Every damned one of them sounds like it was written by Jefferson Davis or George Wallace. Obama!, and socialists!, and immigrants!, oh my! Usually, what this would mean is that Dems act like giant wussies: "I like Tea Parties too! I'll stand up to Obama too!" Well, there's no vote there, it's already taken.

Here's what I want to see in my Dem candidates for Congress and governor say: "Hi, I'm Joe Dem. Are you tired of all these Republican politicians running ads blaming your problems on Muslims, or immigrants, or President Obama? Are you tired of all those extremists who take their orders from Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers? I don't know what's worse: that they think we're all a bunch of racist hicks or that they think we're idiots. We all know who's to blame for this mess. It's George Bush and the Republicans. They crashed the economy, they ran up the debt, and they sold our government to Wall Street and the corporate lobbyists. And then they apologized to BP and the bankers. They want you to blame some poor immigrant. They want to end the stimulus, so that we have to fire teachers and police officers, good jobs right here in Tennessee. But you know better. This November, send them a message. Vote Democrat."

I can imagine a dozen variations on that ad. With all the hate that gets spewed around here, I think a straightforward call for human decency and common sense would come like a bolt from the blue. And since we're already in the hole, what have we got to lose?

Update: a few hours after I posted, Krugman had a good column thinking on very similar lines. He spends a bit too much time with 20/20 hindsight. In retrospect, a bigger stim would have been the key play IF it could have passed in Congress, which is debatable. But what does that mean for NOW? Fatalism? I'd say no. Voters are going to be pissed, but Indies are clueless about ideology and famously confused about whom to blame. Meanwhile, a "go partisan" strategy would help fire up the Dem base to approach GOP intensity. So you've got two real pluses there, even if continued economic stagnation will make the objective one of minimizing losses rather than picking up seats.

Dixie Dispatch, or Deep in the Heart of "the Crazy"

2010-07-10T19:10:00.007-04:00

As bad an election year as 2010 promises to be, that badness will have an epicenter, and that epicenter is likely to be here in what the Drive By Truckers dubbed "the dirty South." Judging from the campaign commercials we've been getting, the South will rise again, only this time as the "North." The North circa 1890, that is--the year when an activist right-wing Supreme Court filled with Commie-fearing, dollar-doting, states' rights-bloviating radicals began waging war against democracy on behalf of the "real" America. I.e., the rich, the corporate, and the racist. I don't see this as an enduring national trend, the way it was in 1890. But it is our new regional religion, and we will be lucky if this tent revival ends at dusk.

Tennessee may not be as bad as Alabama, where the treasonous Rick Barber dreams of piking the President and eating his entrails, but the climate here is toxic, at least on my TV. [An aside: someone should really explain to Barber that you shouldn't put Lincoln in your commercials equating federal taxes to "slavery" when it was Lincoln who invented the federal income tax and even made it progressive!!!!!] The governor's race features the most visible and risible of the villainous in Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey. His call to "Give em' the boot!" (re: Obama, Washington, etc.) so closely evokes segregationists of old that even the Republicans seem a little creeped out. Ramsey is running a distant third in polls, well behind Congressman Zach Wamp (a charter member of the C Street "Family" who cries armed resistance on the stump while copping a vaguely inoffensive technocrat feel in his ads), and the front runner, Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam, whose ads give treacle a bad name. Ramsey gives them red meat, Haslam slays them with tar tare: red, but cool, superficially classy, and likely to impress the moderate businessman.

Our congressional race to replace the beloved Bart Gordon bodes more ominously. The GOP race is a three-way between my state senator, Jim Tracy, state senator Diane Black, and local GOP honcho Lou Ann Zelenik. Tracy, the early fave, may have come across as too lacking in crazy, so Black and the demagogic Zelenik have charged into the breach. The key issue seems to be who hates Obama, immigrants, and Muslims the most--although 'round here that's just one thing. Cause, you know, the grandchildren are our future. In particular, everyone seems to be going all pee-pants over the proposed building of an Islamic Center just outside the Boro. Read this for a little fear mongering--old school, yo.

I was hoping that a holiday jaunt to the SC would provide some relief. Because nothing makes TN crackpottery look mild like a trip back home. My folks' district recently sent the reliably conservative Bob Inglis to crushing primary defeat for having had the temerity to suggest that Glenn Beck might not be all that and a bag of chips. On the way, we had the pleasure of spotting this billboard on I-85 in Atlanta. Like breadcrumbs to my cottage!

The sandlapper state did not disappoint, either. Lots of nuttiness. But surprises too--what the Truckers call "the duality of the Southern thing." Turns out that the big issue in the Burg was a raging battle in the paper over whether gays were all going to burn in hell. Context: the mayor is now a guy named Junie White, who I remember as the good ol' boy owner of the Exxon station around the corner from my house growing up. Well, it seems ol' Junie proclaimed "Gay Day" and compared the gay rights cause to the Civil Rights movement--in a good way! Apparently, Junie spent much of his time at Exxon promoting racial solidarity and mentoring lost souls of many a shape and color. He also converted to his wife's Judaism at some point, and yet was none-too-impressed with local wingnut citations from Leviticus. Junie has taken a lot of heat, but I was shocked to see how much published support he was getting as well. "The Crazy" may have finally stirred the SC progressive minority from its lugubrious slumber.

Then there was church. Because what else should a good Carolina boy do first thing in the morning on July 4th? The sermon at the First Presbyterian--one of the largest congregations in town--was, not surprisingly, a classic case of politicized Christianity. Rev. Arthur had a few bones to pick. He started with the famous passage from Romans, beloved by fundies far and wide, about how government should be a "terror" to evildoers. Then he finished the section of scripture. Apparently, God wants us to respect the authorities and stop bitching about our taxes. See, Paul was in Rome, where they had "real tyrants," and he wasn't some whiny ass titty baby about it. Then, the good preacher segued into an attack on cul de sac narcissism and a celebration of sidewalks for building community, before ending with a story comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam and lamenting the human toll of war. I wonder how the rest of the flock reacted? Me? I was home at the epicenter of the Crazy.

Bob Probert Is Dead

2010-07-08T05:56:00.003-04:00

He was 45 years old.

If you were a Detroit Red Wings fan in the 1980s and early 1990s, then it's a sad day. Probert was one of the great goons in NHL history (5th all-time in penalty minutes), but actually a pretty decent hockey player. I didn't realize he spent 7 years in Chicago, too.

As someone who just turned 41, it's a little frightening to see pro athletes like Jose Lima, a few weeks ago, and now Probert, dying at young ages. Now, Probert did have a long history of substance abuse, including that motorcycle crash with cocaine in his system . . . but still. These guys were professional athletes. They had to have been in pretty good shape at one point.

41! With My Girl

2010-07-04T21:00:00.003-04:00

The truth is that, as I get older, I see that I look more and more like my mother. Bee looks more like my dad's side of the family.

Two Years Old

2010-06-25T22:32:00.001-04:00

Stolen GOOOOAAAAAAAL, Part Deux!!!!!

2010-06-23T10:47:00.002-04:00

Again!!!!!! This is getting really frickin' old. This time it was a botched offsides call to negate the US goal, which makes it a close comparison to the Galaragga perfect game example #3 used below (unlike the inexplicable call in the Slovenia game). Nothing corrupt (I presume), just one of those routine, bang bang calls that the linesman clearly botched.

I have a bad feeling about this. Feels a lot like the Germany game where an early bad call combines with frustration over missed chances to change the tenor of the match. Hope I'm wrong.

In Da BFTB

2010-06-23T00:15:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure why I found this so interesting, but today Lang (at 3 1/2) hit a minor developmental milestone. Sporting a big grin, she announced--apropos to what I'm not sure--"I know how to spell 'bathtub': BFTB!"

We had to think about it for a second before conceding she was pretty close. Note that she can't read yet. She knows her alphabet, can write her letters (with a few glitches, like the "E" that often turns into a six pronged comb), and can write a few words from memory, like her and her sister's names. But never before has she taken a word and tried to figure out from how it sounds how it must be spelled. Which certainly seems like something new and qualitatively harder than what she's been doing with language so far. Of course, I'm sure if you read the baby books, they'll say that this is standard behavior at 36 months. Me, I'm holding onto my marvel, time lines be damned.

Stolen GOOOOAAAAAL!

2010-06-18T17:14:00.004-04:00

It's only been a few hours since the game ended, so I'm going to keep my remarks moderate and free of hyperbole. FIFA should fire the referee, South Africa should open up a criminal corruption investigation, and then Obama should order an assault team to capture him and then turn him over to George Bush's CIA. Because, really, a drone attack in the middle of the night would be too kind.

If you haven't seen it, the US soccer team got royally screwed today. The call, which nullified the US's winning goal against Slovenia with five minutes left in the game, is being euphemistically labeled "controversial." But no one who has looked at it has any idea what the ref was looking at. Not only is there no US foul, nor offsides, but there are at least two or three Slovenian fouls in the box that could have resulted in a US penalty kick had not the ball gone in. Which it did anyway. Props to Landon Donovan for a great cross and Maurice Edu for a strong finishing touch.

Now, you may say, it was just one really bad call, and that happens all the time. Sure. But the ref had it in for the Yanks all day. There were at least half a dozen mystery calls against the US that left the announcers (only one of whom was American) baffled--and NONE going the other way. Earlier, Robbie Findley got a yellow card for getting hit in the face with the ball. Plus, no one will comment on the ref's call. The ref is mum, and so is FIFA. They wouldn't explain it on the field, and they won't explain it well after the game is over. This whole thing looks deeply, unforgivably rotten.

Bad reffing happens, and it costs games. The Germans got the bad end against Serbia just hours before when the ref went so yellow card-happy that the Germans lost their best scorer early in the first half off ticky tack shit. Still, that was at least non-partisan badness. Both sides got burned, and Klose was dumb to push it with a weak foul when he knew the ref was playing Miss Priss. The US, by contrast, got a thumb, hand, and shoulder thrown onto the scale. I hope this ends badly for that dude.

UPDATE: Surprised that no one has made the connection between this game and the movie it so closely resembles, Victory (1981): the allies come back from a big halftime deficit to win in the final minutes only to have a corrupt ref negate their winning goal. All that's missing is Sly Stallone, Pele, and the Nazis. I half expected the American crowd to rush the field and carry off the players while chanting, "Victoire! Victoire!"

Vacation Photo

2010-06-12T13:20:00.002-04:00

That is a genuine tarball that washed up at Gulf Shores, Alabama. Photo by me.

The Old College i

2010-06-10T23:37:00.003-04:00

Tim Pawlenty went on The Daily Show tonight to explain his views on "small government" and spent most of his time avoiding specifics, since as we all know there's really no meaningful (by which I mean "noticeably deficit reducing") fat to cut in either state or federal budgets, just big popular programs and small misunderstood ones. Even "foreign aid," which always wins surveys of cut-worthy programs turns out to be (a) minuscule, and (b) primarily spent on Israel & its neighbors (so as, you know, not to attack it). Oppose foreign aid? Jew hater!

But then TimP slipped. Dropped the playbook. Went rogue. Let out his inner Rand Paul. He proposed abolishing state supported higher ed altogether and replacing it with vouchers so you can buy an iPad.

i. Shit. Ye. Not.

Don't take "boring" classes where you have to "listen" to some "professor." Just download an econ app and figure it out for yourself, whenever you want. As loopy as this idea sounds to anyone who has actual experience of education, I have to confess that this does answer at least one long-standing perplexity haunting American political culture: where the hell did the GOP learn its economics? Apparently, the same place it gets its porn.

Haley's Comeback

2010-06-08T23:49:00.003-04:00

I've described before the charming peculiarities of my home state, South Carolina, notably here and here. Philip Roth waxed eloquent on the "American berserk," setting it typically in New Jersey, and, having seen both Jersey Shore and the Real Housewives of New Jersey I won't quibble with his psychic geography, except maybe to press for a sandlapper sidecar.

Tonight, me boys have done it again, and I don't mean, gone shaggin' or cloggin'. Mark Sanford hasn't even left office, and the GOP has nearly (save for the now predictable runoff) nominated yet another hard right, libertarian cum states' rights extremist and serial philanderer to hold their highest office. Don't get me wrong, I'll take the latter sin so long as it breathes free of the former. Public and private virtue aren't the same after all, props to Machiavelli. But Madame Haley lacks for either, so she gets no love from this blogger. How odd, though, that the SC GOP should so passionately rally around her in her moment of greatest implausibility, allowing a mere state senator to lap an MC, an AG, and an LtG. It's as if the very transparency of her bedroom lies made them love her more. The Tea Party has thrived upon its willful embrace of the paradoxical, the hypocritical, and the patently ludicrous. A test of faith? In The True Believer, the great Eric Hoffer wrote that, for the Kool-Aid inclined, big lies were better motivators than small ones, since they created both a more powerful sense of in-group identification and a more intense sense of grievance against that pesky and persecuting "reality." Maybe, but it could also be that defending Darling Nikki--notably against the caddish Jake Knotts--gave them a chivalrous shiver, especially when it let them flatter their Rand-Paulian fantasy of racial indifference. A lady's "virtue" must be preserved, especially if she's fixin' to cut taxes and repeal health care.

Overlooked almost entirely, my home district (SC-04) has likely (again, runoff pending) defeated the hard right incumbent Bob Inglis with the holy-shit-that's-hard right of Trey Gowdy (28%-39%). Inglis committed the sin of telling the Tea Partiers that they were delusional, hoping his rock solid conservative voting record would save him. No such luck. Amazing to think that, growing up, my rep in that district was a liberal Democratic woman. But that was the golden age of Gamecock progressivism, a halcyon time when Gov. Dick Reilly (D!) was inspiring young Bill Clinton with his New South savoir faire, visions of technocratic policy wonks dancing in their heads. Looking back, and having seen SC's political exhibitionism stripped barer and barer over several decades, I now think that dreamy interregnum must have been the real South Carolina berserk--between the reign of Thurmond the restoration that was Reaganism. Ah, South Carolina! Good times there are not forgotten.

Lima Time is . . . over

2010-05-24T21:44:00.002-04:00

Nice remembrance of Jose Lima, who died of 'natural causes' but was younger than me. It was the worst of the times, it was the best of times, it was . . .

Lima Time!

RIP, mi amigo.

A. Specter is Haunting Yer GOP

2010-05-18T23:14:00.003-04:00

Musings on Stupor Tuesday:

1) Rand Paul has gotten all the attention in KY, but he would have finished third, behind BOTH major Dem candidates, in a straight up vote tally. Sure, more in KY are registered Dems even as the state leans strongly GOP in national races. But those folks didn't have to turn out. And when you vote for a guy once (in a primary), you're inclined to do so again (in a general). Everyone assumes this seat is going to stay GOP, but the Dems are definitely in this thing, especially when they've got a good candidate and the GOP has a borderline psychopath. With his parentage (and name) "Rand" Paul ain't just a cafeteria libertarian, he actually believes all that crazy ass shit. Gold standard. Abolish the Fed. Privatize social security. Deregulate Wall Street. That douche bag can be beat, as in drummed, if the Dems play this smart. Is he on the record over birtherism? Does he endorse Ayn Rand's view of American workers as "parasites"? Was his father right to call MLK a communist? Tell us. Counter-theory: it is Kentucky.

2) Fineman has been going off on MSNBC about how this shows Obama's inability to swing a key race. I'm not so sure. Obama had to back Specter as a condition of keeping his Dem majority together in the Senate. But Arlen was always going to be a hard sell to a Dem primary crowd, especially when faced with an A-level challenger like Sestak. And Specter was going to be in serious hot water in a general. What says "unprincipled incumbent" better than a shameless party switch for the stated purpose of "getting reelected"? Sestak is a vastly better candidate against the clownish, cartoon evil of Pat Toomey, who rivals Rand Paul for libertarian lunacy. I think Sestak wins this thing by at least 5 points.

3) That said, I do feel a bit bad for old Arlen. Always kind of liked that guy, even as a Republican. He was a politician's politician, and I don't consider that an insult. I didn't like a lot of his votes back then. Still, you always knew when he was just being a partisan hack--and so did he, and he even signaled it to you, like it was all a chivalrous game. But he had his limits of hackery, and that's really why he couldn't be in the GOP anymore. Only purists. Except as Mitch McConnell and Trey Grayson just learned, plain purism ain't enough anymore. You gotta ooze crazy. That may sell in a midterm when public anger is high. But if that anger subsides at all, these guys are toast.

4) Dems win open special election to replace Murtha in PA swing district. That ensures the narrative can't turn too uniformly pro-GOP, as the press desperately wants, and as it surely would have if this race had gone the other way.

5) Long story short: this should be a bad year for the Dems, but I still smell wingnut blood in the water. On second thought, make that in the tea.

Like a rainbow in the dark

2010-05-17T06:06:00.002-04:00

So Ronnie James Dio has passed. He was 67.

I actually still listen to some of Dio's music. It's cliched and kind of stupid, but there's something that I like about it. I won't defend it, because if you didn't listen to it when you were 15, I think that you will never get into it. But listen to Rainbow's "Man in the Silver Mountain," or Sabbath's "Sign of the Southern Cross," or maybe even "Last in Line," if you like.

Tenkay

2010-05-16T16:01:00.002-04:00

So today was the 31st Capitol Hill Classic 10k. Returning to the field for the first time since 2003 (has it really been that long?), I ran a respectable time, if not PR or even close, just under 44:40. That's something like a 7-minute, 11-second mile for 6.2 miles. The course itself is relatively flat, with the exception of the eponymous hill. So it tends to be fast.

Btw, some sadist course designer decided the Hill should be in mile 6. Genius.

Repeal it

2010-05-16T15:54:00.003-04:00

No, not just health care. Apparently, the Tea Partiers want to also repeal the 17th amendment, which establishes popular, direct election of U.S. senators. This is the ultimate anti-Progressive move--direct election of U.S. senators is one of the few actual "Progressive" in the historical sense things in the U.S. Constitution.

Link

I don't quite get this one. The idea seems to be that this would return power to "the States," but I don't think that that is really how state-legislative selection of senators worked in practice. My understanding is that that process led to powerful state party machines that controlled the Senate seats and thus the state legislatures; that the control went contrary to the plan. IIRC, the direct election of senators was intended to lessen the powers of the "special interests."

Maybe that is incorrect. I've never made a detailed study of the question, assuming that it was settled. But with this crowd, nothing is settled law. And they are, of course, "conservatives."

Thanatos Party

2010-05-06T06:08:00.002-04:00

It's been a while.

Here's just a random thought on the Tea Party 'movement,' culled from Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents.

One way of conceptualizing the 'anger' of the Tea Party folks is that they represent the aggressive side of the national psyche; at an individual level, they are lashing out, given the high level of integration, coordination, in contemporary American life. There is so little room for individual aggression--especially if you are old and don't play first-person shooter games.

In the Bush years, they could express their aggression against Muslims ('dead or alive,' 'I hear you'). But Obama is such a cool character, he doesn't provide that kind of national outlet for aggression.

So, domestically, they lash out. Internationally, too.

Love and strife, the two constant forces. Obama is love. The Tea Party is strife.

Opry Mills, Le Deluge

2010-05-03T15:46:00.004-04:00

Just what we need to jolt FFB back to life: another post on the weather.

As you may or may not have heard, it was a fun weekend here in Middle Tennessee. We got our "Hundred Year Flood" during roughly forty hours of relentless downpour from Saturday morning through Sunday night. Nashville got 13 1/2 inches, setting a two day record and coming within half an inch of setting the all-time record for the entire month of May within just its first two days. That's the official (airport) reading. Parts of Nash-Vegas got 18 inches, and the Cumberland River through downtown was more than 50 feet above flood level, leading to a flood of much of the lower lying downtown area this morning as the river continued to rise while the sun finally shone. The city as a whole looks like a land of a thousand lakes, although parts were more like raging rivers. All major interstates (I-24, I-40, I-65) were under water and closed down somewhere in the metro area. Hardest hit areas: west Nashville & Bellevue, downtown, and the southeast burbs, notably La Vergne, halfway twixt the city and the Boro, where they had to do house by house water rescues. Us, we got lucky: only about 10 inches. Our new basement flooded a little, but nothing the 12 gallon wet/dry Shop Vac couldn't handle (with many rounds of fill and empty).

In other ways, not so lucky. To those of us in the McD-centered universe, the deluge was nature signaling the weekend's (actually, this morning as the sun came out) other milestone: the passing of my Uncle J--athlete, scholar, High Chief of the Boro-based clan, and FFB reader--after a several month battle with cancer. His "final" words, as he wanted them remembered, "What now!?" Amen. Hope the beer and bourbon are even better on the other side.

Koh Star

2010-04-10T11:30:00.003-04:00

Kagan seems like the odds on favorite to replace Stevens on the Supreme Court, but if I were looking for a dark horse candidate, Harold Koh would be that guy. Here's the case:

1) the "ground breaker" narrative: first Asian-American (Korean) on the high court; this always sells with the media framing and would help with a minority demo (albeit small) that leans GOP. It could also make the GOP look petty and racist if they freak out or use an unprecedented filibuster, reinforcing their most damaging stereotype. They'll have to tread more carefully.

2) the "personal" narrative: great family story about parents fleeing dictatorship and persecution; helps with that Obama theme of knowing the difficulties of ordinary people, etc.

3) intellectual heavyweight: Harvard Law grad, Dean of Yale Law School, served under Dem and GOP admins, serious record of scholarship, and expertise on national security and human rights issues. He cannot be dismissed an "unqualified" and would rally liberals in the base looking for a potential rock star.

4) liberal with "bipartisanship" cred: he's clearly a man of the left, but he's won praise for his conservative outreach at Yale and relative moderation on key issues. He'd have at least some conservative cover from witnesses in the hearings, if not from the Senators themselves.

5) international law focus: he's been a pioneer on this topic and would (a) reach out to swing vote Kennedy, who has strong sympathies here, while (b) providing a strong answer to Scalia and Thomas's hatred of non-national sources of legal consultation. Flip side: this WILL be the main right wing freak out. Yet they're going to freak out anyway, and this may be a good thing to get them riled up over since it could provoke them to the extremism that might discredit them with the broad middle of the electorate. Obama usually wins when he looks calm and reasonable and they look like Palin-Beck ragers.

Obama's likely to play this safe and conserve capital. That said, if he decides he's going to get a fight no matter what, Koh would be a pretty good guy to rally behind. Lots of upside, and his fundamentals look sound. He'd be my pick. (Gut pick, that is--I vetted for a whole thirty seconds!)

Good Ol' Boys Were Drinkin' Whiskey and Rye

2010-04-08T23:25:00.004-04:00

It's been a rough couple of months for southern indie rock. Since Christmas, three of the south's quirkiest musical icons have gone to the great beyond. First, on Christmas eve, Vic Chesnutt committed suicide, apparently in despair over his inability to pay his bills for hospital care. A quadriplegic since 18, Chesnutt was a subtle songwriter with a voice both fragile and reassuring. Michael Stipe discovered him playing in Athens (his body only allowed him to play a few chords), and Chesnutt recorded numerous solo records, went on to play with Lambchop and Widespread Panic, and had a small part in Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade. His 1996 album About to Choke was the one I knew and loved. It was haunting, beautiful, and confounding. Yet the song I most get in my head now is 1993's "Gravity of the Situation," a title that felt earned long before it felt prophetic.

Then, last month, Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse--who had collaborated with Chesnutt in the past (and Tom Waits, P.J. Harvey, Cracker, and others)--committed suicide in Knoxville. Sparklehorse, which started out in rural southwestern Virginia, is a hard band to describe. They sounded a bit like Faulkner meeting Sonic Youth: strangely affecting noise rock with a tender heart and a skewed mind. Their debut album, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (1995) is one of my all-time favorite records, although it is not for everyone. Joyous rockers like "Rainmaker," and "Someday I Will Treat You Good," alternate with aching acoustic beauties like "Saturday," and "The Most Beautiful Widow in Town," only to lurch into sporadic bursts of dissonance or object trouvet sound effects. The later albums were generally darker and more intense (notably, It's a Wonderful Life), in a way that anticipated Arcade Fire, and I liked them a bit less. I don't know what Linkous had left in him, but he carved out a wondrous niche while he was here.

Finally, on March 17, Alex Chilton died of a heart attack in New Orleans at 59. Damn. I really can't beat the Rolling Stone tribute in describing his legacy, but it was frickin' huge. What can you say about a guy who was a primary inspiration for REM, Wilco, and the Replacements? If the name doesn't sound familiar, you'll remember his smash hit at age 16 with the Box Tops, "The Letter": "Give me a ticket for an aeroplane/ I ain't got time to take a fast train/ Lonely days are gone/I'm going home/ because my baby just wrote me a letter."

Far more important was his next group, Big Star. By now, he wasn't. Their first album was #1 Record (1972). It wasn't. What it was was one of the greatest albums of all time. And unlike Sparklehorse, it should have been for everyone. His voice was now unrecognizable from the Box Top days--the deep growl replaced by a perfect tenor, as if he had gotten younger and sweeter. Sometimes described as the Beatles from Memphis, they also sounded like the impossibly missing link between the Byrds and Kiss. (Make sense of that! No wonder no one bought it.) When I get some of those songs in my head--"Thirteen," "The Ballad of El Goodo" (?!?), "Watch the Sunrise," or "I'm In Love With a Girl" (from the equally amazing Radio City (1974))--they still break my heart. Don't get me wrong, they also rocked: "Feel," "O My Soul," "Mod Lang." "Down in the Street" was eventually covered by Cheap Trick as the theme for That 70s Show (which also often featured other tunes in the show itself). This was band that seemed like it could do almost anything.

Which explains their third and last album, Third/Sister Lovers (1975). Really, it was a drugged out mess. And brilliant. Where elegance meets entropy. No wonder the record company wouldn't release it for years. It felt like the universe was slowly drifting apart. After a rousing start with songs like "Kizza Me," and "Jesus Christ," it descends into the maddening gloom of "Holocaust" and "Kanga-Roo," only to reemerge with the lovely "Stroke It Noel." I have always thought that many of Wilco's best albums (Being There, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, A Ghost is Born) were efforts to remake Third. Not my favorite Big Star record to listen to. The mood must strike. But there's never really been anything else quite like it. If you don't know them, you ought to give a listen.

HCR Buzzerbeater

2010-03-20T23:53:00.004-04:00

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that health care reform will pass tomorrow (Sunday). I suspect that Pelosi has some votes in her pocket, a decent # of reps who don't want to put themselves in peril--and so have yet to declare--but will if called. They will get called. The tea-party bigots who shouted "nigger" at John Lewis and "faggot" at Barney Frank today will lose. America will win.

Nothing in Weeks

2010-03-19T07:28:00.001-04:00

I know. I am an awful blogger.

2009 Musical Review

2010-03-05T19:11:00.002-05:00

Last year was a monumental year in our clan. We lost my grandmother, the original Tenacious McD, and then welcomed young Bay to help carry on her legacy of spunk (if hopefully not her politics, which was heavy on Rush and Glenn; she considered most of her loved ones "socialists," although only one actually was, her brother, who despite being crippled somehow garnered more than 12% of the vote for US Senate in VA in 1946, almost beating the Republican for second place!). I spent much of the year trying to keep up with two girls at home while parrying turf battles at work. So I listened to less music than usual, and what I listened to was generally old school. Not that I've ever had very cutting edge tastes, but I've definitely steered to comfort zone music this year. Overall, I'd say it was a mediocre year. There was nothing that really blew me away, although that may be more because of me than the tunes. So, without further ado, here's my top 10. As always, the rankings are metaphysically perfect.

1) Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, The Live Anthology. OK, this is cheating, since it's a four CD live set with hits, covers, and hidden gems from four decades. Still great, especially CD #4, which includes brilliant takes on "Square One," "Crawling Back To You," "Southern Accents," "The Waiting," and "I Won't Back Down" plus a few mega-hits that need no plug here. If there's ever been a better Dixie garage band I don't know who it is.

2) Wilco, Wilco: the Album

3) the Avett Brothers, I and Love and You. Did you ever wonder what a Billy Joel and Pure Prairie League mash up would sound like? Me neither. Harmony drenched, alt country piano ballads with mad hooks that stick in your brain for days. My only "new" band discovery this year.

4) Monsters of Folk, Monsters of Folk. Technically, not a new band but a "supergroup," merging Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, and M. Ward. Everyone calls them the indie rock Traveling Wilburys. Who am I to argue?

5) U2, No Line on the Horizon

6) Elvis Costello, Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane. Not necessarily one of his classics, yet still quite good: his Nashville bluegrass record. "Sulphur to Sugarcane" is one of his funniest and filthiest tunes ever.

7) Levon Helm, Electric Dirt. Oldest guy on an old guy list. Formerly of the Band. Lang loves dancing around the house to his cover of the Dead's "Tennessee Jed."

8) M. Ward, Hold Time. They used him in a Budweiser ad. Cool. Odd.

9) Neko Case, Middle Cyclone. Not as good as Fox Confessor, but that's a high bar.

10) Dave Rawlings Machine, Friend of a Friend.

Honorable mentions this year to Bruce and to Phoenix. The latter put out a great record that's just not my natural brew: happy techno-punk. Here's my quibble with Springsteen's record, which is eminently enjoyable, if not quite the #2 record of the year Rolling Stone named it to be. The title, Working on a Dream, sucks. You don't "work" on "dreams." They come over you, envelop you, consume you on an unconscious level, etc. You do not get out your tools and manufacture them. I know, he's using "dream" in the sense of a "project" based in hope and aspiration, not the sleep variety. It's still a mismatched gerund phrase.

So that's 2009. Now I'm well into 2010. Listening to the new Spoon record a lot, and it's pretty good, but they always are. "Trouble Come Running," and "Writing in Reverse" are stand outs. I'm also hoping that this year is calmer than the last, although our house move seems to be working against that. Also, a big shout out to old friend, groomsman, and DKos-blogger extraordinaire, CSK, who has just awaken from two and a half weeks of medically induced coma. Sounds like all signs are positive. Welcome back, bro.

Question of the Week

2010-03-02T06:50:00.002-05:00

I guess Mitt Romney has a book coming out today. That raises an interesting question: Who reads books written by politicians? And by "written by," I mean, purportedly written by politicians. And I mean books "written" as campaign documents, not books written for other purposes. Thus, Dreams from My Father doesn't count, but Audacity of Hope does. (Btw, I haven't read either.)

So the question is, have you ever read a (campaign) book written by a pol (and ghost writer)? If so, what?

They're Re-Making The Rockford Files?

2010-03-01T19:36:00.005-05:00

Link. Impossible. Not only is the show essentially 42ish minutes of James Garner's persona, with some plot, in most episodes . . . but have you watched the show in the last 20 years? I have. On Retro teevee. And let me say, that this show ran for four (?) seasons in the Carter era . . . tells me that perhaps there was an American decline.

That's not to say that the show itself wasn't GREAT. But Jim Rockford is a sad sack PI, with friends like a disbarred lawyer, handling low level cases. The man lives in a trailer, for God's sake. (A trailer on the beach, so not too bad, I guess.)

It's telling that, moving into the Reagan "resurgent" period of American life, we get a new show by the same producer--Magnum P.I. Now that is morning in America, at least, Hawaii. If that still counts as America.

No More American Decline

2010-03-01T06:35:00.002-05:00

I am too lazy to link to David Ignatius's ludicrous column in yesterday's WaPo, but let me just say that if I ran an op-ed page, I'd have a "no more American decline" rule. Here's worst paragraph:

It's usually a mistake to bet against America, as financier Warren Buffet likes to say, given our flexible economy and adaptive political system. The American system seemed at an impasse in the years before the Civil War, and again during the presidency of Herbert Hoover, and once again during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. But it survived these crises and went on to prosper as never before.

Now, I would hesitate to say that we currently have "an adaptive political system." Sure, it adapts quite well to universal, suspicion-less surveillance by the NSA, and to justification of torture, but the current "impasses" over health care, climate, the deficit, etc., suggests some limits.

But the weird thing to me is to compare three "crises"--Ignatius's word! The years before the Civil War, maybe an impasse, but something more serious. The Great Depression, not really an impasse. Hoover didn't propose sweeping changes, his party lost the midterms and then he wasn't reelected. That's how the system is supposed to work, actually.

And . . . I have no idea how 1977-1981 is on the same level, in anyone's mind, with 1856-1860, or 1929-1933, as a time of national crisis. Sure there was disco, but that problem was largely solved. Kidding aside, the talk of American decline then was largely a product of the right-wing noise machine, a focus on looming Soviet military superiority--how did that work out? The economy was bad, but in many respects it's worse now. I just don't get it.

So Civil War, Great Depression, and Jimmy Carter--if we survived those "crises," I guess we can get through this!

Keep in mind that Ignatius is one of the least bad Post columnists.

Old Runners Just Fade Away

2010-02-28T18:57:00.003-05:00

So it's been a long time since I posted on running. Let's just say that much of the last year has been, at best, a mixed bag. I hurt my back last May, in one of those "getting older and have no idea why I am sore this morning" incidents. This back injury made it very hard for me to sit at my chair in my office--I missed a good deal of work--and made it difficult to run because I couldn't really get the stride right.

After about a month, this cleared up, and I had a pretty good fall. I ran a 1-hour, 38-minute half-marathon in November. Then, historic snow in December, and in January, making it hard to run in DC. And I had the flu, which took me three weeks to get over. I missed at least one full week of running, and parts of two more, with upper-respiratory problems, and probably another whole week and part of another to snow.

So my mileage has been way down. I am shooting for 20 miles a week, which is modest given past efforts but more reasonable given my current every-other-day running schedule. Frustration and more, over less.

Still, something lingers. Yesterday, on a bright, beautiful winter day--blue skies, westerly wind but nothing awful--I ran almost 8 miles at slightly better than 8-minute-a-mile pace overall. Not trying to run "fast" (a relative term for an old runner) but finding that I could run just a bit faster than I was, and a bit faster yet . . . still at a training pace, not winded, feeling good the whole time.

That was what it is supposed to feel like. Sun on my face, moving at a comfortable clip. I can live with the frustration if once every now and again it can feel like that.

Bomb [the] Power

2010-02-22T19:27:00.003-05:00

So in the absence of posting, I've actually been reading. I just finished Garry Wills's Bomb Power yesterday, after having knocked off The Hawk and the Dove, a "joint" biography of Paul Nitze and George Kennan, and Arsenal of Democracy, a history of post-war national security politics. I highly recommend Hawk and Dove, and less strongly recommend Arsenal. Arsenal is one of those books that needed one more rewrite, to tighten, focus, emphasize. It also needed a conclusion to pull things together. Still a good read, but a little quick in spots and not as cooked as one would have liked. (Or at least as I would have liked.)

Bomb Power is a different thing. I agree with much of what Wills has to say. But I have to say that, given recent events, I have become increasingly skeptical of the argument that presidential power over foreign affairs/war powers must be "returned" to Congress. I agree that the Framers invested the Congress with many war powers that have atrophied . . . and that presidents, including the present one, will abuse those powers . . . but does anyone really think that the solution is congressional authority? Those folks can't do crap. If the foreign policy of the United States is subject to a 60-vote rule in the Senate, then we are doomed.

What Wills really means, I think, is that we need a much more "humble," much less aggressive foreign policy. And I would agree with that. For example, I think we could easily forswear invading any countries for fifty years and not suffer for it. But that's not the direction he actually goes in. He goes in the direction of congressional power.

Now I think it's an open question whether congressional control of foreign policy would result in a more humble foreign policy. It could result in a "one-way ratchet" toward hawkdom. See Arsenal of Democracy.

As always, people, think these things through clearly, or you just end up in a place that doesn't make sense. Like Absurdistan--a novel, btw, that I did not like.

Summer post on Tim Weiner's history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, which I still highly recommend.

"Worst Person" in the Vandy World?

2010-02-12T18:55:00.004-05:00

Surprisingly, the answer is neither me nor #3. But I think most of the Vandy alums could make a pretty good guess (if you didn't already see the show). Note that he made it not just once. Twice! 2/9 and 2/11. Gold and Bronze.

Snowverkill Is What They Are Calling It

2010-02-10T15:09:00.004-05:00

Just a quick note from inside the maelstrom that is the Great Blizzard of 2010. We have well over three feet of snow, now, and it's still coming down, although it's hard to say how fast, given 30-40 mile wind gusts. That three feet is a guess, based on what I've seen on teevee and having just cleared snow off the back porch roof at lunchtime. There was at least three feet on that roof.

Which brings up the roof on top of the house. Luckily, we don't have a flat roof. I'm surprised that more of those haven't fallen in, yet, at least we haven't seen much about that on the teevee. Large facilities (skating rinks, warehouses) are probably at most risk, given the size issue. Row houses can't hold that much snow, given how narrow they are. Ours, e.g., is just 18 feet across, and some are even narrower--16 feet is a pretty standard width in some areas. The gambrel-style roof (I think that's the right term; it's kind of a one-sided mansard) means that the front of the house, with the exception of the dormer, doesn't actually hold much snow. (The dormer has a lot of ice, which is a bit worrying.) So far, so good.

The District is almost completely shut down. Metro is running, single-track, underground only. So almost half of the system (the above-ground stations) are closed. No Metro buses. All three jurisdictions (Md, DC, Va) had to suspend plowing during the whiteout conditions. (Seriously--it looked like a Tea Party convention out there!) I haven't seen much traffic--one or two cars going down Mass Ave., every now and then. We have heard a fair number of sirens (mostly fire) throughout the day. Right now I can hear an ambulance (not that close). (Update) They have plowed Mass Ave., but nothing moving out there, in short.

The government is likely closed all week. I can't see how they can reopen without Metro, and Metro can't open until they get the tracks plowed--which they can't do until after this stops. They are saying the winds keep up through most of the night, but that the snow should end just after dark. Maybe things can reopen by Friday.

As long as the roof holds--and if we have problems, it's going to be a serious problem for many, many more people--my big concern is the power. We're lucky that we haven't lost power--lots of folks have been dark since the snow Friday-Saturday of last week. We're close enough to the government buildings that I think we get some priority. The power did go out for a second or two last night, which scared us. Given the wind and the snow, if you lose power at this point, I think that you're just going to be dark for several days. Normally, you'd just load up and go to a hotel. Well, good luck with that today.

My next concern is water. A few water main breaks and the system can go down. We did lose water pressure once yesterday, momentarily. But that, too, seems to have passed.

So, we are hanging in there. I'd be curious to hear from B'more. Stay warm, people. The wind chill is 6 degrees, right now, so no new snow pix until tomorrow.

The End of the World . . . Snowmaggedon

2010-02-08T19:59:00.001-05:00

Me & My Girls

2010-02-05T11:01:00.003-05:00

Suburban Turmoil

2010-02-02T13:50:00.002-05:00

Who wins the Hyperbole Bowl when Atrios has called this piece "completely idiotic." Kotkin makes some interesting (and not always wrong) arguments in defense of suburbia, but might I add to the objections already raised that it is a bit strange to assert: 1) that Obama is waging war on suburbanites, 2) that suburbanites are rebelling for having gotten nothing out of the bailouts, stimulus, etc., and 3) that suburbies want nothing more than leafy trees, smooth roads, and cars, cars, cars, when 4) Obama is the guy who bailed out the auto makers and their big, big cars while investing in roads, roads, roads!!! Or when 5) all those "green jobs" are just as likely to benefit edge cities as inner cores? Or when 6) vibrant, livable, accessible city centers benefit the suburbanites who surround them. I could go on (see the comments readers made to Kotkin's essay that come below it--often quite sharp). Kotkin's is a pre-formed narrative in search of pegs.

Might this also just be more of that grievance politics the right has so perfected? Take a dominant group (whites, men, Christians. . . suburbies!) and convince them they are being oppressed by their "other" at the exact moment said other has crawled out of the hole the more dominant group has dug for it? Not that I have any idea what this guy's politics otherwise are. It just seems like his argument is more an exercise in identity formation than an analysis of empirical realities.

The Bipartisan Bash

2010-01-30T10:46:00.003-05:00

Now that's the guy I voted for. Big O is getting a lot of credit for walking into the lyin' den at the House GOP Caucus in Baltimore and then devouring those cats alive.

True enough. In some ways, though, I was struck by how much tougher he could have been had he wanted to play it for blood. He generally treated those crackers with more respect than their "ideas" deserve, humoring, for example, the idea that they had genuine concerns about fiscal policy or that "our side" had engaged in equivalent acts of "demonization." A more effective demolition would have repeatedly referenced "George W. Bush" and the GOP's lockstep support for his budget insanity, and then would have railed against the White House "attack machine" canard by explaining the difference between accusing the President of being a terrorist-loving, secret-Muslim, illegal alien, grandma-killing, Marxist antichrist and, on the other hand, suggesting the GOP had "no serious plan" after they introduced a budget with no numbers and a health care plan with no health care. (Poor Tom Price seemed about to cry over the fact that Obama had never come to his district and given him an award for policy "supergeniusness.")

No, Obama actually seemed to give a shit about "bipartisanship." It is the quintessential DC pipe dream, and it is Obama at his most brazenly beltway. At least he managed to find a way to score some partisan points off it this time, even if it was but a secondary objective. He turned their partisan bash into a bipartisanship bashing. Kudos.

That said, I'm not convinced its benefits will last very long. One of the more frustrating aspects of our "democracy," revealed again this year and this decade, is the irony that the more democratic your politics the less effective they are under our democratic procedures. The GOP has never liked democracy much, for ideological reasons, so they care not a wit what "the people" think about their politics or policies (Dick Cheney's infamous "So what!" to CNN's Wolf). Saboteurs at heart, they mostly just want to ensure that government does not work so that they can profit from its not working. This creates no incentive to problem solve or cooperate with the last election's winner. Democracy is so principled about universal participation that it creates an open political space even for its existential opponents. Hence the GOP conviction--stated by every questioner yesterday--that the only acceptable Dem "compromises" would be to enact a 100% GOP agenda, despite the GOP having lost the White House in a landslide and despite holding near-historic lows of representation in both houses of Congress.

Meanwhile, since for the Dems respect for the electoral process is a core value, when they lose an election they feel morally obligated NOT to obstruct. (Or at least their inner conflictedness paralyzes collective resistance.) They lose one Senate race, knocking their majority down to a mere 59-41, and they're so afraid that the American people have lost faith that they contemplate ditching a century of policy objectives. So ideology creates governing asymmetry, with anti-democrats having a built-in advantage in advancing policy via democratic procedures. This is not then merely a problem of individual fecklessness on the part of the Dems, it is a tragic design flaw at the intersection of our institutions and our culture. I'm not sure how to solve that. Maybe we should take a poll.

Valerie Jarrett Is Full of Shit and Other Observations

2010-01-27T23:59:00.004-05:00

So I hear there was some kind of speech tonight. I missed it, thanks to my night class--or at least all except for the last ten minutes or so, most of which I heard in my car. Plus that Bible Belt Ken doll addressing his high school pep rally while the multiculti club sat behind in rapt attention. Ergo, my comments will reflect a general ignorance of the speech as a whole.

1) "Don't run for the hills" seems like a bad catch line. From a rhetorical standpoint, you should avoid negations to frame you position. All I can think is "RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!!" It reminds me more of what we all know the Dems are doing than what Obama lamely suggests they should be doing. Same for "I won't quit." Really? It sure seems like you might wanna.

2) Valerie Jarrett was an awful spokeswoman for Obama on Maddow. Bad enough that she talked about Scott Brown (Mr. "I am the 41st vote to kill health care") like he's the new Olympia Snowe. She went on to repeat over and over that the federal government has to "tighten its belt" when times are tough, "just like American families." Maddow rightly called her on her sad confusion of micro and macro-economics, but it just goes to show that even Democratic flacks do all their prep work for right-leaning villagers. They really have no clue how to answer substantive questions from the left.

3) I feel no more confident on health care passage than I did a few hours ago.

4) Props for taking on the Supremes in front of their smug faces. Even better, Sam Alito goes all Joe Wilson on us. Dude, get over it. Even your beloved Princeton accepts black people now. You're not going to turn this thing back by treating Obama like the uppity help. So you got dunked on by LeBron. At least you'll end up on the highlight reel.

Not a lot of optimism there. The poll #s are supposedly good, though. Any thoughts?

Sentences I Never Expected I'd Hear

2010-01-23T10:57:00.003-05:00

"This is a picture of me pooping on the potty!" ("Self-portrait" is actually the more exact term.)

Good News, Crazy Bad News

2010-01-21T21:59:00.004-05:00

Quite a day. First the positive. After two months of negotiation, Mrs. TMcD and I appear to have bought ourselves a new house, about 50% bigger and only a few blocks from campus. If you're curious, shoot me an e-mail and I'll send you a link.

Hmm. . . what else? Oh, it appears that only a day after the Democrats decided to strip themselves naked, castrate themselves with a rusty spoon, and then run around singing Beck's "Loser" at the top of their lungs, the Supreme Court has decided that our pesky little experiment with democracy is officially over. Citizens' United v. FEC will certainly go down in infamy as one of the most toxic decisions in American history. Its arrogance is as staggering as its consequences are devastating. Less than a decade after canceling a presidential election to install George Bush via judicial coup, the same 5-4 majority (the same 5 seats on the court) decided that the greatest injustice of American electoral politics is the insufficient ability of corporations to influence, nay control, our political institutions. Its as if they decided that, after a year of Obama, Democrats should never be allowed to hold power again, unless that is, they become just one more species of Republican. Ralph Nader will have proved prophet not madman. Brrrrrr.

Dems should turn this into an opportunity to raise holy hell. But then these are the same guys who defer to the GOP majority of 41 in the Senate with nary a peep. I'll comment more later once I've had time to reflect. At the moment, however, I fear for our future.

Democrats Must Pass the Senate HCR Bill

2010-01-20T11:00:00.003-05:00

There is no possibility that reform survives another vote in the Senate. There will never be 60 votes in the Senate for reform again. Even if Dems had eked out a victory in MA, I doubt that the 60 votes could have been marshaled a second time.

But there's no way around the 60 vote threshold. The most important elements of the bill (the exchanges & the health insurance regulations) can't be done through reconciliation. 60 votes is necessary given the reality of the Senate, and they will not be obtained again. The only possibility of reform is for the House to pass the Senate bill and then revisit it to make improvements to the things that can be addressed in reconciliation.

If the Democrats can't get health reform under the conditions in 2009 (with 60 votes in the Senate, 255+ House seats, a new president, and an AMA endorsement), they should just stop campaigning on the issue because they will never succeed on it. Who should even bother to listen to them if they so much as mention the issue? It will be clear to everyone that they cannot govern.

(Sorry for the typo in my original post. It's the Senate bill that must be passed.)

Tennessee Politics 2009

2010-01-09T17:45:00.002-05:00

Quite a year in the Volunteer state. For any of you expats who have an interest, I can't sum things up any better than this article in the Scene. Highlight: Dems in the state legislature give the GOP the biggest FU ever in the history of FUs, snatching control of the House in a brilliant surprise maneuver. A fleeting victory, but still sweet.