When I was a kid, I wanted to be Bob Woodward. Now, I want Bob Woodward to be me. From Media Matters:
On the November 30 edition of CBS' Face the Nation, while discussing President-elect Barack Obama's expected nomination of Sen. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward remarked of Clinton: "She never goes away, she and her husband." Woodward then added: "It's an amazing national security team that Obama appears to have selected. It's kind of like 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears.' You've got too cool, which might be -- or at least appropriately cool -- General [James] Jones as the national security adviser; [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates is kind of just right, in the middle; and Hillary Clinton, hot."
Maybe if is slipped small needles between my corneas and eyeballs it would be more pleasant than this stupidity. Unless some things change, this will continue until Mrs. Clinton leaves Foggy Bottom. Ugh.
A mother, a wife, a gifted musician and director of music, Kathy finally lost her year-long battle with cancer this morning. She used to direct the bell choir, both youth and adult, at church. She and her husband, Bob, and their children, Amy and Bobby (both of whom attend Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington), are all gifted musicians, who offered their gifts without price to anyone who would listen.
Kathy loved children. She was a second mother to little Alex Saavedra, another child of our church. She would insist on having Moriah and Miriam over for a night, and she and Bob would entertain them. They have a pool and an outdoor jacuzzi, and the kids would swim and luxuriate to their hearts' content. We would all go over, just us or several of us from church, for parties.
Her husband retired two years ago to spend time with his wife. Now, she is gone.
As the mystery is solved for her, the pieces still lie around for all of us who knew her and loved her. I pray all of us, most especially her family, but also the Saavedra's little girl Alex, find the comfort that comes to those who mourn.
The only thing I tire of more than hearing Britney Spears' "Womanizer" is reading the folks at American Descent talk about how America doesn't torture. It's tiresome because it's demonstrably false, but no matter how much evidence piles up, no matter how many testimonies come out, not just from the victims but the perpetrators, it lands upon their ears like snow in the Sahara.
I am quite sure that there will all sorts of verbal gymnastics and intellectual contortions employed to "prove" that the writer (a) isn't who he claims to be; (b) is overstating the use of various torture techniques; (c) admits there is no way to prove that torture has hurt the pursuit of our interests anyway, if it were used. Since folks who manage to employ each and every one of these arguments are impermeable to reason, I'll leave it to the rest of you to make of it what is obviously there:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. … It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
It is obvious that this soldier is an enemy of the state and should be shot immediately.
It's either trivial, or perhaps quadrivial (to quote James Joyce), but it don't mean much at all. Except fun. BTW, ER, consider yourself tagged.
1. Five names you go by: a) Geoffrey b) Geoff (mostly family) c) Mr. Kruse-Safford d) Geoffrey Stephen (my mother still does this!) e) Dad
2. Three things you are wearing right now: a) Green carpenter's pants b) White Rugby shirt c) Steel toe boots
3. Two things you want very badly at the moment: a) More money (pedestrian, I know, but it doesn't make it not true) b) Peace of mind (not necessarily in this order?)
4. Three people who will probably fill this out: In all honesty, the only one I think will do so is ER, whom I've already tagged.
5. Two things you did last night: a)Watched A Christmas Story for what will surely be the first of a hundred times b)Drank two Leinenkugel Creamy Dark Lagers and fell asleep (such a cheap date)
6. Two things you ate today: a) Nothing yet, unless coffee counts as an "eat" b) Certainly not the pet food I put out for our menagerie
7. Two people you last talked to on the phone: a) The wife b) The mother-in-law (God, that's awful; how domesticated is that?)
8. Two things you are going to do tomorrow: a) Awaken to an empty house b) Spend my time at work wondering what I'm going to blog about the next day
9. Two longest car rides: a) Waverly, NY to Hattiesburg, MS, with a side trip further on to New Orleans, LA b) Jarratt, VA to Sycamore, IL in one day . . . twice in a week!
10. Two of your favorite beverages: a) Lemonade on a hot summer day b) Welch's Cherry Burst cocktail
Finally, two scenes put together from the best movie of all time, Pulp Fiction. Obviously, there is strong language, and a pretty graphic shooting. I know it's wrong, but I laugh every single time Marvin gets shot, and Vincent's nonchalant reaction, "Oh man, I just shot Marvin in the face." Can't help it, it's just . . . funny.
In the movies, zombies can only be killed by shooting them in the head, or cutting their heads off. You can destroy their bodies, remove limbs, etc., but as long as the head is intact, it still poses a danger. In the world in which we live, political-historical lies continue to live even after they have been definitively disproved. The reason is simple. There are enough people willing to hear these lies and consider them as possible that they keep the waters muddied.
Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted 400 years." It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal.
The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending -- President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt -- unemployment was 17.2 percent.
"I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started," lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.
It's all here in this long quote. The invocation of the "Roosevelt Recession", a reliance on the Dow as a measure of economic health, mentioning President Hoover as the real father of the New Deal, and the rise of employment during Lend-Lease and the build-up to war.
Except, of course, these are "facts" that are stitched together not by the slender threads of insight and keen analysis, but the heavy hemp rope that's only good for keeping a ship tied to a dock. In other words, Will is citing facts, but he is putting them together the way Frankenstein built his creature. As such, it is not a revived human being, but something monstrous.
Two weeks ago, Will tried to use this same right-wing "historical interpretation" on Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman (not a good idea, George; you both might have Ph.D.s, and Krugman may teach at your alma mater, but he has the Nobel, and you have an op-ed column in the Post, so there is a difference between you), and Krugman schooled him on the way real history, especially real economic history works (the important part comes at the end).
While it is true that it took World War II to lift the US out of the Depression, it is also true, as even conservative historian David Kennedy has written in his massive history of the times, Freedom From Fear, that Roosevelt was essentially a very conservative politician. He disliked the deficit spending he was forced by circumstances to adopt. He preferred the higher taxes, especially the way his tax plan progressed, and limited approach to federal welfare through public works, but also knew that circumstsances did not allow it. His problem, as Krugman notes in the linked video clip and Kennedy explains in detail in his book, was that he took too much heart from the way the economy was improving through the first year and a half of his second term. While unemployment decreased, investment started to tick upward, and banks seemed stable, the underlying structural impediments and deficiencies of the system had yet to be fully rooted out. Another part of the problem, which Kennedy does address and Krugman did not (a TV appearance would hardly be a place to do so) was the stupid Smoot-Hawley tariff, which placed such high tariffs on imports that it, for all practical purposes, shut down our foreign trade. This was made worse by the rising tide of Japanese imperialism in the Pacific, where the Japanese navy, rather than the Royal Navy of Great Britain, controlled the sea lanes. Nervous about antagonizing the Japanese, trade across the Pacific was curtailed, except to the Japanese themselves, who continued to buy our scrap steel to build its war machine.
In other words, a combination of political timidity and historical circumstances were as much a part of the lengthening of the Great Depression as anything. It certainly was not the fault of the New Deal that the Depression lasted as long as it did; nor did the New Deal "fail" to end the Depression, since that was never the plan in the first place. Will is just repeating nonsensical lies that only anti-historical conservatives love to repeat in order to discredit Democratic policies.
It is necessary to repeatedly call these lies what they are, even though it is quite tiresome to note that Will is lying. Repeating them doesn't make them true, and an honest, truly informed review of the historical record bears that out.
I have started the laborious process of going back through my archives for this year, checking for the rare gem and the quite-frequent clunker, and right there on the very first day of 2008, I managed, in the midst of a whole mess of errors, to call the general tone of post-election analysis.
At the time I was leaning towards Edwards, although I really hadn't settled on a preferred Democratic candidate. In essence, I predicted the media would claim that, even the a Democrat had won the Presidency, there would be an emergent narrative that would declare the him a loser of sorts. He would be crippled by ideological battles, by circumstances, by a nation not ready for a Democratic President, etc., etc.
On the very day after Barack Obama won the election, Tom Brokaw started the ball rolling with the invented-from-whole-cloth notion of ours being a "center-right" country (whatever the hell that means). I noted on November 12 that some lefty-types around the internet were declaring the Democratic party defunct in two and four years because Barack Obama inherited a mess from George W. Bush. Mainstream journalists are giggling over other lefty-blogger types who are whining about this or that or the other cabinet choice, noting that the lefty-bloggers feel left out and cheated, thinking they won the election for Obama.
All of this emerging narrative of an embattled President-elect, hampered by ideological struggles within and disastrous conditions without, and the resulting emerging notion that Obama has no chance to govern effectively was predicted, despite a whole mess of details being wrong, by me. In January.
I went, I saw, I bought yesterday two CDs and a live DVD. The CDs were Porcupine Tree's Nil Recurring and Ray LaMontagne's Gossip in the Grain. The concert DVD was Rush's live concert from their Snakes and Arrows tour. Filmed in Holland, it featured the same set list when I saw them on the same tour, in Chicago (well, Tinley Park, really), in September, 2007.
One of the things I really liked about this tour was the deep cuts they pulled out - "Digital Man", "Entre Nous", "Natural Science" - from their older material. And this one, a song easily overlooked, yet so appropriate. "Witch Hunt" is a scathing attack on all forms of mob-like thought, "Those who know what's best for us", as the song says, who "must rise and save us from ourselves" because of the "strangeness" in "our immigrants and infidels", "theaters and bookstore shelves." This clip is from an 80's tour - for the album Grace Under Pressure - but the power of the song shines through the decades.
It might just become an on-going series. Where else would it be from?
Personally, if you agree with European leaders, communists, terror-supporting nations, and Dope-dealing Latin-American leaders and hate America as well (because...if you believe that others have a right to hate America then certainly you must hate her too), then you are an enemy of America.
Obviously, if I believe others have a right to think for themselves, then I must be anti-American. Because America isn't about freedom . . .
I was going to get ready for work, but on one last go 'round, sending out my Thanksgiving greetings, I happened upon something that made me laugh, cry, vomit, fart, and fall asleep all at the same time. It took Michael Savage a whole bunch of words to rip meaning from the English language. Displaying his keen grasp of Ockham's Razor, Neil manages it in one simple "sentence".
Predictably, the Abortion President is putting together a seriously anti-life, anti-family Cabinet.
As compared to a lame duck responsible for many deaths in war, in federal executions, in the hungry and homeless here in America, and the dying abroad from lack of access to our many resources, including simple things like medicines to help stave off childhood diarrhea and malaria.
Obviously, a man with a happy marriage and two beautiful children is anti-family. Because they are all black.
I hope it goes without saying that I will be computer-free tomorrow, due to a whole bunch of relatives, something about turkey, and then a night of getting ready for the biggest bunch of crazy people . . . I mean the biggest shopping day of the year (here's hoping, anyway).
To all and each and every person who visits this site, whether it's your first time, or you come here every day to peruse my words of wisdom (cough!cough!) I wish a very Happy Thanksgiving. Maybe, on Friday, exhausted from work, more turkey, and anticipating a weekend recovery, we can get back to our regularly scheduled program, eh?
Like the whole chicken-egg thing, or whether or not a tree falling in a blah-blah-blah, one of the great mysteries for which there may never be an answer is how Glenn Reynolds gets so many people to read him. I have only read his stuff that other people comment upon, and I refuse to link to him, if for no other reason than I don't want anyone that stupid to know I exist, but I gleaned the following from someone who does pay attention:
I feel a little sorry for Martin Luther King — his enormous accomplishments got less attention than they deserved because of the cult of Malcolm X, and now he’s being eclipsed by Barack Obama.
When one thinks of all the chance occurrences in time and history that led to his conception, birth, education, and all the little decisions that led to him typing that particular sentence, and it makes one want to drive off a cliff.
It would be surprising if I selected a Treasury secretary who had had no connection with the last Democratic administration because that would mean the person had no experience in Washington whatsoever. And I suspect you would be troubled and the American people would be troubled if I selected a Treasury secretary or a chairman of the National Economic Council…who had no experience whatsoever.
--snip--
But understand where the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from me. That’s my job — is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure that my team is implementing it.
Since I'm now, officially, more right than Bill Kirstol has ever been in his entire pundit career, can I get a slot on the Times op-ed page?
The title of this post was also the title of Lisa's sermon from the Thanksgiving service tonight at church. 1 Thessalonians and Acts 16 were called in to service. The first has Paul's admonition to pray without ceasing and give thanks in all things. The second is the story of Paul and Silas in prison, after having been beaten and put in stocks, sitting in their cell, singing hymns and praising God.
The service was wonderful, and fed me, spiritually, as well as forcing me to think about all sorts of things that made me uncomfortable, and see things in a new light. I am so pampered. I have a home, a family that is a greater blessing than I could ever have imagined. I am gainfully employed (for now), and am anticipating a wonderful Thanksgiving surrounded by my wife's family, with a table overflowing with food and conversation and laughter. I am healthy, almost robustly so, in better physical condition than when I was a high school athlete (too long ago to think about). I have good friends, a church family that is one of the most open, loving, giving communities imaginable. All that I could imagine complaining about is so small compared to the many blessings of a good God.
Yet, complain I do, and usually content myself that, in so doing, I am only being human, nothing wrong with that. Except, of course, my complaints are a kind of spiritual forgetfulness, aren't they? They are, in a sense, a desire to want more. More comfort, have things go my way more. They are nothing more or less than attempts to make myself the center of action and attention. In reality, I have nothing at all to complain about; I am blessed beyond measure, and certainly beyond dessert, and should be thankful for all I have.
There is a deeper lesson here, for all of us. We have, all of us, desired so much more. More stuff, more freedom from the burdens of responsibility to our neighbors and communities. We would prefer the world understand us, rather than seek to understand others. We much prefer to be loved than to love. In the crush and pressure and stress not just of everyday life, but of our particular historical moment, we forget the many, many ways we have all been blessed, and how much of what we take for granted is nothing but dross, brands that should be plucked for burning. Our lives would be just as full if all that were gone in a flash, because we might then recall that it is God alone upon whom we should rely.
So, the irony is, it seems, that where there is faith, there are no dark places. . .
Since we're talking about "rational", I thought I'd offer a perspective from Weiner World:
On his radio show, Michael Savage said of the United States: "[S]ocially, we're far worse -- more degenerate than Weimar Germany. At least in Weimar Germany, men couldn't marry men and women couldn't marry women. So we're probably 10 leagues below the degeneracy that brought about Hitler. We're probably 50 leagues below the degeneracy that brought about Hitler. We are the sickest, most disgusting country on the earth."
Obviously, the Weiner hates America. Yet, one needs to ask. Do any of these words, put together the way Savage has done, actually have any meaning in English? I'm at a loss.
A good question might be, if we are truly the sickest of nations, since conservatives have been in charge for so long, isn't it kind of their fault that we are so degenerate?
That, of course, assumes there's a reason to treat this vomitous mass of words as if they meant something. It also assumes the person who spewed them was worthy of anything more than ridicule. I only highlight it because this guy has a radio program that people listen to. If I had heard this, I would probably have turned the radio off and sat down and tried to figure out what, exactly, he was saying. After giving up, I would probably drink heavily.
Today, a Florida judge ruled that the state’s strict law banning the adoption of children by same-sex couples is unconstitutional. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman rejected the state’s arguments that there is “a supposed dark cloud hovering over homes of homosexuals and their children.” She noted that gay people are allowed to be foster parents, adding, “There is no rational basis to prohibit gay parents from adopting.”
But, there are all sorts of irrational reasons. All rooted in hatred and fear that the gay germ will rub off, say, or that there is something inherently immoral about being gay that precludes them being parents.
No doubt we have not heard the end of this particular issue, but at least for the moment, we have a judge using the word "rational" correctly.
DCup managed to tag-without-tagging (it's a Zen thing; you wouldn't understand) on a Name Meme that is quite fun.
1. WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother’s & father’s middle names): Lee Bird 2. NASCAR NAME: (first name of your mother’s dad, father’s dad): Eugene George 3. STAR WARS NAME: (the first 2 letters of your last name, first 4 letters of your first name): Rdgeof, or maybe R'd'Geof (pretty clunky, huh?) 4. DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color, favorite animal): Green Koatamundi (even clunkier!) 5. SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, city where you live): Stephen Poplar (I left off the grove) 6. SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd favorite color, favorite alcoholic drink, optionally add “THE” to the beginning): Blue Guinness Stout (actually sounds like a reason someone became ill) 7. FLY NAME: (first 2 letters of 1st name, last 2 letters of your last name): Gerd (please add "your loins" if you wish) 8. GANGSTA NAME: (favorite ice cream flavor, favorite cookie): Vanilla Iced Sugar - which, all things considered, would be the kind of rap I'd do . . . 9. ROCK STAR NAME: (current pet’s name, current street name): Dreyfus Bree (Or, I could use our cat's name, but "Patch Bree" just isn't, you know, hot and all boss; what young woman would toss her panties on the stage to some guy named "Patch Bree"?) 10. PORN NAME: (1st pet, street you grew up on): Aaron Orange (I had to use our second pet, because our first dog when I was a kid, was named Lady, and "Lady Orange" just wouldn't do for me . . .)
I don't tag, so I'll just let you do it if you wish, because this was a whole lot of fun.
DCup featured a song by Ray LaMontagne today, and sitting and listening to it, I just felt the need. When I first heard him on PRI's "World Cafe" a few years back, right after the release of Trouble, I was absolutely blown away. The first time I heard "Shelter" and I knew there was something transcendent about this man. He is on his third "official" release, and his sound has morphed slightly from the rough six-string sounds of 60's folk music to the rough, gritty horn sounds of the Stax/Volt/Muscle Shoals sound, especially in records made for Dusty Springfield and Aretha Franklin. Yet, punching through the sound is the voice and the words - direct, stripped bare of artifice and pretense. This is art and poetry and music as it should be. If you haven't heard him yet, please listen. If you have heard him, and have yet to realize what a gift he has, and is sharing with the world, I urge you to listen again.
From a BBC session, this is an extended version of "Shelter/Hold You In My Arms"
When all of this around us falls over Tell you what we're gonna do You will shelter me, my love, And I will shelter you.
The first track off Until The Sun Turns Black, "Be Here Now"
From his latest release, Gossip In The Grain, this is "You Are The Best Thing"
Watching the unfolding implosion of the American economy, while leaving one with the nagging fear that there is no bottom in sight yet, nevertheless gives some a reason to reconsider a basic tenet of classical Marxist philosophy. Marx taught that at the heart of capitalism was a contradiction so fundamental, it would end up destroying itself. It could be summed up in an ethical epigram - Private vice does not lead to public virtue. Marx correctly diagnosed that at the heart of the capitalist system is not "self-interest" in some grand, ethical way, but greed. The pursuit of maximum profit at the lowest possible cost. Impoverish workers, create hazardous work environments, destroy the environment and you have a competitive advantage over your competitor. Monopoly capitalism goes even further, as several large firms conspire to do all this together.
We are witnessing this in action even as we speak. Unlike one idiot's claim, it isn't global warming advocates who are destroying capitalism. It is the boosters of unregulated financial markets who managed it. Members of Congress, members of various Executive Branch departments, their cheerleaders in the media and academia and right-wing think tanks - these folks led the charge to let the markets do what they do best, and we are living with the results.
These same people demanded that government get out of the way. It did. We have been told, ever since the heady days of Ronald Reagan that government is the problem; Rush Limbaugh used to claim that there is no evidence any government program ever worked. All we needed to do was loose the shackles holding back markets and we would enter the gates of paradise, all of us wealthy beyond our dreams of avarice. Now, of course, as we lose our jobs, our homes, our sense of economic and financial security, everyone is scrambling for help. The first in line, of course, are those very same large firms that clamored the loudest for the state and its machinery to remove itself from the path to glory, hands out like Oliver Twist. More than any other reason, this is the reason for my own spiteful "Nein!" to these greedy merchants of economic destruction. You wanted it this way; all the "naysayers" said this would be the result, and you insisted it just couldn't be so, so you should just take the consequences of your stupid insistence that you wouldn't screw things up.
While I do not believe Marx was correct in his prescription - revolution makes things so much worse - especially since the remarkable success of various levels of social democracies in mitigating the social consequences of capitalism's destructive tendencies, I think the heart of his diagnosis is correct. We are living in the midst of it, after all.
Of all years in recent memory, thinking of things for which to be thankful is particularly difficult this year. The economy is tanking. People are losing their homes, their jobs, their savings, their sense of equanimity. There is much unrest and disquiet in the land. A lack of any sense of stability and security is creating a stressful situation in many homes.
Yet, give thanks we should (that sentence should be heard in the voice of Yoda). I do not say "must", because I do not believe "must" is a word God understands. We should be thankful for the blessings, little and big, that surround us even in the midst of our current turmoil and distress. For family and friends, neighbors far and near. We should be thankful that we are fortunate enough to live in a land with as many opportunities for recovering as we do. We are more than our economic and financial stability and well-being, and we are free, we just held an election that will drastically alter our country, and power will pass peacefully in January 20, 2009. We can praise Allah, offer incense to the goddess, recite the Psalms in Hebrew, or worship the god of many names and faces behind the many masks of Hinduism. We can even refuse to recognize any of it, call it all garbage and bunk and hokum, and yet be thankful. We are Americans, residents of a great land, and we believe that even though our prospects are bleak right now, our future is always brighter than our present, which means we will move on to greater things together. So give thanks, if nothing else, for living in this moment.
