TOUGH FOR THE 40% PARTY TO EXPLOIT POPULISM:

Can Obama give 'em hell before it's too late? : Why can't Democrats mobilize the public for healthcare reform? Blame the demagogy gap (Michael Lind, 8/31/09, Salon)

[F]DR would be shocked by the inability of his party to mobilize the public on behalf of reform.

The irony is that the modern conservative movement started out by opposing the very populism it later embraced. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was influenced by the philosopher Albert Jay Nock, a family friend who despised mass democracy. Buckley's never-published philosophical manifesto, written in the 1950s and early 1960s (he allowed me to read the manuscript), was a critique of the mass society, inspired by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset's "The Revolt of the Masses." The symbol of empty, decadent mass politics for the young Buckley, as for Gore Vidal in his novel "Washington, D.C.," was the telegenic celebrity politician John F. Kennedy. A few years later in the 1960s, Buckley wrote that he would rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty, and in 1980 the conservative movement captured the White House in the person of the ultimate telegenic celebrity master of mass politics, Ronald Reagan.

While the right was rejecting its gloomy elitism and embracing the mass society and populist politics, liberalism was moving in the other direction. Liberal intellectuals, shocked by McCarthyism and the rejection by the voters of the urbane Adlai Stevenson for Dwight Eisenhower, concluded that the American people themselves were the problem.

We are.

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OPEC HASN'T CORNERED THE HYDROGEN MARKET:

Mercedes to Launch Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Car Into Production by 2010 (Mike Spinelli, 08.31.2009, Popular Science)

The company says it will build 200 units of the F-Cell, a car powered by a 136-horsepower electric motor with current generated by a fuel-cell generator. Power storage comes by way of a lithium-ion battery (35 kW output / 1.4 kWh capacity) supporting a driving range of 250 miles and a top speed of 106. According to a press release, the F-Cell will perform similarly to an economy car with a 2-liter, four-cylinder engine. The company also touts good cold-start capability at temperatures as low as -13 degrees Fahrenheit. Not likely a problem in California, where most of the country's hydrogen refueling stations are.

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WE'RE ALL TRANSNATIONALIST SOMETIME OR ANOTHER:

U.S. Loses Ruling on Cotton Payouts (PETER FRITSCH and JOHN LYONS , 9/01/09, WSJ)

A ruling against the U.S. in a long-running fight with Brazil over American payouts to cotton growers sets an important precedent for developing nations concerned by what they see as excessive U.S. support for farmers.

A World Trade Organization arbitration panel ruled Monday that Brazil is entitled to $295 million upfront, and nearly $150 million a year, for the U.S. failure to eliminate subsidies to the cotton industry. The annual penalties are far below the $2.5 billion Brazil had sought.

Come one, come all!

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JUST A PRETEXT FOR BUGGERY:

Study finds prostate cancer test may expose men to unnecessary treatment (Kelly Brewington, 8/31/09, Baltimore Sun)

Most men diagnosed with prostate cancer in the last two decades never needed to know they had the disease, exposing them to treatment that can do more harm than good, according to a new study. [...]

"Just the diagnosis of cancer causes a fair amount of anxiety--no one wants to be given that diagnosis needlessly," said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a researcher from Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, and the study's lead author. "The bigger problem is being given treatment that can't help you, but all of our treatments can hurt you."

Yet they insist that rationalizing health care requires more "preventive" medicine....

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WALLY'S GOTTA BEEF:

‘Sam’s Club’ Republican Pawlenty Bids for 2012 (Albert R. Hunt , 8/30/09, Bloomberg)

[Tim Pawlenty] has built a reputation as a blue-collar conservative -- his dad was a truck driver, and associates say he’s much more comfortable hunting or fishing with his pals than hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. He advocates a more modern, inclusive Republican Party -- a “party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club” -- that stresses lower taxes and entrepreneurial initiatives while eschewing divisive and exclusive politics and policies.

He wants to run for president in 2012 and this fall will establish a federal political action committee to finance trips around the country. He’ll then have to start spending more time with wealthy donors as well as grassroots Republicans.

Although a big-tent Republican, he has impeccable conservative credentials. He is an evangelical Christian and has been happily married for 22 years to the same spouse, who even Democrats say is a political asset. He is consistently anti- abortion, pro-gun on the Second Amendment and against gay marriage.

He brings an almost Jack Kemp-like fervor to cutting marginal tax rates; an important predicate for any presidential run may be how Pawlenty handles a recommendation from a task force he appointed that the state replace some corporate and individual taxes with consumption levies.

His emphasis on taxes rankles many Minnesota Democrats. “There is a long line of progressive Republican governors in Minnesota who are big supporters of education,” says Walter Mondale, the former vice president and U.S. senator. “He is much more interested in tax-cutting and has broken with that tradition.”

The GOP has an embarrassment of riches for 2012.

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HERE'S A CONTEST FOR YOU...:

Obama keeps Bush nominees in top posts (TOM RAUM, 8/31/09, AP)

Along with Gates and Bernanke, they include:

- Sheila Bair as holdover chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. She has played a major role in the management of the financial crisis. A one-time unsuccessful candidate for a Kansas House seat, Bair was first appointed by Bush in June 2006. Forbes Magazine ranks her as the second most powerful woman in the world behind German chancellor Angela Merkel.

- Ray LaHood, a former congressman from Illinois, as transportation secretary. He was elected as part of the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994 and was so trusted by both Republicans and Democrats that he was selected to preside over the House during the impeachment vote against President Bill Clinton.

- Former Rep. John McHugh from upstate New York, as Army secretary. McHugh was known by his House colleagues for an even temperament and willingness to work with Democrats.

- Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who was a Mormon missionary in China in his youth, as ambassador to China.

- Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian, as director of the National Institutes of Health.

Unlike the others on the list, Collins is not a Republican and worked in the Obama presidential campaign. But he doesn't fit the usual mold of liberal Democrat as portrayed by many Republicans.

...how many days until the first accusation from the Left that Mr. Obama is George H. W. Bush's secret love child? The administration is too big a train wreck for the Left to take any responsibility.

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DEATH GRIP:

Live Free, Die Free: The Final Exit Network, a right-to-die organization, battles government euthanasia accusations. (Adam Case, 8/31/09, In These Times)

The GBI alleges that four Final Exit volunteers not only provided suicide-related information to John Celmer of Cummings, Ga., but assisted in his death. After Celmer’s death, the state began a sting operation.

An undercover agent contacted the group and identified himself as a patient with pancreatic cancer. According to an affidavit given by the agent, two volunteers held Celmer’s hand as he breathed in helium from a tank with a hood cinched tightly over his head, causing death by asphyxiation. “This would have prevented John Celmer the ability to pull off the hood had he changed his mind about dying,” the affadavit states.

Final Exit Network denies the charge. “Anybody who wants to take off the bag can take off the bag. We are holding a person’s hand out of compassion only, so they are in touch with another human being when they die,” says Jerry Dincin, president of the Final Exit Network. “It’s more like holding the hand of a child in a very nice way.”

While you murder them.

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ONE DIVIDED BY TWO IS ONE:

An Update on C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures" (Lawrence M. Krauss, 8/31/09, Scientific American)

Ultimately, science is at best only consistent with a God that does not directly intervene in the daily operations of the cosmos, certainly not the personal and ancient gods associated with the world’s great religions. Even though, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, most people who call themselves religious tend to adhere to only those bits and pieces from scripture that appeal to them, by according undue respect for ancient religious beliefs in general, we nonetheless are suggesting that they are on par with conclusions that have been drawn from centuries of rational empirical investigation.

Snow hoped for a world that is quite different from how we live today, where indifference to science has, through religious fundamentalism, sometimes morphed into open hostility about concepts such as evolution and the big bang.

The problem for Snow and Mr. Krauss is that the more we know the more science converges on the ancient wisdom of the "intellectuals" of The Two Cultures and the more misguided the intellectuals of their own sort appear to be. With even leading Darwinists espousing intelligent design theories and the geocentrism of modern physics, we're pretty much back to the One culture.

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LDP LITE:

Rise of a New Era in Japan (YUKA HAYASHI, 8/31/09, WSJ)

[T]he DPJ faces skepticism from voters ambivalent about change. The party has offered few specifics on how it plans to pay for its initiatives.

"What the party is saying sounds impossible," said Kozue Murakami, 34, a stay-at-home mother who took her infant son to the polls. Pointing to her son, she said if the DPJ fails to finance its policies, "We citizens have to take the burden, and these children are the ones who will have to take up the slack."

Despite its mandate, the DPJ may go slowly in policy shifts.

It's the latest democratic trend, change no one believes in.

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BUILDING ON PAST FAILURE:

Obama’s health care tactics just like those he used in state Senate in 2004 (LYNN SWEET AND DAVE McKINNEY, 8/31/09, Chicago Sun-Times)

Barack Obama, deflecting criticism of his top agenda item to deal with the health care crisis, accuses opponents of "fear-mongering," telling lies and miscasting his proposal as "socialized medicine."

That wasn't President Obama in recent weeks, as the health care debate has been heating up in Congress and in town halls across the country. That was then Illinois State Sen. Obama, arguing on the floor of the Illinois Senate on May 19, 2004. If the themes sound familiar, it's because Obama is mustering some of the same rhetoric in 2009 he used in 2004. [...]

If the past is prologue, the episode involving Obama's successful bid to pass what became the "Adequate Health Care Task Force" could be instructive. Obama won on a party-line vote.

Obama ultimately watered down the original bill because the insurance industry feared that the state was going to mandate coverage. Instead, Obama called for a task force to study coverage options, cost containment and portability of coverage, among other items. [...]

The task force Obama helped create took shape in August 2005 and issued a final report to then-Gov. Blagojevich and the General Assembly in January 2007.

The group's basic findings -- that Illinois essentially should adopt a form of universal health care coverage and employers should help foot the bill -- wound up being incorporated into Blagojevich's ill-fated bid later that spring to impose a gross-receipts tax on businesses. That tax proposal withered, effectively killing discussion on universal health care for the remainder of time Blagojevich was in office.

He can definitely get a bipartisan bill to study the issue into oblivion.

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JAMES CARROLL IS THE LAST PERSON YOU'D LOOK TO FOR MORAL CLARITY...:

Cheney Wins (James Carroll, 8/31/09, Daily Beast)

The Obama administration insists that its version of rendition will be supervised and handled legally, if not necessarily humanely. But rendition is itself the revelation: a mechanism that allows for torture means torture lives on. No matter how you cut it, this bypassing of U.S. jurisdictions, protections, and official American standards of conduct and accountability, even for the sake of urgent information, reeks of ends-justify-means moral bankruptcy. Score one for Dick Cheney—a final victory.

...but even he ought to recognize that he isn't arguing against "means-ends" but for a different "means-ends". His end is that we not torture and his means is that we even allow successful terrorist attacks instead. Mr. Cheney's is that we prevent terrorist attacks even if it requires torturing the occasional terrorist. The one gives pride of place to concerns about evil-doers' physical and mental comfort, the other elevates innocent lives above such sensibilities. Once viewed through this corrected lens it's easy to see why torture is so readily accepted in democracies.

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AND YET...:

Becoming Close: The Geography of Friendship (Allison Aubrey, 8/31/09, NPR: Morning Edition)

In both cases, what drew these friends together in the first place was proximity — being in the same place at the same time. They also shared a common race or heritage.

So, are those two factors really enough to spark a friendship? Bruce Sacerdote, a researcher at Dartmouth College who studies economics and society, says the answer seems to be yes.

"I think having that shared background and the random chance meeting certainly have big impacts on who your friends are," Sacerdote says. He says these early college friendships can even have big impacts on whom you marry, where you live and what you do.

Several sociology studies, some going back decades, point to this proximity or "distance" effect. In Sacerdote's own research, he studied e-mail exchanges among students on his campus. The e-mails were stripped of personal identification and content, as he was only looking to analyze the volume of e-mails.

He then correlated the number of e-mails with factors such as race, hometown, Greek system or fraternity membership, whether students went to private or public high school, and the distance they lived from each other in college housing.

His study found that race and distance were the key determinants.

...university administrators lean heavily towards closing fraternities and moving upper classmen into off-campus apartments, effectively atomizing the population.

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YOUR FLESH-CREEPING TALE OF THE DAY:

Macaulay Culkin is the father of Michael Jackson's son Blanket (Urmee Khan, 31 Aug 2009, Daily Telegraph)

Culkin, who is now 29, became friends with Jackson after he rose to fame in the 1990 with the film Home Alone.

A source told the Sun: "But Jackson and Culkin were best friends. He was one of the few people Jackson really trusted and Mack never let him down.

"Really, Jackson idolised him - that's why he asked Mack to donate sperm.

"Deep down, I think he always wished Mack was his son. Creating Blanket was the next best thing."

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THE ESSENTIAL DILEMMA...:

Environmentalists Slow to Adjust in Climate Debate (David A. Fahrenthold, 8/31/09, Washington Post)

It seems that environmentalists are struggling in a fight they have spent years setting up. They are making slow progress adapting a movement built for other goals -- building alarm over climate change, encouraging people to "green" their lives -- into a political hammer, pushing a complex proposal the last mile through a skeptical Senate.

Even now, these groups differ on whether to scare the public with predictions of heat waves or woo it with promises of green jobs.

...is that--besides a more direct gas tax being preferable--all of the good arguments are on the other side of the political aisle:

The Pigovian: Taxing consumption rather than income

The Capitalist: The creative destruction of forcing the transition away from the petroleum economy

and

The Liberationist: Depriving the rotten--almost without exception--regimes that pump oil of the power that props them up

MORE:
Wahhabism and Saudi Power (Dr. Irfan Al-Alawi, 8/31/09, Hudson Institute)

The Saudi Arabian kingdom could be the poster child for the Middle East as an area ruled by despotic governments that deprive their people of basic human rights.

The Saudi state and the royal family have not been directly and publically exposed as international terror financiers, although officially-subsidized Saudi charities and global missionary (da’wa) institutions have been identified as complicit in terrorism. In addition, the royal family includes factions that conceal their support, but still contribute to extremist violence. Funding of terrorism from Saudi Arabia continues, but now mainly originates from individuals as well as from charities and agencies that have evaded scrutiny. Aside from the terroristic violence visited on Shias and other minorities, Saudi Arabia itself is curiously immune from major terrorism, except against foreigners. The Wahhabi cult and its enablers prefer to export their worst fanatics to countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Terrorists who attempt to disrupt life in the kingdom itself are imprisoned and re-educated.

But neither authoritarianism nor human rights violations stops Western money from flowing to the Saudi royal family.

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THE WICKER MAN:

Missing Richard Nixon (PAUL KRUGMAN, 8/31/09, NY Times)

Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy’s life mention his regret that he didn’t accept Richard Nixon’s offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today’s health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side.

But it’s a bad analogy, because today’s political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.

Indeed, Richard Nixon was our last liberal president.

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EXCEPT THEY NEED TO BE UNIVERSAL AND MANDATORY, LIKE SEAT BELTS:

The Breathalyzer Behind the Wheel (PHILIP J. COOK and MAEVE E. GEARING, 8/31/09, NY Times)

People driving while intoxicated still cause about 13,000 deaths a year in the United States. And of the 1.4 million arrests made, one-third involve repeat offenders. The greatest potential of ignition interlocks is to reduce this recidivism. [...]

A person who has been drinking might naturally think of fooling the device by persuading a sober person to start the engine, but that is not enough to subvert the system, because the device requires breath samples while the person drives — at random intervals of five minutes to an hour. (At least one company is also integrating cameras with the interlocks to photograph the driver when he provides a breath sample.) The unit keeps a log of all tests, and it is sealed so that any attempts at tampering can be detected.

Ignition-interlock devices are not perfectly effective; a drunk can often borrow another car. But in one recent study they were found to reduce repeat drunk-driving offenses by 65 percent. If they were widely installed, the devices would save up to 750 lives a year, a recent National Highway Transportation Safety Administration report estimated.

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ALTHOUGH THE DISPOSITIVE ACCOUNT...:

A Clash of Camelots: Within months of J.F.K.’s death, the president’s widow asked William Manchester to write the authorized account of the assassination. He felt he couldn’t refuse her. Two years later, nearly broken by the task, Manchester found himself fighting a bitter, headline-making battle with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy over the finished book. The author chronicles the toll Manchester’s 1967 best-seller, The Death of a President, exacted—physically, emotionally, and financially—before it all but disappeared. (Sam Kashner, October 2009, Vanity Fair)

It has never gone away, the nightmare of November 22, 1963. Each time one revisits the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, “one hopes for once the story will be different—the car swerves, the bullets miss, and the splendid progress continues. But each time, like a recurrent nightmare, the handsome head is shattered,” as Gore Vidal wrote in his World Journal Tribune review of William Manchester’s highly detailed, passionate, and greatly beleaguered account, The Death of a President.

Of all the books written about the Kennedy assassination—by some counts more than 2,000—the one book commissioned by the Kennedys themselves and meant to stand the test of time has virtually disappeared. The fight over Manchester’s book—published on April 7, 1967, by Harper & Row after more than a year of bitter, relentless, headline-making controversy over the manuscript—nearly destroyed its author and pitted him against two of the most popular and charismatic people in the nation: the slain president’s beautiful grieving widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. And the struggle would bring to both Jackie and Bobby a public-relations nightmare. [...]

Beset by writers clamoring for interviews, Jacqueline decided to designate one to produce the official story of the assassination. In part, she wanted to stop Jim Bishop, a syndicated columnist living in Florida, who was already preparing a book. He was the author of The Day Lincoln Was Shot and a just-finished book, A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, but according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and special assistant to Kennedy, the First Lady considered Bishop a “hack” who asked too many personal questions. She preferred that no book be written, but as that was impossible, she went in search of an author. [...]

By the second anniversary of the assassination, Manchester began to crack. “I had no appetite—for food, for beauty, for life. I slept fitfully; when I did drift off, I dreamt of Dallas. I was gripping my Esterbrook [fountain pen] so hard that my thumb began to bleed under the nail. It became infected … marring the manuscript pages with blood.” He stopped driving because he didn’t trust his reflexes. Finally, on November 22, 1965, he found himself writing the sentence “Oswald, surrounded by over 70 policemen, was murdered in the basement of the Dallas jail,” when his hand stopped moving. He couldn’t go on. “This is Camus,” he would eventually write. “This is the theatre of the absurd.”

Four days later, he was admitted to a Portland, Connecticut, hospital, suffering from nervous exhaustion, which gave rise to rampant rumors in Washington—that he had fallen into catatonic schizophrenia, that he had fallen in love with Jacqueline Kennedy, that he had fallen completely apart. Manchester’s doctor even received an anonymous phone call saying that he had died in Mexico City. Hearing the rumor, Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler exclaimed, “We’ve killed him!” But after 12 days, Manchester asked for his typewriter and his files to be brought to him, and he finished the book in the hospital, where he remained for eight more weeks.

The final manuscript, which Manchester had titled The Death of Lancer (Kennedy’s Secret Service code name), was l,201 pages—380,000 words. He wrote to Bobby Kennedy upon its completion, “When I awoke this morning I felt as though I had emerged from a long, dark tunnel.” He made four copies and packed them into a suitcase, which weighed 77 pounds, and on March25, 1966, he boarded a Trailways bus for New York and hand-delivered the first copy to Evan Thomas at Harper & Row. He dropped another copy off with Don Congdon, and then, with Thomas at his side, the remaining copies were delivered to Robert Kennedy’s Manhattan office. Angie Novello, Robert’s secretary, and Pam Turnure, Jacqueline’s private secretary, brought Manchester to the Kennedy suite at the Carlyle, No. 18E, where they toasted the completion of the book.

It was finally a glorious spring for William Manchester. The reactions of his first readers were ecstatic. Back home in Connecticut, he got a phone call from Evan Thomas: “This is the finest book I’ve read in 20 years here,” his editor told him. “I couldn’t stop crying, but I couldn’t stop reading.” Cass Canfield wrote to Manchester, “A work of unusual distinction and great power. It will be in demand long after you and I have disappeared from the scene.” Schlesinger wrote in a six-page memorandum, which he sent to Robert Kennedy, Evan Thomas, and Manchester, “I think that this is a remarkable and potentially a great book. The research, the feeling, the narrative power, the evocation of personality and atmosphere, much of the writing—all are superb.”

That was the good news. The bad news, as his editor informed him, was that neither Jacqueline nor Robert would read the manuscript. It would only open up painful memories, Robert had explained, so he delegated his and his sister-in-law’s right of approval to two trusted Kennedy aides, Ed Guthman and John Seigenthaler. Richard Goodwin, the poetry-loving speechwriter and adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, would also weigh in.

Manchester thought he was finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but it turned out it was the light of an oncoming train.

Guthman, Robert Kennedy’s press secretary, had left the Justice Department and was now national editor at the Los Angeles Times. Seigenthaler, “the blond, tough editor of The Tennessean,” was Robert Kennedy’s closest friend. And Dick Goodwin, the rumpled, summa cum laude graduate of Tufts and Harvard Law School, had worked in the Justice Department as an investigator into the television quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. After the president’s death, Goodwin continued as a speechwriter for President Johnson, but Senator Kennedy also came to rely upon him. Coincidentally, Goodwin and Manchester were neighbors at the time in Middletown, as Goodwin had accepted a two-year fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan.

Thomas worked with Guthman and Seigenthaler, who provided him with long memos about their concerns. Their main objection, which Thomas shared, was Manchester’s unflattering depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson, Thomas felt, was portrayed as a rawboned boor, too eager to take over on Air Force One the day of the assassination. If Bobby sought the nomination from his party in the 1968 election, the book’s less than flattering portrayal of Johnson would look opportunistic. On May 16, 1966, after reading the manuscript for a third time, Thomas wrote to the two Kennedy friends that he didn’t want Robert Kennedy to be hurt by association with Manchester’s book, which he found, “in part, gratuitously and tastelessly insulting to Johnson.” He suggested that Manchester had become “so deeply involved in this tragic narrative that he could not resist turning it into a magic fairy tale”—Jack the Lancer, “all pure Camelot,” versus “the Texans in their polka dot dresses and bow ties.”

Most troubling to the early readers was “the deer-hunting incident”—a scene described by Jacqueline that opened the original manuscript. On a visit to the Johnson ranch, along the Pedernales River, eight days after the election, Johnson took the president-elect deer-hunting, initiating him into the blood sport. “At 6 a.m. they turned out by the ranch house, Johnson in weather beaten cowboy clothes, Kennedy in a checked sports jacket and slacks. They left in Johnson’s white Cadillac, zooming and jouncing across the fields, and Kennedy was forced to shoot his deer.… To Kennedy,” Manchester wrote, “shooting tame game was not sport, and he had tried to bow out gracefully.” The scene underscored the implication that Texas and its culture of violence were factors in the assassination. Manchester, when asked to delete the scene, refused to do so, but he did plow it further back into the narrative, which diminished its power. Still, the implication remained that “a Texas murder had made a Texan President,” in the words of Jay Epstein, who would later write Inquest, about the Kennedy assassination.

Dick Goodwin joined the jury, poring over the manuscript, which he praised as “a masterful achievement.” He advocated only three changes: to begin with, a new title. It was Goodwin who suggested the elegant The Death of a President. He also suggested excising a quote by Mrs. Kennedy and shortening the ending of the book by five pages, all of which Manchester agreed to do.

...is Gerald Posner's Case Closed:

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RUN AS ROSS:

Focus on Ind. Gov. Daniels sparks White House talk (MIKE SMITH, 8/30/09, AP)

The 60-year-old millionaire governor is equally at home in Washington and Indiana after serving as President George W. Bush's budget director and an adviser to President Ronald Reagan. He earned a reputation in Washington as the "blade" for his efforts to promote fiscal responsibility in Congress and carried that to Indiana, where he took over a state with a $800 million deficit and worked with lawmakers to pass a balanced budget in his first year. The state's fiscal year ended June 30 with a $1.3 billion surplus.

Republican observers believe his track record in Indiana would resonate with voters weary of billions in federal bailouts for banks and the auto industry, and record federal red ink.

"First of all he's a successful governor. Secondly, he is deeply informed on the subject about which deep information is now particularly needed, and that is budgeting," said conservative commentator George Will. "Third, he has an all-purpose general intelligence, and fourth, he is funny. He is a witty man and a graceful writer."

Daniels is popular with voters, winning Indiana easily in a year in which Barack Obama gave Democrats their first presidential victory in the state in 40 years. And he doesn't hesitate to speak his mind, criticizing his own party for being too placid and putting politics above policy and saying the GOP needs to get in touch with average citizens — something he excels at. [...]

Daniels' businesslike approach to state government — including a highly criticized move to privatize many state welfare eligibility functions and a 75-year lease of the Indiana Toll Road to a foreign consortium — has caught the eyes of other states looking for savings and revenue-generating ideas.

His philosophies and potential appeal to the GOP have been the focus of articles in National Review magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He was an hour-long guest on C-SPAN, and delivered a weekly radio address for the GOP, criticizing Obama's "cap and trade" energy policy as too costly.

It's the perfect climate--again--for an uber-wonky deficit hawk who wants to run DC more like a business.

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WERE THEY PAYING ANY ATTENTION LAST CYCLE?:

The Long-Distance Runner: While other 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls crash, burn, and sputter, Mitt Romney has quietly been raising millions, casting himself as a New Hampshire son, keeping cozy with the NRA, and otherwise perfecting his Mr. Perfect approach. (Sasha Issenberg, August 30, 2009, Boston Globe Magazine)

When Mitt Romney strode onstage just past noon on Thursday, February 7, 2008, many of those attending CPAC did not know that he was no longer a candidate for president. The basement of Washington’s Omni Shoreham hotel is deep out of cellphone range, and so the news that had popped up on blogs 20 minutes earlier -- that Romney would use his speech to withdraw -- barely moved the ballroom, then featuring a panel discussion on books by Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, and Ayn Rand. “Mitt! Mitt! Mitt! Mitt!” the crowd cheered upon Romney’s arrival.

The day before, Romney had gathered his senior staff in a conference room in his Boston headquarters to assess his options after Super Tuesday. He had carried all but one of the day’s caucus states, evidence that he had at long last won over conservative activists. But, with the exception of Massachusetts, he had lost the big-population states -- California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey -- which gave their delegates to John McCain, and whose demographics augured poorly for Romney’s ability to build a broad base of support.

Romney enjoys watching debates play out in front of him, and he invited aides to make the case for fighting on. Even another month as a candidate could help Romney establish a national constituency as an alternative to McCain and allow him to quit the race as undisputed runner-up in a party that has long recognized rank. (The Republican nominees in 1980, 1988, and 1996 had each finished second in the previous open primary season, as McCain had in 2000.) But Romney’s advisers were convinced that former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who had tangled with Romney for the votes of social conservatives, would make his own bid for that role.

“Even under the rosiest scenario, it was hard to see how the data worked out,” says Phil Musser, a senior adviser who had by then left the campaign. “He was cleareyed about the math and what continuing meant for his wallet, in order to keep up a long fight with a slim chance of success.”

Romney ended the meeting and went home to Belmont to write a speech for CPAC, while a group of aides decamped, as they often did in the evenings, for burgers and beer at the North End’s Waterfront Cafe. Eventually spokesman Madden’s BlackBerry buzzed with a draft from Romney. Staying in the race, he had concluded, would only weaken McCain’s prospects against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. “In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” Romney had written.

Romney returned to his office the following week in a T-shirt and jeans, ready to travel to his California home. From there, Romney’s staff informed McCain’s, he would be willing to travel to Arizona for a formal endorsement ceremony. But McCain’s camp volunteered their candidate, campaigning that day in Rhode Island, for an immediate photo op in Boston. Romney wavered about doing it so quickly -- he held a ticket for a middle seat on a JetBlue flight later that day and hesitated about paying the cancellation fee -- but was flattered that McCain would show deference and come to him. Hours later, after postponing his flight and changing into a suit, Romney met with McCain privately for 15 minutes and asked what he could do. McCain made a standard request: He entreated Romney to campaign for him and other Republican candidates. Then the two walked out in front of an American flag and made it official.

It was an early indication that Romney’s long-term strategy would be undiverted by the grudges and pique that often endure among rivals. When McCain found himself in a similar scenario against George W. Bush eight years earlier, he had prolonged the end of his flailing campaign, projected a visible discomfort when he finally endorsed, and participated in a “shadow convention” that drew attention away from Bush’s nomination. Romney decided to be a good soldier.

“That we just put down to him being smart,” says Mark Salter, a McCain adviser who was among Romney’s most vehement detractors during the primaries. “He got out and then graciously said, ‘Put me to work.’ And I don’t think he turned down anything we asked him to do.”

The brutal reality is that unless Mr. Romney converts to Catholicism or becomes a Baptist he has no shot. He's seeking the nomination of a party in which many don't consider him a fellow Christian. John McCain has already demonstrated that "skip IA, win NH, lose SC" is not a viable strategy.

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ASSUME THE POSITION:

Zero Of The Lions (George Plimpton, 9/0764, Sports Illustrated)

As a football player, the zero wedged unheroically at left between the broad backs of Nick Pietrosante (33) and Jim Gibbons (80) of the Detroit Lions is a nothing who even keeps his helmet on because it hurts his ears to pull it off. He is the author, and he is about to take the field for the climax of what began as no more than a Walter Mitty daydream. He had long wondered—as has every follower of the sport—what it would feel like to quarterback a professional football team. Sports Illustrated approached the Detroit Lions, who were willing to oblige him before several thousand fans in their big preseason scrimmage. What follows is his account of the smashing career of the most naive, inept, befuddled, tolerated and unnerved quarterback that pro football has ever known[...]

Raymond Berry, the knowledgeable Baltimore end, once told me that I would survive a scrimmage if I played his position (out on the flank) and was sure to stay out of what he referred to as the "pit"—a designation that often came to mind just before my participation in scrimmages. It was an area, as he described it, along the line of scrimmage, perhaps 10 yards deep, where at the centering of the ball the Neanderthal struggle began between the opposing linemen. The struggle raged within a relatively restricted area that was possible to avoid. Berry himself, when he told me this, had wandered into the pit only three times in his career—coming back to catch poorly thrown buttonhook passes falling short—and he spoke of each instance as one might speak of a serious automobile accident. The particulars were embalmed in his memory in absolute clarity: that year, in that city, at such-and-such a game, during such-and-such a quarter, when so-and-so, the quarterback, threw the ball short, his arm jogged by a red-dogging linebacker, so that Berry had to run out of his pattern back toward the scrimmage line so many yards to catch it, and it was so-and-so, the 290-pounder, who reached an arm out of the ruck of the pit and dragged him down into it.

"One thing to remember when you do get hit," Berry told me in his soft Texas accent, "is to try to fall in the foetus position. Curl up around the ball, and keep your limbs from being extended, because there'll be other people coming up out of the pit to see you don't move any, and one of them landing on an arm that's outstretched, y'know, can snap it."

"Right," I said.

"But the big thing is just stay out of that area."

"Sure," I said.

But when I arrived to train with the Lions at Cranbrook I disregarded his advice. What I had to try to play was quarterback, because the essence of the game was involved with that position. The coaches agreed, if reluctantly, and after the front office had made me sign some papers absolving them of any responsibility, I became the "last-string" quarterback, and thus stood in Berry's pit each time I walked up behind the center to call signals. He was right, of course. One of the first plays I called at Cranbrook landed me in the pit. It was a simple hand-off play. Opposite me across the line the linebackers were all close up, shouting, "Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!" which is one of the Lion code cries to red-dog, to rush the quarterback. When the snapback came I fumbled the ball, gaping at it, mouth ajar, as it rocked back and forth gaily at my feet, and I flung myself on it, my subconscious shrilling, "Foetus! Foetus!" as I tried to draw myself in like a frightened pill bug, and I heard the sharp strange whack of gear, the grunts—and then a sudden weight whooshed the air out of me.

It was Dave Lloyd, a 250-pound linebacker, who got through the line and got to me. A whistle blew and I clambered up, seeing him grin inside his helmet, to discover that the quick sense of surprise that I had survived was replaced by a pulsation of fury that I had not done better. I swore lustily at my clumsiness, hopping mad, near to throwing the ball into the ground, and eager to form a huddle to call another play and try again. The players were all standing up, some with their helmets off, many with big grins, and I heard someone calling, "Hey, man, hey, man!" and someone else—John Gordy, I think, because he said it all the time—called out, "Beautiful, real beautiful." I sensed then that an initiation had been performed, a blooding ceremony. Wayne Walker said, "Welcome to pro ball." Something in the tone of it made it not only in reference to the quick horror of what had happened when I fumbled but in appreciation that I had gone through something that made me, if tenuously, one of them, and they stood for a while on the field watching me savor it.

But the trouble was that the confidence that came with being blooded did not last long. After 10 minutes, kneeling on the sidelines quaking with eagerness to be called again, one would feel it begin to seep away, and the afternoon would be gone, and when the night came, in the cubicle-sized rooms of the boys'-school dormitory where we slept, what was left would edge completely away, skirting the discomfiture and insecurity that waited, as palpable as cat burglars, to move in.

It made sleep at night difficult to come by—a problem not so much for me as for the rookies, who had their careers at stake. Frank Imperiale, in the daylight hours trying for an offensive guard position, told me that it was often 4 o'clock before he could get to sleep. He would lie and listen to the hands of the big clocks in the corridors click forward every minute, which I had noticed too, audibly, like post-office boxes clicking shut, and he would count from one click to the next, trying to match them to the count of 60. He got expert at it, mumbling his numbers in the darkness. There were variations he could switch to. His room was next to a latrine, which had a row of urinals that flushed automatically every 53 or 83 seconds, I forget which, and Imperiale would count the seconds off to whichever number it was, and when he got there a low moan of machinery would rise from next door and culminate in a harsh flush of water. Mainly Imperiale kept at his numbers to keep his mind off football and his chances of making the team [he did not] and to bore himself to sleep. But every once in a while his mind's eye would fill with a vision, always the same: an enormous phantom lineman opposite him on the line of scrimmage, down in his crouch, the hard eyes staring out from his helmet, and when Imperiale launched himself at the figure he did so with such an effort to establish contact, muscles straining, that in his bed he suddenly felt pounds lighter, not far from levitating himself completely, sailing up off the bed stiff as an ironing board, and then with a gasp he would collapse back, the sweat beginning to flow. He would blink his eyes open and shut to remove the image.

Imperiale had the fortune, nonetheless, of having a single illusory opponent to take care of. Mine, either in the closeness of my dormitory room or in my mind's eye as I sat gloomily on the bench at Pontiac, gaping vacantly out at the field where the contests were concluding, came in great numbers, cliffs of defensive linemen, toppling toward me, calling out, "Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!" nearly loud enough to drown out, but not quite, the schoolmaster's pawky voice whispering close at hand, "Son, do this, son, do that," manifestations of insecurity so discomfiting that to cease being a captive audience to them I ripped off my helmet, despite the fact that game time was only minutes away, and let the outside noise of the crowd wash over me.

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HE LIKES PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION SO MUCH HE TURNED HIS PRESIDENCY INTO ONE:

A Scary Season For Obama (David S. Broder, August 30, 2009 , Washington Post)

I badly misjudged the broad public reaction to the angry August congressional town meetings. Instead of provoking a pro-Obama backlash, as I had expected, the town halls, amplified on sometimes hostile cable channels and talk radio, spread disquiet about what the president has in mind. And Obama's patient, didactic responses have not quieted the reaction, let alone built fresh support for a vitally needed overhaul of our expensive, dysfunctional health system.

With congressional Democrats increasingly divided between moderates nervous about the cost of reform and liberals adamant that it not be compromised, it will take a major presidential push to get this effort back on track. But the coming weeks will find Obama more than distracted by growing challenges in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. [...]

Meantime, an implacable and opportunistic Republican opposition savors the prospect of victories in off-year gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

As Washington mourns the death of Edward Kennedy, a rested but sobered president faces the toughest times he has yet encountered.

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IF DEMOCRATS WERE DERANGED BY BUSH V. GORE...:

The Paranoid Style in Iranian Politics (ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN , Tehran Bureau)

The conspiratorial interpretation of politics is not, of course, unique to Iran. In fact, the title of this essay is borrowed from Richard Hofstadter’s classic “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Published nearly thirty years ago, that article described how throughout American history nativistic groups have claimed that Washington was being subverted by foreign conspirators — at times by Freemasons, at other times by Roman Catholics, at yet other times by Jews, and, in more recent times, by International Communists, such as General Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren. Similarly, fearful politicians in Britain have been known to conjure up a variety of fantastic conspiracies — all the way from the Luddite-Jacobin plot during the Napoleonic Wars, to the Zionist “manipulation” of the 1908 revolution in the Ottoman Empire, and, more recently, to the KGB’s “control” of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Such paranoia not only sees plots everywhere but views them as the main force of history. “According to this style history is a conspiracy,” writes Hofstadter, “set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power.”

Although the paranoid style can be found in many parts of the world, it is much more prevalent in modern Iran than in most Western societies. In the West, fears of plots, both real and imaginary, emerge in times of acute insecurity — during wars, revolutions, or economic crises. In Iran, they have been pervasive throughout the last half century. In the West, they tend to be confined to fringe groups, causing more ridicule than concern in the mainstream. In Iran, however, the paranoid style permeates society, the mainstream as much as the fringe, and cuts through all sectors of the political spectrum — royalists, nationalists, Communists, and, of course, Khomeinists. What stirs ridicule in Iran is not the style itself but the rival reading of the grand “conspiracy.” One man’s particular interpretation becomes for others not ridiculous but a deliberately misleading misinterpretation.

This chapter has three interrelated aims: first, to trace the root causes of the paranoid style in Iran; second, to compare the forms the style takes among the main political streams — among royalists, nationalists, and, most important of all, Khomeinists; and third, to weigh its consequences for contemporary Iran, especially its costs in retarding the development of political pluralism. [...]

[T]his style can be explained by history, especially Iran’s experience of imperial domination: foreign powers — first Russia and Britain, later the United States — have, in fact, determined the principal formations in the country’s political landscape over the last two hundred years.

These key formations include three disastrous wars in the first half of the nineteenth century; the subsequent capitulations in the treaties of Golestan, Turkmanchai, and Paris; the creation of the Tsarist-led Cossack Brigade in 1879; the sale of the tobacco monopoly to a British entrepreneur in 1890; the 1901 D’Arcy concession, which soon led to the establishment of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company; the 1907 Anglo-Russian Agreement, dividing Iran into zones of influence; the 1911 Russian Ultimatum and the consequent Anglo-Russian occupation; and the 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement, designed to make the whole country into a British protectorate.

In the eyes of not only Iranians but also other Europeans, Russia and Britain had in effect incorporated Iran into their empires. It was their diplomats who ruled the country; the shah served as a “mere viceroy.” By the second half of the century, the Qajar shahs could not even designate their successors without the explicit approval of the two imperial representatives.

Imperial influence was also present in Iran’s three military coups: in 1908, 1921, and 1953. In the first, the Cossack Brigade led by its Tsarist officers bombarded the newly established Parliament in an attempt to shore up the faltering Qajar monarchy.

In the second, British officers helped Colonel Reza Khan of the same Cossack Brigade to overthrow the government, paving the way for the demise of the Qajar dynasty and the birth of the Pahlavi state.

In the third, the CIA, together with Britain’s MI6, financed army officers to overthrow a popular prime minister and salvage the Pahlavi throne. These traumatic events naturally led Iranians to conclude that whatever took place in their country was decided by the imperial powers.

This feeling of alienation was further intensified by the wide gap existing between state and civil society — in Persian terms, between the dawlat (government) and mellat (nation); the mamlekat (realm) and ummat (community); the darbar (court) and vatan (country); the hokumat (regime) and mardom (people).

The imperial powers sought local clients, and the elite in turn sought foreign patrons, even foreign citizenship. Ordinary citizens, thus, understandably came to the conclusion that public figures harbored alien “ties” and “connections.” In the words of a typical Iranian historian: “The imperial powers interfered in everything, even the personal affairs of leading statesmen. Absolutely nothing could be done without their permission.”

The link between the imperial powers and local elites was most glaring from 1941 to 1953 — from Reza Shah’s abdication brought about by the Anglo-Soviet invasion to Mohammad Reza Shah’s triumphant return engineered by the CIA. For one thing, this period saw the birth of Iran’s main political movements, especially the Tudeh and the National Front, and a host of gadfly newspapers which were able to openly air such themes as class conflict, national sovereignty, and foreign intervention. For another, the Great Powers immersed themselves in Iranian politics while Iranian politicians actively sought their help.

The shah, convinced that the army and the monarchy would stand or fall together, sought U.S. military aid. Southern politicians — led by Sayyid Ziya, a leading figure in the 1921 coup — obtained British assistance to counter both the shah and their other competitors. The United States considered Sayyid Ziya to be so pro-British as to be “unsuitable” for the premiership. Americans, no less than Iranians, were highly skeptical when British officials, such as Lambton, categorically denied having ties with Sayyid Ziya. Northern aristocrats tried to contain the shah and their southern rivals first by seeking Soviet help, but when they found the Soviets encouraging social revolution in Iran, they turned to the United States, seeking economic, rather than military, assistance.

The Tudeh party, on the other hand, as a radical movement, looked to the Soviet Union as the “champion of the international working class.” Meanwhile, Mosaddeq, leading the middle-class National Front, sought U.S. support against the pro-British aristocrats associated with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, against the shah and the armed forces, against the pro-Soviet Tudeh, and against the northern aristocrats as well as conservative pro-American politicians.

Riding a wave of popularity based on his promise to nationalize oil, Mosaddeq was elected premier in 1951 and promptly took over the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British, refusing to accept nationalization, did their best to discredit Mosaddeq, categorizing him as a “wily Oriental” who was not only “crazy,” “eccentric,” “abnormal,” “unbalanced,” and “unreasonable” but also “demagogic,” “slippery,” “cunning,” “unscrupulous,” “single-mindedly obstinate,” and “opium-addicted.”

“Mosaddeq’s megalomania,” declared the British Embassy in 1952, “is now verging on mental instability. He has to be humoured like a fractious child.” As evidence of Mosaddeq’s “mental instability,” the British ambassador cited his refusal to use the ministerial motorcar and the title “His Excellency.” He concluded that Iran, unlike the rest of Asia, was not yet ready for independence but rather, like Haiti, needed some twenty more years of foreign occupation: “Persia is indeed rather like a man who knows very well that he ought to go to the dentist but is afraid of doing so and is annoyed with anybody who says there is anything wrong with his teeth.”

The British government planted articles with similar themes in the newspapers. For example, the London Times carried a biography of Mosaddeq describing him as “nervously unstable,” “martyr-like,” and “timid” unless “emotionally” aroused. The Observer depicted him as an “incorruptible fanatic,” a xenophobic Robespierre, a “tragic” Frankenstein “impervious to common sense,” and with only “one political idea in his gigantic head.”

To encourage similar views across the Atlantic, the British fed the American press with a steady diet of — to use their own words — “poison too venomous for the BBC.” Typical of such character assassinations was an article in the Washington Post written by the venerable Drew Pearson falsely accusing Hosayn Fatemi, Mosaddeq’s right-hand man, of a host of criminal offenses, including embezzlement and gangsterism. “This man,” Pearson warned, “will eventually decide whether the US has gas rationing, or possibly, whether the American people go into World War III.”

The British, determined to undermine Mosaddeq from the day he was elected premier, refused to negotiate seriously with him. For instance, Professor Lambton, serving as a Foreign Office consultant, advised as early as November 1951 that the British government should persevere in “undermining” Mosaddeq, refuse to reach agreement with him, and reject American attempts to find a compromise solution. “The Americans,” she insisted, “do not have the experience or the psychological insight to understand Persia.”

The central figure in the British strategy to overthrow Mosaddeq was another academic, Robin Zaehner, who soon became professor of Eastern religions and ethics at Oxford. As press attaché in Tehran during 1943-47, Zaehner had befriended numerous politicians, especially through opium-smoking parties. Dispatched back to Iran by MI6, Zaehner actively searched for a suitable general to carry out the planned coup. He also used diverse channels to undermine Mosaddeq: Sayyid Ziya and the pro-British politicians; newspaper editors up for sale; conservative aristocrats who in the past had sided with Russia and America; tribal chiefs, notably the Bakhtiyaris; army officers, shady businessmen, courtiers, and members of the royal family, many of whom outstripped the shah in their fear of Mosaddeq. Helped in due course by the CIA, Zaehner also wooed away a number of Mosaddeq’s associates, including Ayatollah Kashani, General Zahedi, Hosayn Makki, and Mozaffar Baqai.

Baqai, a professor of ethics at Tehran University, soon became notorious as the man who abducted Mosaddeq’s chief of police and tortured him to death. MI6, together with the CIA, also resorted to dirty tricks to undermine the government, one of the more harmless ones being the rumor that “the communists are plotting against Mosaddeq’s life and placing the responsibility on the British.”

It is therefore not surprising that the 1953 coup gave rise to conspiracy theories, including cloak and dagger stories of Orientalist professors moonlighting as spies, forgers, and even assassins. Reality — in this case — was stranger than fiction. These conspiracy theories were compounded by the fact that some Western academics did their best to expurgate from their publications any mention of the CIA and MI6 in the 1953 coup. In fact, recent autobiographies reveal that the shah often subsidized British and American academics whose publications tended to reinforce the court view of modern Iranian history, especially of the 1953 events.

...imagine how crazy a coup would make them?

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KHAMENEI STRIKES BACK:

Tehran Prosecutor Sacked (Muhammad Sahimi, 8/29/09, Tehran Bureau)

Hojjatoleslam Sadegh Larijani, the new chief of the judiciary, has fired Saeed Mortazavi, the notorious Prosecutor General of Tehran and of the Revolutionary Court. Larijani has appointed Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi to replace him.

Mortazavi was responsible for the arrest and torture of many journalists, young bloggers, human rights advocates, political activists and reformist leaders. He was behind the closure of more than 200 newspapers, weeklies, and monthlies.

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THEY HAD TO MAKE IT UGLY TO MAKE IT MODERN:

Lead Us Not Into Penn Station (Ed Driscoll, 8/29/09)

One of the subplots in the first two episodes of Mad Men’s third season (set in mid-1963) involves fictional ad agency Sterling-Cooper’s involvement with the firm that’s leveling Manhattan’s original Penn Station and building modern-day Madison Square Garden and an office high-rise on top of it. Given the folk Marxism (as Arnold Kling would call it) that’s lurking just under the surface of so much of the show’s writing, it seems safe to say that its producers view the nuking of the original 1910-era Penn Station as greedy businessmen and shortsighted developers run amok, along with a railroad that couldn’t care less about its passengers.

The reality, as I wrote back in 2005 over at Tech Central Station, when it appeared a long-delayed successor was on the immediate horizon, is a bit more complex, with plenty of blame to go across both political aisles, and private enterprise, government, and academia, combined...

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NOW THEY CAN DIE IN PEACE:

Japanese govenment crushed in election rout (Richard Lloyd-Parry, 8/30/09, Times of London)

Japan’s ruling conservative party today suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of voters, according to exit polls.

The opposition Democratic Party of Japan is now expected to win 300 of the 480 seats in the lower house of Japan’s Diet, ousting the Liberal Democrats, who have governed Japan for all but 11 months since 1955, according to projections by the major Japanese TV networks. [...]

[M]r Hatoyama has taken an outspoken stand against unfettered international capitalism and promised to abandon the country’s “worship” of the United States.

Sayanora.

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IT WASN'T A REPUBLICAN THAT NUKED HIROSHIMA:

Interrogating the CIA (REUEL MARC GERECHT, 8/30/09, WSJ)

A clever, streetwise classmate of mine at the Central Intelligence Agency's junior officer training program—a former Delta Force officer—quickly and rudely discovered that counterterrorism in the much-vaunted Reagan years wasn't a serious endeavor at Langley. He had original and provocative ideas on using physical force to scare the bejesus out of terrorist suspects who had American blood on their hands. Although the CIA was then filling up with operatives pretending to be engaged against a growing terrorist menace, Langley's counterterrorist data bank and real operational planning were near zero. My friend's ideas were too unsettling. He resigned. By the time I resigned in 1994, CIA counterterrorism had become an inflexible, lumbering creature, incapable of countering the wicked anti-American forces gaining strength in the Middle East.

Fast forward to eight years after 9/11: Has Attorney General Eric Holder damaged the CIA's improved counterterrorist capacity by his decision to employ a special prosecutor to investigate whether crimes were committed by the agency's interrogators? From the moment Barack Obama won the presidency, Langley's use of "enhanced interrogation" was obviously over. The appointment of a prosecutor guarantees that unless the United States is again devastated by a terrorist attack—on a scale greater than 9/11—CIA operatives will certainly decline any future order by a Republican president to interrogate roughly a jihadist. Langley's junior officers may still receive survival and escape training, which is the baptismal font for the agency's enhanced interrogation techniques. But members of al Qaeda will not similarly get to enjoy the experience.

Constrained by new rules and hostile lawyers, can the CIA in the future successfully interrogate uncooperative jihadists, like self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who remained as close-mouthed as a clam when questioned without physical coercion?

Does anyone really think that any Democratic president would eschew torture despite a subsequent attack?

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WITH EUROPE'S POPULATION PROJECTED TO FALL BY ALMOST 200 MILLION BY 2050...:

Bankers watch as Sweden goes negative (Andrew Ward in Stockholm and David Oakley in London, August 27 2009, Financial Times)

[L]ast month, the Swedish Riksbank entered uncharted territory when it became the world’s first central bank to introduce negative interest rates on bank deposits.

Risbank graphic for MarketsEven at the deepest point of Japan’s financial crisis, the country’s central bank shied away from such a measure, which is designed to encourage commercial banks to boost lending.

But, as they contemplate their exit strategies after the extraordinary measures of the past two years, central bankers will be monitoring the Swedish experiment closely.

...how would you sustain positive rates? Such a precipitous decline in the supply of people has to drive down the demand for all sorts of stuff, no? Which means demographics will drive deflation.

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BONGO BACH:

Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ as You’ve Never Heard It (VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, 8/30/09, NY Times)

BACH, though an energetic transcriber of other composers’ music, could never have imagined the stampede of arrangers his own scores would attract in a distant future. His “Goldberg” Variations, written for a two-manual harpsichord in 1742, have been widely coveted since Glenn Gould’s landmark 1955 recording on the piano: interpreted and misinterpreted by pianists, jazz trios, guitarists, accordionists, saxophone quartets and others. Now two harpists and a marimba player have entered the fray with recordings of their own transcriptions.

You have to think that Bach would appreciate the inventiveness of Pius Cheung’s version, billed as the first recording of the “Goldberg” Variations on marimba. With the marimba coming into its own as a solo instrument, it was only a matter of time before an enterprising player laid hands on the work. In booklet notes for the recording, released independently, Mr. Cheung, a young Chinese-Canadian virtuoso, writes that the piece is “incredibly difficult” to play on the instrument. But he surmounts the contrapuntal hurdles and offers a stylish, deeply expressive interpretation notable for its clear voicing, eloquent phrasing and wide range of color and dynamics.

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WHICH IS WHY THE GAS TAX CAN ONLY BE A TEMPORARY SOURCE OF FEDERAL TAX DOLLARS:

He's a driving force in the world of electric cars: Tom Gage, a self-described 'car nut' since childhood, has been advancing the technologies under the hoods of electric vehicles as chief executive of AC Propulsion. (Ken Bensinger, August 30, 2009, LA Times)

A self-described "car nut" since childhood, Gage moved to Georgia to work as a race mechanic after graduating from Stanford University with an engineering degree. After a few years tinkering with turbos and emissions systems, he wiped off the grease, got an MBA and landed a job at Chrysler. There he got his first jolt of electric transportation, working on a program to develop plug-in passenger vehicles. That effort sputtered, and Gage ultimately left Detroit for California to consult on advanced vehicle technologies.

In 1994, he met Alan Cocconi, who had put an electric drivetrain into an old Honda Civic. Driving it, Gage said, "was a life-changing experience for me." Soon after, he "started hanging out at AC Propulsion," Cocconi's company, and worked his way up the ladder. [...]

Gasoline engines can be great for power or for fuel economy, but not both, Gage said. That's a compromise that electric cars don't have to make. He said vehicles running AC Propulsion's drivetrain, called the tzero, can have bullet-like acceleration yet still get from point A to point B for just a few pennies' worth of juice. The only limitation is range, which is rapidly increasing as lithium battery technology improves.

"The most compelling feature is that you don't use petroleum," Gage said. "For many uses, electrics are superior."

Once you crank up the cost of gasoline the transition will be so fast that we'll have to phase in a broad consumption tax to make up the revenues.

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ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, THERE WERE FEWER FELLOW COUNTRYMEN FOR SCROOGE TO HATE:

The truth in black and white: there are too many of us (Rod Liddle, 8/30/09, Times of London)

So immigration, both direct and by proxy, is still the main weapon in our valiant fight to reach the 100m mark around about Easter 2112, by which time we will all be stacked horizontally in warehouses on wooden pallets, like in those weird Japanese hotels, and eating one another.

There are plenty of learned people around who worry that Britons — and Europeans in general — are being rapidly outbred in their homelands and will soon constitute a minority in their “own” countries. I don’t much care, frankly, who is stacked above me snoring on one of those pallets (so long as it is not a Belgian); it is the sheer weight of numbers I find alarming. The quicker the problem of overpopulation can be uncoupled from alarmist racial rhetoric, the more likely we are to address the real problem.

The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) think tank reckons Britain’s population should be somewhere between 17m and 27m, although it has not, to my knowledge, recommended a cull...

Britain's population, for example, was 20 million in the early 1850's, when Dickens wrote Hard Times. And Ebenezer Scrooge was, like Mr. Liddle, a Malthusian:

'I wish to be left alone,' said Scrooge. 'Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned-they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.'

'Many can't go there; and many would rather die.'

'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population..'

Of course, back then Britain at least had a majority living in grinding poverty to "justify" such views. It's a much harder argument to sustain in a society that just moves from one pinnacle of well-being to the next as its population grows. As always, the case against humans depends on wishing them dead, not on any effect from their numbers.

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YOU MISSED ONE NATION:

Time for a Souter-O'Connor Commission (Fred Hiatt, August 30, 2009, Washington Post)

If President Obama has been frustrated in his desire not to look back at Bush-era detention practices, it is because he is caught between two fundamental but seemingly irreconcilable American principles.

On the one hand, this is a nation of laws. If torture violates U.S. law -- and it does -- and if Americans engaged in torture -- and they did -- that cannot be ignored, forgotten, swept away. When other nations violate human rights, the United States objects and insists on some accounting. It can't ask less of itself.

Yet this is also a nation where two political parties compete civilly and alternate power peacefully. Regimes do not seek vengeance, through the courts or otherwise, as they succeed each other.

More than either of those, it's a nation that pursues its foreign affairs with an almost unique savagery. Recall that the "anti-war" side in Iraq proposed maintaining the embargo instead, even though they said it was killing 5,000 children under 5 per month. The notion that a people who happily burn down cities in order to win wars must try guys for pretending to drown a couple terrorists in order to vindicate its legal traditions is absurd.

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THE RENDITION TRADITION:

Obama Will Continue “Shipping Away Prisoners” (Matthew Rothschild, August 25, 2009, The Progressive)

It’s the story, I’m sorry to say, of another Obama betrayal.

When he was campaigning for President, he said we needed to end the practice of “shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries.”

But now Obama has decided to continue the Bush policy—and I’m not going to use the euphemism of rendition, because it’s a policy of kidnapping.

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WHAT TEDDY TAUGHT BARRY

Mubarak, Obama and the US-Cairo thaw (ZVI MAZEL , 8/30/09, Jerusalem Post)

Following his talks with Obama, Mubarak declared that his Cairo speech had removed all doubts concerning the new American policy towards the Muslim world, thus giving Obama Egypt's seal of approval and putting an end to the coolness between the two countries.

After all, in Cairo the American president had given low priority to human rights issues, and the message had been well received by Arab leaders and particularly by Mubarak.

After all, why should a modern liberal care about the freedom of 80 million Egyptians?

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CARL SAGAN HAD A BETTER IDEA:

Man-made volcanoes may cool Earth (Jonathan Leake, 8/30/09, Times of London)

THE Royal Society is backing research into simulated volcanic eruptions, spraying millions of tons of dust into the air, in an attempt to stave off climate change.

All we'd have to do is nuke Assad, Chavez, Kim, & the PRC to achieve the same effect. In addition to which, once we'd done it once no one would ever misbehave again. It's a non-proliferation regime with teeth.

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JUST HAGGLING OVER YOUR PRICE:

Revealed: Lockerbie link to oil exploration deal (Jason Allardyce, 8/30/09, Times of London)

The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal.

Gordon Brown’s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards.

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WITH THE DEATH OF LIBERALISM AS A SET OF IDEAS...:

How will liberals react to Obama maintaining Bush-era security policies? (Ruben Navarrette Jr., 08/28/2009, San Diego Union-Tribune)

They say the older you get, the smarter your parents get. Likewise, it seems, the deeper President Barack Obama gets into his first term, the smarter President George W. Bush gets.

Hard-line liberals will never accept this. They have too much invested in the narrative of Bush-as-incompetent-dolt to make room for the possibility that the Texas Republican got one or two things right in eight years. Nor do they want to believe that the supposedly more enlightened Obama is emulating his predecessor. [...]

So what gives? Here are three options: Either Obama is learning that being president is much more difficult than running for president, or he's a bigger pragmatist than we thought, or he never really believed President Bush was as bad he made him out to be during the campaign.

And whatever brought them to this point, Obama supporters only have two options: Stand by their man, or their principles.

...principle is whatever your leader does.

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ERIC HOLDER WOULD HAVE PREVENTED THAT!:

How a Detainee Became An Asset: Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding (Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate, 8/29/09, Washington Post)

After enduring the CIA's harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency's secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called "terrorist tutorials."

In 2005 and 2006, the bearded, pudgy man who calls himself the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks discussed a wide variety of subjects, including Greek philosophy and al-Qaeda dogma. In one instance, he scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture.

Speaking in English, Mohammed "seemed to relish the opportunity, sometimes for hours on end, to discuss the inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group's plans, ideology and operatives," said one of two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified. "He'd even use a chalkboard at times."

These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.

"KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA's then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.

MORE:
The 'Most Prolific' Detainee: We learned a lot about al Qaeda from KSM, and not by asking nicely. (Thomas Joscelyn, 09/07/2009, Weekly Standard)

On March 1, 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the principal planner of the September 11 attacks, was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. U.S. interrogators quickly went about the business of getting him to talk, and for good reasons. KSM's operatives were already here, inside America, planning attacks.

Shortly after KSM was detained, an Ohio-based truck driver named Iyman Faris was arrested by the FBI. Faris had reportedly been under suspicion beforehand, but U.S. authorities suddenly determined that they had to arrest him. It turned out that Faris, an al Qaeda-trained sleeper agent, had been dispatched to the United States by KSM to plot attacks on landmarks in the New York area, including the Brooklyn Bridge.

Then, in late March, a young Pakistani man named Uzair Paracha was arrested. He had been working out of an office in Manhattan's Garment District for a company owned by his father, Saifullah Paracha. KSM wanted Uzair to facilitate the entry of al Qaeda operatives and use the Parachas' import-export business to smuggle explosives into the United States.

Until this past week, it was not clear how U.S. authorities pieced together the details of this plotting so soon after KSM was captured. But the inspector general's report on the CIA's detainee interrogation program and two other CIA analytical papers--all three of which were released on August 24--fill in the blanks. It is clear now, if it wasn't before, that the CIA's questioning of KSM saved numerous lives, both here and abroad. The inspector general found that KSM "provided
information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Saifullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen whom [KSM] planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States." His "information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris." KSM would become the "most prolific" detainee in the CIA's custody, giving up fellow terrorists and the details of plots around the globe.

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BRING DA' NOISE:

Lester Young: 'The Prez' Still Rules At 100 (Tom Vitale, 8/27/09, NPR)

In the winter of 1959, French photographer Francois Postif interviewed Young in his Paris hotel room less than two months before the saxophonist died. The recording has been passed around from jazz fan to jazz fan.

In it, Young said that even though he became famous with the Count Basie Orchestra, he didn't like big bands.

"I don't like a whole lot of noise — trumpets and trombones," Young says in the recording. "I'm looking for something soft. It's got to be sweetness, man, you dig?"

Related articles by Zemanta

• Lester Young Centennial (thebadplus.typepad.com)
• 50 great moments in jazz: Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit (guardian.co.uk)

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AS THE FATHER WITH THE NAZIS SO THE SON WITH THE COMMIES:

Ted Kennedy's Soviet Gambit: Considering the late senator's complete record requires digging into the USSR's archives. (Peter Robinson, 08.28.09, Forbes)

Kennedy's message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. "The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations," the memorandum stated. "These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign."

Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

First he offered to visit Moscow. "The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA." Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television.

Of course, John shared a lover with Hitler, so just swapping love letters with Andropov doesn't seem so awful.

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IT'S LIKE THEY LOOKED OUT ACROSS THE LANDSCAPE OF RECENT PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY...:

Tax Pledge Is a Target As Deficits, Debt Grow (Lori Montgomery, 8/29/09, Washington Post)

During last year's campaign, President Obama vowed to enact a bold agenda without raising taxes for the middle class, a pledge budget experts viewed with skepticism. Since then, a severe recession, massive deficits and a national debt that is swelling toward a 50-year high have only made his promise harder to keep.

The Obama administration has insisted that the pledge will stand. But the president's top economic advisers have refused to rule out broad-based tax increases to close the yawning gap between federal revenue and government spending and are warning of tough choices ahead.

...and decided to try and replicate every single one of the worst mistakes. Somewhere there must be a gang of plumbers trying to break into GOP hq...

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IT'S WHY GOD GAVE US TV IN THE FIRST PLACE:

'Inspector Lewis' mixes highbrow with lowdown (Mary McNamara, 8/29/09, Chicago Tribune)

Lewis, now an inspector, is back in Oxford, with his own detective sergeant, James Hathaway (Laurence Fox), who, though not as arrogant as Morse, does have a tendency to quote Shakespeare a bit too often for Lewis' taste.

So not only is a viewer treated to the stately spires and cobblestone charm of Oxford, but each episode inevitably imparts some bit of scholarship or other, and a pretty decent mystery too.

On Sunday, Percy Bysshe Shelley is the focus, so brush up on your knowledge of the Romantics, or clues like "Prometheus" (as in "Prometheus Unbound") will whiz right by you. Just so you know, the title of the episode -- "And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea" -- comes from Shelley's "Love's Philosophy," parts of which are repeated a few times with enduring lyricism even as the body count rises. [...]

The next episode makes a U-turn into Wagner, the world of boxing and the fall of East Germany. It would be a, well, crime to say more because the beauty of "Inspector Lewis" is watching how seemingly unconnected incidents emerge as a single series of events that inevitably expose some odd subculture or other, all within the confines of the still-formidable setting of Oxford.

"And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea," written by Alan Plater, is especially well done, with a terrific main conceit, a very believable set of players and a genuine ongoing conversation about the nature of art itself.

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LIBERATION DAY:

An Example for the Future Or an Icon of the Past? (Alec MacGillis and Ann Gerhart, August 29, 2009, Washington Post)

Today, although they control Congress and the White House, Democrats are suffering from a crisis of confidence. Having spent years running from the "liberal" label, many fret over how far to push Kennedy's signal issue, health-care reform that would bring medical insurance to every American -- now the centerpiece of President Obama's domestic agenda.

Kennedy's death this week has left Democrats debating just what made him so successful -- his public embrace of liberalism or his political skill and the relationships he built with opposition lawmakers -- and about whether his approach might be translated to help Democrats regain their footing.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) wants Democrats to renew their commitment to unabashed liberalism. "Voters want the real thing," he said.

American voters in particular don't want the real thing, but what's revealing is that neither do voters in Canada, England, Australia, etc. This is an opportunity for liberals to modernize their views in the way that other Labour/Left parties in the rest of the Anglosphere have.

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DISSENT OF THE GOVERNED:

Reactions to Health Bill Make Some Democrats Wary: In Nebraska, Sen. Nelson Hears Steady Chorus of Opposition to Overhaul; 'My Vote Is Not on Autopilot,' He Says (Janet Adamy, 8/29/09, WSJ)

He and some other Democrats say it now seems more likely Congress will opt for scaled-down health legislation, instead of the broad expansion of insurance coverage President Barack Obama is pushing. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D., Mo.) said he hopes Congress will "punch the reset button," and sees two core principles as vital to a bill: competition to drive insurance costs down and eliminating insurers' ability to deny coverage because of pre-existing health conditions.

A moderate Democrat in a conservative state, Mr. Nelson has been one of the Senate's most skeptical Democrats on lawmakers' proposals to fix the health system. The former insurance-company executive maintains he is undecided on whether he will vote for a health overhaul, and he has criticized proposals to create a public health-insurance plan.

That position prompted liberal groups to hit him with attack ads in Nebraska for not backing the public plan. This month, Mr. Nelson fought back with television ads defending his position, an unusual move since he doesn't face re-election until 2012.

While Democrats were taking jabs at each other, the Nebraska Republican Party was sending emails to thousands of supporters, saying that the Democrats' health proposals would make health care more expensive, raise taxes, increase the federal budget deficit and harm the quality of care Americans receive. Conservative groups distributed details about town-hall meetings and encouraged Republicans to voice their concerns.

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HUMANS OUGHT NOT LIVE BELOW SEA-LEVEL?

Obama vows not to forget lessons of Katrina (PHILIP ELLIOTT, 8/29/09, AP)

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YOU COULD NUKE 'EM AND AMERICANS WOULDN'T BAT AN EYELASH:

Americans worried about Iran, support direct talks and tough sanctions (Eric Fingerhut, August 28, 2009 , JTA)

A new poll shows that Americans are worried about the nuclear aspirations about Iran and support the U.S. doing anything it can to stop the Islamic republic -- from sanctions to direct negotiations.

The Israel Project poll of 800 registered voters, jointly conducted by the Republican Public Opinion Strategies and the Democratic Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, found that 81 percent believe Iran poses a "very" or "somewhat" serious threat to the United States, and 84 percent agreed with the statement "Even with all the problems that America faces at home now, we must still work hard to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons."

---

HIS MIDDLE NAME AIN'T SHLOMO:

4% of Israeli Jews: Obama pro-Israel (GIL HOFFMAN , 8/28/09, Jerusalem Post)

The number of Israelis who see US President Barack Obama's policies as pro-Israel has fallen to four percent, according to a Smith Research poll taken this week on behalf of The Jerusalem Post.

Jimmy Carter had to leave the presidency and reveal his true self to sink that low.

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WELL, THEY'RE SIMILAR OTHER THAN THE CHARISMATIC AND SMART PART ANYWAY:

Colorado 'Republican Obama' Looks to Better the Real Obama (Amanda Ruggeri, 8/28/09, US News: Washington Whispers)

Ryan Frazier, the GOP candidate battling for the seat of Colorado's Sen. Michael Bennet, is young, African-American, tech-savvy, charismatic, and school smart. So it's no surprise that some have dubbed him the "Republican Obama." Watching the prez, the 31-year-old says he's learned what—and what not—to do in campaigns.

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WHAT BETTER WAY TO MEMORIALIZE HIM THAN TO TRAMPLE THE RULE OF LAW?:

Reversal on Senate Succession Stirs Political Storm: Democrats' Push to Let Governor Fill Kennedy's Seat, After Demanding Special Vote in 2004, Draws Accusations of Hypocrisy (JOHN HECHINGER and PHILIP SHISHKIN, 8/28/09, WSJ)

Massachusetts state Sen. Brian A. Joyce, a Democrat who headed the election-laws committee in 2004, agreed. "If we were to allow an appointment, it would be wholly undemocratic," he said. "When you cut through the rhetoric on both sides, it's pure partisan politics."

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THANKS, W:

The Bailout Bonanza: TARP's early returns are impressive. (Daniel Gross, Aug 28, 2009 , Newsweek)

The final cost of TARP will be a fraction of the original $700 billion, and taxpayers are turning a profit from its central component: the Capital Purchase Program.

Paulson's initial efforts, continued by the Wall Street sharpies who succeeded him, had the characteristics of an investment fund. Under the CPP, the government would lend money to banks at 5 percent, through the purchase of preferred shares. As investors in troubled companies do, the government demanded an extra ounce of flesh: warrants, which are the right to buy a stock at a set price. It's like lending money to a financially troubled friend to buy a house, but getting ownership of the kitchen.

The spreadsheets at financialstability.gov document the status of the 667 investments, worth $204.4 billion, made under the CPP. Morgan Stanley, which borrowed $10 billion in October 2008, paid back the cash in June and purchased the warrants for $950 million on Aug. 12, giving taxpayers a 12.7 percent return, according to SNL Financial. For the 22 companies that have bought back shares and warrants, the taxpayer received an annualized return of 17.5 percent—better than most hedge funds have done lately. (Another 15 have repaid part or all of the principal.) Since many of the largest financial institutions have left the program, the 37 "exits" represent 34 percent of the total cash initially disbursed. The bottom line: taxpayers have received $70.3 billion in principal, plus about $10 billion in dividends and warrant payments.

Nice to have had our first president with an MBA when the panic hit. Too bad we had the House Republicans....

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NO ONE GOES THERE ANYMORE, IT'S TOO CROWDED...:

As boycott continues, Glenn Beck's audience swells (Matea Gold, August 27, 2009, LA Times)

An advertising boycott against Fox News host Glenn Beck has succeeded in keeping most major sponsors from running commercials on his show even as the controversial commentator's viewership has grown.

Beck attracted 2.81 million viewers Monday, his third-largest audience since his show launched on Fox News in January, according to Nielsen Media Research data provided by the network. On Tuesday, nearly 2.7 million viewers tuned in, his fifth-largest viewership to date. [...]

[Updated at 4:43 p.m.: Beck posted his second-highest viewership ever Wednesday, attracting more than 3 million viewers for the hour.]

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DON'T THEY HAVE ENOUGH PROBLEMS WITHOUT TURNING FROM THE ANGLOSPHERE TO THE FRENCH/CONTINENTAL MODEL?:

A New Path for Japan (YUKIO HATOYAMA, 8/27/09, NY Times)

Yukio Hatoyama heads the Democratic Party of Japan, and would become prime minister should the party win in Sunday’s elections.

In the post-Cold War period, Japan has been continually buffeted by the winds of market fundamentalism in a U.S.-led movement that is more usually called globalization. In the fundamentalist pursuit of capitalism people are treated not as an end but as a means. Consequently, human dignity is lost.

How can we put an end to unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism, that are void of morals or moderation, in order to protect the finances and livelihoods of our citizens? That is the issue we are now facing.

In these times, we must return to the idea of fraternity — as in the French slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité” — as a force for moderating the danger inherent within freedom.

What citizens? The country is already so insular it's dying and now they'll turn further inwards?

Remember when folks like Walter Mondale, Ross Perot and Michael Crichton were terrified of Japan? It was kind of the '80s version of climate hysteria.

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TO FIND A PRESIDENT WITH A COMPARABLE LEGISLATIVE RECORD...:

Union Disappointment: A “No” on Card Checks: Legislation coveted by unions isn’t likely to get the nod this year, though a compromise stands a good chance next year. (Martha Lynn Craver, 8/28/09, The Kiplinger Letter)

Congress will likely deal unions a disappointment on labor law reform this year. Prospects are dimming for a vote in the Senate on legislation that would allow labor groups to organize via card signing campaign instead of a vote.

...you have to look to William Henry Harrison...

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HE SHOULD REALLY ONLY BE ALLOWED TO PLAY ON LADIES DAYS:

For Obama, Golfing Is a Very Leisurely Pursuit (HELENE COOPER, 8/28/09, NY Times)

Bill Clinton was famous for the creative way he kept score. Both George Bushes would speed-golf through 18 holes as if they had to beat the clock, not the course.

And President Obama?

Long, slow rounds. A lot of time hunting for balls in the woods. [...]

He spent five hours on Monday afternoon playing 18 holes at the Farm Neck Golf Club here, two and a half hours on Tuesday playing nine holes at Mink Meadows Golf Club in Vineyard Haven, and several hours playing Thursday afternoon at the Vineyard Golf Club in Edgartown.

His caddies must despise him.

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FAR BE IT FROM US TO TELL THEM HOW TO RUN THE WHITE HOUSE...:

White House: Obama postponed Israel trip due to healthcare reform (Yitzhak Benhorin, 08.28.09, Israel News

The National Security Council suggested that US President Barack Obama travel to Israel, but the trip was postponed due to the political dispute surrounding healthcare reform, White House officials told Ynet.

According to the officials, Obama planned on visiting Israel in the coming months due to the drop in Israeli public support for the American leader.

...but he'd improve the chances of the health care bill if he weren't in America talking about it.

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IT WOULD BE WISE, THOUGH NOT BRIGHT...:

Elder Bush will not attend Kennedy funeral (The Associated Press, Aug. 28, 2009)

The other remaining former presidents — Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — will join the younger Bush at the service. President Barack Obama will give the eulogy.

..to have W deliver the eulogy. He never failed to rise to the occasion for his big set piece speeches and he and Michael Gerson would render a memorable one. If the UR follows form he'll have to give three follow-ups apologizing for and clarifying his otherwise forgettable remarks.

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LOSING CONTROL OF THE SCREEN:

Well, this is as subtle as a trainwreck. It's sponsored by Nestea and the story has an office drone (the great Tony Hale from Arrested Development and Chuck) spill Nestea on his keyboard, turning it into some kind of time portal. Sadly, that may be the future of television since you can just skip the ads if they aren't built into the show.

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YOU CAN FEEL YOUR FLESH CRAWL AS YOU LISTEN:

History is much too important to be left to politicians: The EU must not give succour to self-interested revisionists who equate Stalinism and Nazism in an effort to smear the left (Jonathan Steele, 8/19/09, guardian.co.uk)

[2]0 years on, the issue is still a political football, marked by a resolution which the European parliament passed this spring to declare 23 August "a Europe-wide Remembrance Day for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes".

In the arcane way these things are done in the European parliament, the resolution was a watered-down version of a "declaration" it passed last September which wanted to make 23 August a day to remember "victims of Stalinism and Nazism". Individual EU governments take the ultimate decision, and few have nominated 23 August as a special day. But the issue matters as it marks an unpleasant effort by many Baltic and central European politicians to equate Stalinism and Nazism or claim Stalinism was worse. In part concerned by the continuing strength of former Communist parties in the region, they use the Nazi-Soviet "equation" as a device to smear any party of the left. (The draft resolution was watered down by left groups in the European parliament.) It is also a barely disguised attempt to maintain extreme wariness, if not outright hostility, to contemporary Russia.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact certainly showed Stalin to be as cynical as Hitler. But to jump from that to equate the two men's record or ideology does not accord with reality. Nor does it take account of the fact that Soviet policy evolved after Stalin's death so that political activity, let alone ordinary family life, in the two decades under Brezhnev was not subject to arbitrary terror. Rightwing Baltic politicians have a point in saying most other Europeans are unaware of Stalin's mass deportations from the Baltics. Perhaps 100,000 people were sent to Siberia after 1939 or when the Red Army defeated the Nazis and re-entered the region.

So because the Soviets period of mass murder only lasted for the first forty years of the regime before they settled into a less violent totalitarian gulag they weren't as bad as the Nazis? Who's to say that by the time Hitler died of natural causes the Reich would not have been largely done with its death camps and have evolved into just a stock nationalist socialist experiment? (Anyone read Robert Harris's Fatherland?)

We don't have to smear the Left when folks like Mr. Steele do such a good job of smearing themselves.

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PITY THE BRIT WHO WANDERS INTO THE BAZAAR:

Gaddafi: ‘Lockerbie is history. Now it’s time to talk business' (Exclusive by LUCY ADAMS, August 28 2009, The Herald)

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's son today reveals the inside story of how - and why - the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was released.

Speaking exclusively to The Herald at his home near Tripoli, Saif al Islam al Gaddafi disclosed the original prisoner transfer deal with the UK government was directly linked to talks on trade and oil. [...]

In what he said was his most important message, Mr al Gaddafi said: "Lockerbie is history. The next step is fruitful and productive business with Edinburgh and London. Libya is a promising, rich market and so let's talk about the future. There is no reason for people to be angry. Why be so angry? This is an innocent man who is dying."

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SO NOW HE'S UNWELCOME IN TWO OF THE THREE COUNTRIES HIS MANDATE COVERS?:

Obama's envoy Holbrooke 'in heated row' with Karzai (Haroon Siddique, 8/28/09, guardian.co.uk)

The US special envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, had a heated row with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in the aftermath of the election, according to reports. Sources described the meeting as "a dramatic bust up" and "explosive", according to the BBC.

Holbrooke is said to have challenged Karzai over allegations of ballot-stuffing and fraud and suggested that a run-off to decide the next president – which would be held if no candidate obtained more than 50% of the votes – would boost the credibility of the democratic process.

And the two that are our allies at that. As in Honduras, the Obama Administration's position appears to be that not following your own constitution is the way to make the UR happy.

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SEE YOU OUT THERE (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Soldiering On: The Troops First Foundation gives America's injured vets a chance to reclaim their dignity (David Feherty, 8/26/09, , GOLF Magazine)

Earlier that week, Hunter, Rod Pampling, Jason Gore, Pat Perez, Kelly Tilghman and Tom Watson played with thirty or so seriously injured servicemen and women (most of them amputees) in my 2nd Annual Improvised Explosive Day of Golf at the Chevy Chase Club. This year I had another amazing group of warriors, from Rob Brown — a below-the-knee amputee who may represent the U.S. in both the regular Olympics in kayak and Para-Olympics in track and field — to 22-year-old PFC Brendan Marrocco of the 25th Infantry, who on Easter Sunday in Tikrit was robbed of all four limbs plus his left eye.

It takes a while to figure out how to react to the severely injured members of our armed forces, but after almost three years of being around them, I think I have it figured out. This year's IED of Golf was the first time I'd met Brendan, with whom it is impossible to shake hands, play footsie, chest bump or, for that matter, pull his finger. A stump-to-knuckles thing had to suffice, and after that I embarked on what is now my normal procedure for getting to know a new member of my F-troop, who was being driven around in a cart by his brother Mike. It went something like this:

Me: "You know, you're not as tall as I thought you'd be."

Brendan: "I used to be taller."

"Yes, I can imagine. So, what would you like to do today?"

"I'd like to kick your [butt]."

"Well, that seems unlikely. Obviously you can't walk, but you look like you'd bounce pretty well. Are you going to be okay in that cart without a seat belt?

"Yeah, I can hold on with my butt cheeks."

"Excellent! Well, clench on, brother — I'll see you out there."

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ISRAEL AND IRAN MAY HAVE AN INTEREST IN EXISTING...:

The isolation of Israel could have disastrous consequences for us all: The more Israelis feel they can no longer rely on Washington to protect them, the more likely they are to launch unilateral military action to destroy Iran's nuclear capability (Con Coughlin, 8.28/09, Daily Telegraph)

n the course of Israel's 61-year history, there have been a host of occasions when the country has found itself in a tight fix. There was the Six-Day War of 1967, when the Jewish state was surrounded by hostile neighbours hell-bent on its destruction; the surprise attack by Syria that triggered the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which directly threatened the Israeli heartland; and the condemnation that followed the massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Beirut's Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps at the height of the Lebanese civil war in 1982, for which the Israeli military bore a heavy responsibility.

Recent history has been scarcely less traumatic. During the Gulf War, Israelis were subjected to their own terrifying ordeal when they were bombarded by Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles. Israel's subsequent military operations in Lebanon and Gaza were not only problematic, but did much to alienate international opinion.

But throughout their trials and tribulations, Israelis have been able to take comfort from the fact that no matter how great the threat, they could always rely on the support of their closest ally, the United States.

And yet today, when Israel arguably faces a threat to its very existence from Iran's nuclear ambitions, the country suddenly finds itself more isolated than ever before, shunned by its erstwhile defender and protector.

...but looked at only through the lens of Realist foreign policy, what's the downside of them destroying each other?

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CARD CHECKS AND BALANCES:

A Virginia Model For a GOP Comeback? (Michael Gerson, August 28, 2009, Washington Post)

Since 1977, the political party that has won the presidency has, in every case, lost the Virginia governorship in the next election. This pattern of cussedness is holding, at least for the moment. McDonnell, Virginia's former attorney general, is currently well ahead of his Democratic opponent, Creigh Deeds, in one poll leading by 15 percentage points among likely voters.

McDonnell, riding in a well-worn, 30-foot blue RV from dairy farm to winery to college campus, recounts how the political environment has changed from a year ago. "The business community," he says, "was the first to recoil" from policies such as "card check" -- legislation to allow union organization by signing cards instead of by a secret ballot -- and cap-and-trade environmental policies. "But health care now dwarfs previous concerns -- handing over the best medical system in the world to the federal government. It affects everyone." Conservatives, he contends, are more activated than at any time since 1993.

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IF ONLY HE REALLY WERE AN AGENT OF CHANGE...:

Abuse Issue Puts the C.I.A. and Justice Dept. at Odds (Peter Baker, David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti, 8/28/09, NY Times)

With the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate detainee abuses, long-simmering conflicts between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department burst into plain view this week, threatening relations between two critical players on President Obama’s national security team.

The tension between the agencies complicates how the administration handles delicate national security issues, particularly the tracking and capturing of suspected terrorists overseas. It also may distract Mr. Obama, who is trying to move beyond the battles of the Bush years to focus on an ambitious domestic agenda, most notably health care legislation. [...]

Despite the C.I.A. pressure and the stated desire of the White House not to dwell on the past, Mr. Holder went ahead with an investigation that will determine whether agents broke the law in their brutal interrogations.

The officials interviewed for this article spoke anonymously so that they could discuss debates over classified matters.

On the day the decision was announced, Mr. Panetta phoned Mr. Holder, according to people familiar with the call. In the conversation, which lasted less than a minute, the C.I.A. director told the attorney general that the agency would cooperate but expressed his displeasure and swore mildly, if only once.

Mr. Holder and Mr. Panetta are each confronting difficult balancing acts. Mr. Holder inherited a dispirited department accused of carrying out the political wishes of the Bush White House, and he now must show independence while continuing to work with the rest of the administration.

For his part, Mr. Panetta, who is also new to his job and lacks a background in intelligence, must carry out White House orders to make a clean break with some of the Bush administration’s intelligence policies, including ending the C.I.A.’s harsh interrogations. At the same time he must soothe frayed nerves at the C.I.A.

...Mr. Obama would do what should have been done years ago: shut the place, raze it, salt the earth and switch to a market-based open intelligence system. Instead, typically, he's giving us the worst of all possible worlds: the same useless, when not actually counterproductive, agency further crippled by leftwing politics.

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IT'S FINE IF YOU JUST WANT TO SHOVEL MONEY AT THE PROBLEM...:

Some Roman Catholic Bishops Assail Health Plan (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 8/28/09, NY Times)

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been lobbying for three decades for the federal government to provide universal health insurance, especially for the poor. Now, as President Obama tries to rally Roman Catholics and other religious voters around his proposals to do just that, a growing number of bishops are speaking out against it. [...]

The bishops’ opposition — published in diocesan newspapers, disseminated online by conservative activists, and reported in a Roman Catholic newspaper to be distributed this weekend at churches around the country — is another setback for Mr. Obama’s health care efforts. His administration has been counting on the support of Catholic leaders to help rally believers behind his health care plan. Just last week, he held a conference call with 140,000 religious voters to appeal to what he called their “moral convictions.”

The bishops’ backlash reflects a struggle within the church over how heavily to weigh opposition to abortion against concerns about social justice.

...but any measure that controls costs does the opposite. And since the most rational cost control is to just kill the patients....

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SORRY, MAHMOUD...:

Iran's supreme leader downplays foreign links to unrest (Ramin Mostaghim, August 28, 2009, La Times)

In a move seen as an attempt to woo disenchanted moderates and reformists back into the political establishment, Iran's supreme leader said in comments published Thursday that he was not convinced leaders of recent unrest were acting on behalf of foreign interests.

The comments by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's top political and religious authority, distanced him from assertions made by hard-liners.

...it's not foreigners; it's we who hate you.

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IS THERE AN EXERCISE MORE FUTILE...:

Bush's Search Policy For Travelers Is Kept (Ellen Nakashima, August 28, 2009, Washington Post)

The Obama administration will largely preserve Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search -- without suspicion of wrongdoing -- the contents of a traveler's laptop computer, cellphone or other electronic device, although officials said new policies would expand oversight of such inspections. [...]

[R]epresentatives of civil liberties and travelers groups say they see little substantive difference between the Bush-era policy, which prompted controversy, and this one.

...than looking to the UR for anything substantive?

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IT'S NOT JUST A CONSERVATIVE COUNTRY...:

Change We'd Rather Do Without (Michael Kinsley, August 28, 2009, Washington Post)

The reason Americans have turned against health-care reform, after electing President Obama in part for promising it, is simple: Despite protestations to the contrary, Americans don't like change. You wouldn't know it, of course, if you listen to politicians in high-pander mode, or to talk radio hosts of the right or TV pundits of the left. Or, for that matter, if you listened to the president of the United States. You would think that while we might disagree about what kind of change we want, Americans are in total agreement that the current situation is intolerable in all areas and that change -- big, immediate change -- is essential. Americans do agree about this -- in the abstract. But as soon as it seems that change might actually happen -- as soon as we leave the abstract for the particular -- we panic. We suddenly develop nostalgia for the comforts of the status quo. Sure, we want change -- as long as everything can stay just as it is.

...but one where most of the status quo was a product of consensus. Change is an accusation.

That's why we rehabilitate even our worst presidents--Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter--because we elected them in the first place. If they suck we're idiots.

---

DOPEY, THEN MOPEY:

Forever Young—A Centennial Tribute (WILL FRIEDWALD, 8/19/09, WSJ)

His 1943 solo on "Sometimes I'm Happy," made shortly after Young's return to the Count Basie Orchestra, is a prime ­example of the President (usually shortened to "Prez")—as Billie Holiday called Young—touching on every emotion known to man in a single, short solo. He's obviously ­inspired by Irving Caesar's title and lyric as much as he is by Vincent Youmans' melody. Most popular songs present the states of "happy" and "sad" as monolithic poles of feeling, but Young seems to be jazzed by the way that Caesar and Youmans mix both together. His ­interpretation of the tune is both at the same time, a constant state of melancholic ­euphoria. [...]

Young's later period has been the subject of much controversy among jazz scholars; it's often alleged that he was in decline in the 1950s, partly as a result of a nightmarish year he spent, mostly in the detention barracks, in the segregated armed forces during World War II, which certainly exacerbated the chronic alcoholism that contributed to his death at age 49. Yet even without these extramusical circumstances, it seems reasonable that Young's sound would have grown darker and deeper as he got older (as did Sinatra's), and to many of us Young in his 40s is even more melancholy and moving than his earlier self.

The "Centennial" collection includes seven tracks from 1956 of the President, appropriately, in Washington, D.C., at a local club at his relaxed and clear-headed best, and three longer tracks of him jamming more ­aggressively with the Jazz at the Philharmonic troupe ­(including Roy Eldridge and Flip Phillips) and in front of Oscar Peterson's Quartet.

When he plays "I Cover the Waterfront" on the "Centennial" package (from 1953), he isn't just playing a pretty melody or a generic love song. He makes you feel as if he's covered every inch of that waterfront, searching for that person whom the lyrics ­refer to as "the one I love." Not only has he looked on every pier and wharf, but he's been in and out of every waterfront watering hole and saloon, fortifying himself along the way. No less than Sinatra doing "Angel Eyes" or Holiday doing "Don't Explain," it's a profoundly dark, almost ­existential experience. You have a hard time believing anyone could ­reveal so much of his soul through a tenor sax and a ­microphone.

And yet, most of the time, even in his final years, Young is an irresistible and relentless swinger—Fred Astaire only wished he could be this light on his feet—as on the saxophonist's two original riff anthems, "Lester Leaps In" and "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid." There's no escaping the conclusion that listening to Lester Young makes you happy. Sometimes.

---

PARTY LIKE IT'S 1994:

GOP poll: Reform less popular than '94 (MICHAEL FALCONE, 8/27/09, Politico)

President Barack Obama’s health care reform plan is facing even more public skepticism than President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals did in 1994, according to a poll released this week.

The telephone survey, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, found that 37 percent of Americans are opposed to the Obama plan compared with 25 percent who favor it.

---

SPEED KILLS:

Apple's Snow Leopard reviewed (guardian.co.uk, 27 August 2009)

Mac OS X 10.6 – aka Snow Leopard – will be released tomorrow. The truth is that it doesn't contain hundreds of big new features to entice you into upgrading – but it does have one that everyone will appreciate: speed.

Snow Leopard is, in fact, blisteringly fast. Booting is quicker, waking from sleep is quicker, and, of course, launching applications is quicker than if you're using Leopard.

Just in case you were wondering what to get us for Labor Day....

Name Your Link

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SO THE CHARITABLE VIEW IS HE'S IGNORANT RATHER THAN LYING?:

How Abortion Could Imperil Health-Care Reform (Michael Scherer , 8/24/09, TIME)

The health-care reform proposed by House Democrats, if enacted, would in fact mark a significant change in the Federal Government's role in the financing of abortions. "It would be a dramatic shift," says Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who has vowed to oppose the bill because of how it would affect abortion. Stupak says dozens of House Democrats may join him in opposing a final health-care compromise unless the abortion language is changed, presenting a clear challenge to Democratic vote counters that could imperil a party-line vote. [...]

Opponents of abortion, including Stupak, want language that would prohibit any private insurance company that accepts federal funds from offering to policyholders abortions other than those already eligible under Medicaid.

Nonetheless, the new system differs markedly from the old federal policy of not involving the government in abortion services unless issues of rape, incest or the life of the mother are at play. "It does represent a policy shift in favor of the abortion-rights community that it would not have received under George W. Bush's Administration," says Glen Halva-Neubauer, a political scientist at Furman University who has studied the politics of abortion. [...]

[S]tupak says that Obama's statements during recent public events signal one of two things: either he does not fully understand the current House bill, which Stupak maintains has the effect of publicly funding abortion, or "if he is aware of it, and he is making these statements, then he is misleading people."

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NEVER THERE WHEN HIS PARTY NEEDS HIM:

Mitt Romney won't run for Ted Kennedy's seat (ANDY BARR, 8/27/09, Politico)

Former Massachusetts GOP Gov. Mitt Romney will not seek the Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy’s death, a Romney spokesman said Thursday.

Useless.

---

WHICH WILL SAVE US TEARING THEM UP COMPLETELY WHEN THE RAIL SYSTEM IS RESTORED:

Solar Panels Built Into Roads Could Be the Future of Energy (Adrian Covert, 08.27.2009, Popular Science)

The Department of Energy just gave $100,000 to upstart company Solar Roadways, to develop 12-by-12-foot solar panels, dubbed "Solar Roads," that can be embedded into roads, pumping power into the grid. The panels may also feature LED road warnings and built-in heating elements that could prevent roads from freezing.

Each Solar Road panel can develop around 7.6 kwh of power each day, and each costs around $7,000. If widely adopted, they could realistically wean the US off fossil fuels: a mile-long stretch of four-lane highway could take 500 homes off the grid. If the entire US Interstate system made use of the panels, energy would no longer be a concern for the country.

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WHAT THE...?:

Ted Kennedy died with faith – in us (Doug Kmiec, 8/27/09, National Catholic Reporter)

But is it proper to insist that the law simply coerce the hearts and minds of others? Was it not once the calling of the church to convert, not coerce? [...]

While Ted Kennedy understood the law could not impose faith, he knew it was instrumental to building a just society: reforming immigration in 1965 (abolishing irrational quotas); creating a federal cancer research program in 1971 that quadrupled the amount spent on the number one disease affecting millions of Americans each year; promoting women’s equality in college sports with the passage of Title IX in 1972; curbing the corrupting influence of money in politics with the public financing system for presidential candidates in 1974; securing the creation of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday in 1983; bringing racial justice to South Africa by spearheading the 1986 anti-apartheid efforts; co-authoring in the 1990s, the Family and Medical Leave Act helping business to begin to understand the Catholic insight that “work is for man; man is not for work; allowing for student loans at subsidized rates; passing the law that allows employees to keep health insurance after leaving a job; sponsoring needed increases in the minimum wage; and on and on. The work of social justice is never finished, he observed. How correct he was.

Mr. Kmiec is too busy these days defending the abortion regime for anyone to take him seriously when he tries his hand at moral reasoning, but the notion that you deserve tremendous credit for regulating daily life so thoroughly that you even limit someone's political speech but ought not be held accountable for helping them kill their child is simply insane. Such is the incoherence that Mr. Kennedy led liberalism into.

MORE:
Ted Kennedy, Abortion Advocate and Health Reform Mastermind, Dead at 77: NARAL awarded 100% pro-abortion voting record to senator, who also championed embryonic stem cell research, same-sex "marriage." (Kathleen Gilbert, August 26, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com)

As a prominent Catholic, Kennedy's aggressive pro-abortion politics was a constant source of scandal to the Catholic community. But it was not always so: in the years before the abortion industry took hold of the Democrat party, Kennedy, like many of his fellow abortion-promoting Democrats, was pro-life.

"Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized - the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old," wrote Kennedy in a letter to Catholic League member Tom Dennelly in 1971.

"When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception."

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RECOUNT!:

Obama's job approval rating falls to 50% in poll (Mark Silva, August 27, 2009, LA Times)

President Obama, who won the White House with an electoral college landslide and enjoyed soaring public approval for the job he was doing in the weeks following his inauguration, has fallen to a 50% job approval rating in the newest daily tracking of the Gallup Poll released just now. [...]

[O]bama has reached his new low more quickly than most of his predecessors did, according to Gallup. The percentage of people voicing disapproval for the job the president is performing also stands at a near-high of 43%.

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AT LEAST THEIR SELF-LOATHING IS WARRANTED:

Cattle Dealer (ALEXANDER MELEAGROU-HITCHENS, September 2009, Standpoint)

The New Statesman has long prided itself on its left-wing, liberal and agnostic reputation. [Mehdi Hasan]'s appointment [as senior editor (politics)] is possibly the final nail in the coffin of this image, which has been gradually eroding over the last decade.

In July, an audio tape was released by a leading blog, Harry's Place, of a fiery speech Hasan delivered at the al-Khoei foundation, a Shia centre in London. [...]

Addressing an audience made up mainly of young Muslims, he says: "The kaffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Koran; they are described in the Koran as, ‘a people of no intelligence', Allah describes them as; not of no morality, not as people of no belief — people of ‘no intelligence' — because they're incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world...In this respect, the Koran describes the atheists as ‘cattle', as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world."

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THANKS, W:

Four years after Katrina, New Orleans reinvents its schools: Disaster gave birth to radical reforms, with lessons for others. (USA Today, 8/25/09)

If there was any silver lining to the devastation that Hurricane Katrina wrought in New Orleans four years ago, perhaps it is this: The water washed away one of the nation's worst school systems and left New Orleans determined to rebuild in a wholly new way. [...]

-- Innovation. New Orleans has embraced charter schools as no other city has. The Recovery School District's 38 charters, with 11,600 students, outnumber its 30 traditional schools. While the label, "charter," doesn't ensure success, the charter model — taxpayer funded, publicly chartered but run by independent operators — has achieved striking successes in other places. It encourages fresh thinking, makes principals and teachers accountable and does away with bureaucratic shackles, such as retaining poorly performing teachers just because of tenure. Charters are among the city's best performing schools, and Vallas has grafted the model's best ideas onto traditional schools, giving principals the autonomy to hire, fire and promote.

-- Competition. Students are no longer bound by geography; all schools are open to everyone. Schools must compete for students and the attention of picky parents, as well as for their very survival. Unlike the old days, when failing schools limped on forever, Vallas promises to close non-performing schools. One charter closed already.

W should have used his secret weather warfare machine more widely.

---

FIRST, LET'S PROTECT ALL THE LAWYERS...:

Obama Targets Jack Bauer, but Who Takes the Fall?: The closer you read the newly released CIA reports and read into the Justice Department's torture probe, the more you realize nothing much is going to come of them — except more enemies for the inheritor-in-chief (Thomas P.M. Barnett , 8/27/09, Esquire)

With the CIA report's parallels, 24 is now actually a more accurate comparison than ever. And with its fallout, Obama's new torture approach suggests more dangerous paths than even his hedging on Guantanamo, each with their own pitfalls between which he will have to carefully maneuver if he wants to make it past 2012. By launching a Justice Department probe, for starters, Obama is effectively writing GOP campaign ads in the event that Al Qaeda pulls off anything substantial on U.S. soil in the coming years ("He crippled our intelligence agencies, denying them the tools they needed to prevent the [city] attacks of [date], resulting in the sacrifice of [dozens/hundreds/thousands] of innocent American lives!"). But by insisting that Eric Holder's special prosecutor focus on CIA personnel and contractors and not the lawyers who issued the justifications for "enhanced interrogation techniques," the White House risks an outcome as unsatisfying as Abu Ghraib: scapegoat prosecutions of underlings, scot-free consequences for higher-ups, and more restrictions for the investigated parties to, you know, do their jobs. Most precariously, Obama has decided to personally own the problem going forward, announcing that the White House will form and directly supervise (under the direction of the Bauer-esque — though highly qualified — John Brennan) a new interrogation unit led by the FBI, signaling a return to the days when Washington (read: Clintonian Democrats) treated terrorism as a police problem. And that simply won't jive with classifying Afghanistan as a "war of necessity" and ramping up American drone strikes in northwest Pakistan.

So while Obama has the right instincts to avoid criminalizing past policy mistakes even as he corrects them, what may ultimately decide which of these situations turns from danger to reality is who takes the fall in his new windfall of investigation. And putting together the pieces of the newly released documents — the chain of command, the timeline, and what they mean to other, bigger investigations — offers a preview of the country's torture endgame as Jack Bauer goes back in his cage — until we decide we need him again.

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NOBODY KNOWS:

Obama great-uncle unsure whether to be 'confused or not' (Ben Smith, 8/26/09, Politico)

DANA BASH, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Do you feel like you have a good grasp of what's in the plans for overhauling health care?

RALPH DUNHAM, PRESIDENT OBAMA'S GREAT-UNCLE: No, I don't, because the thing is over a 1,000 pages long, and the House and the Senate are going to straighten out the two bills. And nobody knows what's going to be in it, I don't think.

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STARK RAVING MAD:

Key Democrat suggests party moderates 'brain dead' (ERICA WERNER, 8/27/09, AP)

Moderate Blue Dog Democrats "just want to cause trouble," said Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who heads the health subcommittee on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.

"They're for the most part, I hate to say, brain dead, but they're just looking to raise money from insurance companies and promote a right-wing agenda that is not really very useful in this whole process," Stark told reporters on a conference call.

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THE LION SLEEPS:

The Last Liberal (Orrin Judd, 8/27/09, New Ledger)

Now, if you want to get a feel for what it was like to argue about angels and pinheads in medieval times, you could always just try start an argument about what the term liberalism means. Libertarians and paleocons will fight you for the right to it, in its original incarnation as a belief in human freedom. And plenty will tell you it’s an epithet, standing for naught but statism and economic redistribution. But Ted Kennedy claimed the term for himself, always wore it proudly, and defended it even after most Democrats had tried escaping it. So perhaps we can say that, to a remarkable degree, modern liberalism was whatever Ted Kennedy said it was and however he stood on the issues. He certainly leaves no fellow politician behind who Americans would both recognize and describe as a liberal. The last Democratic nominee who would have been comfortable describing himself as a liberal was probably George McGovern and most of the remaining liberals in Congress are intentionally kept out of the limelight. Nancy Pelosi is probably the closest thing he has to an heir, but House Speakers are fairly anonymous. No, Teddy was it. All that “last liberal lion” is more true than not.

So when we look at his public record we can learn wider lessons about modern liberalism. What that record teaches us is that there are pronounced inconsistencies to liberalism such that it can barely be considered a political philosophy, inconsistencies so drastic that we can see why it failed to stand the test of time.

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HAPPILY, WE ATE OF THE TREE AND CRUCIFIED OUR SAVIOR...:

Guilt and Atonement on the Path to Adulthood (JOHN TIERNEY, 8/28/09, NY Times)

Guilt in its many varieties — Puritan, Catholic, Jewish, etc. — has often gotten a bad rap, but psychologists keep finding evidence of its usefulness. Too little guilt clearly has a downside — most obviously in sociopaths who feel no remorse, but also in kindergartners who smack other children and snatch their toys. Children typically start to feel guilt in their second year of life, says Grazyna Kochanska, who has been tracking children’s development for two decades in her laboratory at the University of Iowa. Some children’s temperament makes them prone to guilt, she said, and some become more guilt-prone thanks to parents and other early influences.

“Children respond with acute and intense tension and negative emotions when they are tempted to misbehave, or even anticipate violating norms and rules,” Dr. Kochanska said. “They remember, often subconsciously, how awful they have felt in the past.”

In Dr. Kochanska’s latest studies, published in the August issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, she and colleagues found that 2-year-olds who showed more chagrin during the broken-toy experiment went on to have fewer behavioral problems over the next five years. That was true even for the ones who scored low on tests measuring their ability to focus on tasks and suppress strong desires to act impulsively.

“If you have high guilt,” Dr. Kochanska said, “it’s such a rapid response system, and the sensation is so incredibly unpleasant, that effortful control doesn’t much matter.”

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WHAT'S HAUNTING ABOUT THIS EXPLANATION...:

Is quantum mechanics messing with your memory?: For all we know we may live in a world in which windows un-break and cold cups of coffee spontaneously heat up, we just don't remember. The explanation is quantum entanglement (Michael Slezak, 27 August 2009 , Guardian)

Briefly, the problem is that while our laws of physics are all symmetrical or "time-reversal invariant" – they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards – most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not. They never seem to happen in reverse.

We have a statistical law that describes these everyday phenomena called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law tells us that the "entropy" or degree of disorder of a closed system never decreases. Roughly speaking, a process in which entropy increases is one where the system becomes increasingly disordered. Windows break, thereby increasing disorder, but they will not spontaneously unbreak. Gases will disperse but not spontaneously compress.

However, entropy describes what happens with large numbers of particles. We presume that it must arise from what happens with individual particles, but all the laws that govern the behaviour of individual particles are time-reversal invariant. This means that any process they allow in one direction of time, they also allow in the other.

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?

Maccone's solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time – so there is no asymmetry and no associated mystery about the arrow of time.

He argues that quantum mechanics dictates that if anyone does observe an entropy-decreasing event, their memories of the event "will have been erased by necessity".

...is that lady who said it's turtles all the way down likewise claimed that we routinely observe this fact but then forget it.

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NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

More Sun for Less: Solar Panels Drop in Price (KATE GALBRAITH, 8/27/09, NY Times)

For solar shoppers these days, the price is right. Panel prices have fallen about 40 percent since the middle of last year, driven down partly by an increase in the supply of a crucial ingredient for panels, according to analysts at the investment bank Piper Jaffray.

The price drops — coupled with recently expanded federal incentives — could shrink the time it takes solar panels to pay for themselves to 16 years, from 22 years, in places with high electricity costs, according to Glenn Harris, chief executive of SunCentric, a solar consulting group. That calculation does not include state rebates, which can sometimes improve the economics considerably.

American consumers have the rest of the world to thank for the big solar price break.

Until recently, panel makers had been constrained by limited production of polysilicon, which goes into most types of panels. But more factories making the material have opened, as have more plants churning out the panels themselves — especially in China.

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THE QUESTION IS WHY THEY STAY PART OF THE LEBANON:

Hezbollah Part of Next Government: Hariri (AFP, 8/27/09)

Lebanese prime minister-designate Saad Hariri said on Wednesday Hezbollah will be part of the next cabinet "whether Israel likes it or not," as his bid to form a government entered its eight week.

"The national unity government will include the (ruling) March 14 alliance, and I also want to assure the Israeli enemy that Hezbollah will be in this government whether it likes it or not because Lebanon's interests require all parties be involved in this cabinet," Hariri said at an Iftar feast to break the Ramadan fast on Tuesday night.

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IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR ACTOR:

Laim Neeson thanks US for its support by becoming a citizen (Rashid Razaq, 27.08.09, Evening Standard)

Liam Neeson has decided to become an US citizen because of the support shown by Americans following the death of his wife Natasha Richardson.

The Northern Ireland-born actor said "touching" condolence letters sent to him by well-wishers had prompted him to seek citizenship after living in America for 20 years.

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WHOSE SIDE WAS THE LION ON?:

The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World by David Priestland: Western progressives nostalgic for the Soviet Union shouldn’t get too excited by the global financial crisis, writes John Gray. A fine new history of communism shows why (John Gray, 27 August 2009, New Statesman)

It cannot be long before progressive opinion begins to look back on communism with nostalgia. Whatever they may have been like in practice, communist states were established to embody ideas that progressives understood and to a large extent shared. The Soviet Union and Maoist China were seen as advancing the cause of humanity and many on the left judged it best not to make too much of any crimes these regimes committed along the way. However imperfectly, communism continued an authentic tradition of European radical humanism.

One of the many virtues of David Priestland's The Red Flag is that it places communism squarely in this tradition. Citing Marx's description of Prometheus as "the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar", Priestland shows how Marx's Promethean world-view has animated communist movements and regimes throughout their history. In the preface to his dissertation, Marx wrote, in the words of Aeschylus: "In sooth all gods I hate. 'Tis better to be bound on a rock than bound to the service of Zeus." In Marx's variation on the Promethean myth, heroic humanity wages war against religion, inequality and subservience to nature.

Priestland shows that this modern mythology was propagated right up to the end of communist Russia.

For over half of Ted Kennedy's career the single most important issue facing mankind was the war between the West and Communism, yet he for the most part was either silent on that war or actively engaged in undermining the West. That too is his legacy and that of the Left he led.

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WOW...:

Will an Opposition Victory Rescue Japan's Economy? (Michael Schuman, 8/27/09, TIME)

The central theme marking this weekend's general election in Japan is much like the one that dominated the American presidential contest of a year ago — "change." Yukio Hatoyama, president of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), is striving to paint his party as the party of "change" on the campaign trail, much like U.S. President Barack Obama positioned his Democrats. And if the election goes as expected — the DPJ commands a comfortable lead in polls over the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — "change" is exactly what Japanese voters will want. The LDP has governed Japan almost uninterrupted since 1955, but the nation's endemic malaise seems to have pushed an often politically complacent public to finally boot them out of power.

The election, if it turns out as expected, could prove a seminal moment in Japan's modern political history and bring about a dramatic transformation in the country's politics and government. Yet on the most pressing area of policy — the struggling Japanese economy — voters may not get the change they so desperately desire, and badly need.

...so it'll be exactly like electing the UR.

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NO BAD DEED GOES UNREWARDED:

The folly of devolution: The furore over the Lockerbie release may hasten the decline of the union (James Macintyre, 27 August 2009, New Statesman)

After 18 years of a Tory government for which relatively few Scots voted, and having been used as a laboratory for the poll tax experiment, Scotland welcomed devolution in 1997. But Tony Blair's mistake was to accept uncritically his predecessor John Smith's policy on devolution, instead of making the case for a national Labour government that would redress some of the damage of the Thatcher years. Today, the latest BBC Scotland/ICM poll shows that only 38 per cent of Scots would vote for independence while 54 per cent support the union. But amid a gradual, diminishing sense of cohesion, there are new fears that the controversy over the Lockerbie release may further expose the flaws of the devolution settlement and thereby hasten nationalist moves towards the 300-year-old union's demise.

So, like William Wallace, the passengers of Pan Am 103 will have died for Scottish liberation.

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IN A LIFE NOT SHY ON GOOD FORTUNE...:

SAUNTERING ON (Mark Steyn, Steyn on Stage and Screen)

Back in the late Thirties, Bob Hope and his writers created two “Bob Hopes”, two public personae that kept him in business for the next six decades. For radio, he was smart, sharp, sly, with tremendous confidence: in my mind’s eye, I always see him walking out from the wings to the mike - the first great saunterer in show business. He was the pioneer stand-up and the inventor of the modern Oscar ceremony. Until the late Thirties, the Academy Awards was like Rotarian of the Year night in a hick town. At the 1937 Oscars, Cecil B de Mille, presenting the awards for editing and sound recording, spoke for 35 minutes. The next year, a Hollywood newcomer called Hope was asked to present the award for Best Short Subject. He eyed the table containing the statuettes, said, “Looks like Bette Davis’ garage”, and went on from there. And that was it: he’d found the tone - the affectionate joshing of the big-time stars. Next year, they asked him to host, which he kept doing every other year or so till the late Seventies. “What a night. The furs, the jewels, the glamour,” he began, in March 1978. “I haven’t seen so much expensive jewellery go by since I watched Sammy Davis Jr’s house sliding down Coldwater Canyon.” He was pushing 75, and the Hope persona his writers had cooked up in the Thirties still had a couple decades’ juice left in it.

But, for the movies, they came up with a second Hope - a boaster, a tightwad, a skirt-chaser, a coward: “Brave men run in my family.” The Paleface (1948) is the apotheosis of the second Hope, and the Road pictures its most basic template. I once tried to have a fairly serious conversation with him about why he didn’t go with the radio act on screen. “Well, we took a decision to play up the boob side more,” he said. I don’t know who the “we” is: it sounds like a corporate strategy taken by the full board and, commercially, it worked.

But there’s a third Hope I just love watching, the self-deprecating tuxedoed romantic of the very early movies. His first film was a two-reeler from 1934, Going Spanish. “When they catch Dillinger,” he told Walter Winchell, “they’re gonna make him watch it twice.”

...I consider myself especially lucky toi have seen Mr. Hope live, when he came to Colgate to film his "On Campus" special in 1979.

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Toasted Pecan Rice (Linda Cicero's Cook's Corner, 8/27/09, Miami Herald)

• 3 tablespoons butter

• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped

• ½ bell pepper, chopped

• 2 celery ribs, chopped

• 1 or 2 garlic cloves, minced

• 1 cup uncooked rice (white or brown)

• 4 cups beef, chicken or vegetable broth

• 1 bay leaf

• ½ cup minced parsley

• ½ cup chopped green onion

• Salt and pepper to taste

• 1 cup pecans, freshly toasted

Heat butter in a 1 ½-quart saucepan over medium heat. Sauté yellow onion, bell pepper and celery 5 minutes. Turn heat to high, stir in garlic and cook until fragrant and lightly browned, about 2 minutes. Stir in rice, broth and bay leaf; bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, until rice is tender, 20 to 25 minutes for white, 35 to 40 minutes for brown. Stir in parsley, green onion and pecans.

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TED KENNEDYS FINAL WISH FOR AMERICA?:

'Cruel and neglectful' care of one million NHS patients exposed (Rebecca Smith, 27 Aug 2009, Daily Telegraph)

One million NHS patients have been the victims of appalling care in hospitals across Britain, according to a major report released today.

In the last six years, the Patients Association claims hundreds of thousands have suffered from poor standards of nursing, often with 'neglectful, demeaning, painful and sometimes downright cruel' treatment.

The charity has disclosed a horrifying catalogue of elderly people left in pain, in soiled bed clothes, denied adequate food and drink, and suffering from repeatedly cancelled operations, missed diagnoses and dismissive staff.

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DO THE RIGHT THING, MR. PANETTA

Panetta loses battle over CIA abuse probes (Eli Lake and Shaun Watermanm, 8/25/09, THE WASHINGTON TIMES )

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta argued within the Obama administration that it should not reopen cases of suspected torture by CIA officers but lost the argument to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., former and current intelligence officials said Monday.

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MEN OF PRIVILEGE:

Blood, Sweat, and Words (Joseph Epstein, Septrember 2009, In Character)

I recently wrote a book about Fred Astaire, than whom no one worked harder at his craft. Astaire was a perfectionist, which is to say a great worrier. His only difficulty with the studios for which he worked was his constant demand for more and yet more rehearsal time before his dance numbers were finally filmed. He wanted everything he did to look effortless, which on film it indubitably does, and so he put in the maximum effort to ensure that it did. For Astaire all grit entailed was properly left in the studio rehearsal halls; the seemingly effortless, lilting, unforgettable beauty went into the movie.

I have never liked to suggest that writing is grinding, let alone brave work. H. L. Mencken used to say that any scribbler who found writing too arduous ought to take a week off to work on an assembly line, where he will discover what work is really like. The old boy, as they say, got that right. To be able to sit home and put words together in what one hopes are charming or otherwise striking sentences is, no matter how much tussle may be involved, lucky work, a privileged job. The only true grit connected with it ought to arrive when, thinking to complain about how hard it is to write, one is smart enough to shut up and silently grit one's teeth.

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AND THE GERMANS WILL EVEN MAKE THEM RUN ON TIME:

Siemens and Deutsche Plan US High-Speed Rail Offensive: German engineering giant Siemens and national railway operator Deutsche Bahn are making plans to penetrate the US rail market. They hope to benefit from President Obama's promised $8 billion in investments in the country's high-speed railway infrastructure. (Der Spiegel, 8.26.09)

Europe's largest engineering company, Siemens, and German national railway operator Deutsche Bahn AG announced on Saturday that they are hoping to jointly enter the US high-speed rail business.

Both companies have been hurt by the global financial crisis and are hoping to find a boost in profits from US President Barack Obama's plans to invest up to $8 billion (€5.6 billion) in the US rail sector. Obama's plan, which was unveiled in April, envisions creating up to 10 new high-speed rail corridors between major cities, such as Miami and Orlando as well as San Francisco and Los Angeles, with trains travelling at top speeds of over 150 mph (240 kph). For the 2010 fiscal year budget, Obama has proposed a separate, additional €5 billion investment in high-speed rail service.

According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, as part of the proposed joint effort, Siemens would supply high-speed ICE-3 trains and transport technology, while Deutsche Bahn would be in charge of operating the rail links. The latter company's consulting division, DB International, has already started looking into how to implement the plan.

The point has to be to connect Miami and LA.

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PREZCENTENNIAL:

Lester Young Turns 100: Billie Holiday’s favorite musician, jazz great Lester “Prez” Young brought a hip, freewheeling sensibility to his saxophone playing (Jamie Katz, August 25, 2009, Smithsonian.com)

He was known for speaking a private language, some of which has entered the American lexicon. The expression “that’s cool” was probably coined by him, as were “bread” (for money), “You dig?” and such colorful sayings as “I feel a draft”—code for prejudice and hostility in the air. He also wore sunglasses in nightclubs, sported a crushed black porkpie hat and tilted his saxophone at a high angle “like a canoeist about to plunge his paddle into the water,” as the New Yorker’s Whitney Balliett put it. Rolling Stone later pronounced Prez “quite likely the hippest dude that ever lived.”

Young’s impact on the language of music was even greater. Before tenorman Coleman Hawkins led the emergence of the saxophone as a serious instrument in the 1920s, most sax players “habitually produced either a kind of rubbery belch or a low, mooing noise,” wrote Young biographer Dave Gelly. Young came along right behind Hawkins, and electrified the jazz world with his dexterity and imagination.

“He redefined the instrument,” says the tenor saxophonist and jazz scholar Loren Schoenberg, who is also executive director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem (a Smithsonian affiliate). His most fundamental change involved a subtle relaxation of jazz phrasing and rhythm. “A lot of lesser players depend on the friction of a spiky rhythm to make it seem as if it’s ‘hot,’ ” Schoenberg says. “Young found a way to play that had a more even rhythm, and yet he swung like crazy. This called for great ingenuity and great genius.”

Young mastered the art of improvising beautiful melodies, which he played with a velvety tone and an effortless, floating quality. Yet like a great dancer, he never lost sight of the beat. A bluesman at heart, he could swoop and moan and play with edge, but more typically, the sensation was one of “pulsating ease,” as critic Nat Hentoff once described it. At slower tempos, he radiated a more wistful, bruised spirit. “In all of Lester Young’s finest solos,” Albert Murray writes in his classic study, Stomping the Blues, “there are overtones of unsentimental sadness that suggest he was never unmindful of human vulnerability.”

To the untrained ear what stands out is his fluidity, though, to my mind at least, the transition of jazz from dance halls to night clubs killed it.

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YOU'RE RICH--BUY NEW FEELINGS:

The Rich Have Feelings, Too: Losing billions is stressful, and the brave financiers who risk other people’s money need a way to cool out—hopping on the GV, say, for a bimbo-boffing weekend in the Bahamas. Thanks to the bailout, that’s history. The author imagines one fictional highflier’s shock as he rejoins the commercial-aviation herd. (Tom Wolfe, September 2009, Vanity Fair)

Up until the tarantulas arrived late last year waving their billions in “bailout” money before our faces, there were ten of us, including the two Harvard algorithm swamis, who could use the Gulfstream V, the Falcon, and the three Learjets pretty much anytime we needed them.

The vast majority of the flights—let’s get this straight before anyone starts clucking and fuming—were strictly business, but we also used the planes to “maintain an even strain,” as our C.E.O., Robert J. (Corky) McCorkle, liked to put it.

At the risk of sounding condescending, we should point out that ordinary people haven’t the faintest conception of the strain we had to endure daily. How many ordinary people have ever done anything remotely like betting $7.4 billion—bango!—just so!—that the price of energy will rise sharply 14 months from a certain date? How many of them ever had the animal spirits to go for it on the say-so of a young never-been-wrong-yet meteorology swami from M.I.T. who was convinced that, after a five-year lull in the cycle, a series of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes would pulverize the Gulf of Mexico, obliterating all offshore drilling operations, possibly shutting them down for years? How many ordinary people have woken up in the middle of the night, eyes popped open—swock!—like a pair of umbrellas, stark raving terrified by the possibility that they have just blown $7.4 billion on … a weather forecast? How many of them have ever sat for three days, 72 hours straight, in front of a gigantic plasma TV watching the Weather Channel as if it were the Super Bowl as Hurricane Enrique dithers, dawdles, malingers, messes around off the coast of Fort Lauderdale? How many ordinary people have been reduced finally, by sheer fear, to yelling at the screen, “Come on, Enrique, you pathetic wuss! Move your fat eye, you lazy worthless bitch! Be a man! Move inland! Cut straight across the Everglades, tear ‘em up by the roots and just let the greenies wail! Set your eye on the freaking Gulf! Take your goddamn steroids! Show some rage, you pussy! Barrel into those goddamn oil rigs! Destroy ‘em! Obliterate ‘em!”? How many ordinary people have finally sunk to their knees, hands clasped in prayer before a plasma-TV screen, imploring it, begging it, beseeching it … to save them?

God knows we deserved every chance we could get to even out the strain.

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AND THERE'S NEVER BEEN A PEOPLE WITH MORE TO BE OVER-OPTIMISTIC ABOUT:

The Curious Paradox of 'Optimism Bias': Being highly positive can lead to disaster for individuals—but benefit society as a whole (Dan Ariely, 8/26/09, Business Week)

The basic idea is that when people judge their chances of experiencing a good outcome—getting a great job or having a successful marriage, healthy kids, or financial security—they estimate their odds to be higher than average. But when they contemplate the probability that something bad will befall them (a heart attack, a divorce, a parking ticket), they estimate their odds to be lower than those of other people. [...]

It is interesting to ponder the utility of over-optimism. It's not a simple matter, because it can both hurt and help us. Individuals often suffer because of an overly bright outlook. They wind up dead, or poor, or bankrupt because they underestimated the downside of taking a certain path. But society as a whole often benefits from behavior spurred by upbeat outlooks.

It's the inverse of "the paradox of thrift," which holds that saving money (instead of consuming) may be good for an individual but is bad for an economy trying to grow.

Overoptimism works the other way. Imagine a society in which no one would take on the risk of creating startups, developing new medications, or opening new businesses. We know most new enterprises fail in the first few years. Yet they crop up all the time, sometimes jump-starting entirely new sectors. A society in which no one is overly optimistic and no one takes too much risk? Such a culture wouldn't advance much.

Want to know why you should be optimistic? Find someone 85 or older and try telling them how you just lived through a Depression just like the Great one.

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JUST BECAUSE HE WASN'T AS REVOLUTIONARY AS MAGGIE DOESN'T MEAN HE WASN'T WORTHWHILE:

The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents: His presidency was better than expected, but worse than desired. (Steven F. Hayward, 8/26/09, National Review)

Reagan’s statecraft, at home and abroad, should be seen as a unity for one crucial reason: He saw it as a unity. Lincoln once wrote that all nations have a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate. The same can be said of leading statesmen. Reagan’s central idea can be summarized as the view that unlimited government is inimical to liberty, both in its vicious forms, such as Communism or socialism, and in its supposedly benign forms, such as bureaucracy.

That Reagan regarded statism as a continuum, rather than a dichotomous problem of the East and West, was made clear in his 1982 speech in Westminster, where he said: “There is a threat posed to human freedom by the enormous power of the modern state. History teaches the dangers of government that overreaches — political control taking precedence over free economic growth, secret police, mindless bureaucracy all combining to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom.” Reagan’s conflation of “secret police” and “mindless bureaucracy” was no mere coincidence, as his next sentence made clear: “Now, I’m aware that among us here and throughout Europe there is legitimate disagreement over the extent to which the public sector should play a role in a nation’s economy and life” — in other words, “I know you’re not all as freedom-loving as me and Margaret Thatcher” — “but on one point all of us are united: our abhorrence of dictatorship in all its forms.”

The point is: The same principles that animated Reagan’s Cold War statecraft also directed his domestic-policy vision. Now, this isn’t especially remarkable to recall, and in fact the critics who nowadays want to consign Reaganism to the dustbin of history like to recall with scorn the part of his First Inaugural Address where he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. . . . It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”

However, I think both friend and critic have lost sight of the important way in which Reagan viewed his project as a restoration of constitutional government as the Founders intended it. In other words, Reagan conceived of his project not as a revolution but as a restoration.

This is made clear in the immediate sequel in his Inaugural Address. Reagan continued: “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed” (emphasis added). Note here that Reagan didn’t rest his argument against the growth of government on grounds of efficiency or effectiveness, but on the constitutional ground of consent. This had been a constant theme of Reagan’s political rhetoric for more than 20 years, but one that was rarely heard from America’s political class — even from other conservatives. He was careful, though, to qualify his critique of government:

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. . . . Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back.

While this is not revolutionary, it is controversial, as it challenges the basic premises of the modern, centralized administrative state. Liberals in 1981 could scarcely have imagined hearing such heresy from the presidential podium. Although many liberals had been shaken by the disasters of the preceding 15 years, from Vietnam and the Great Society through President Carter’s ineffectual rule, there was never a point at which the fundamental premises of modern liberalism were attacked from the pinnacle of American power. The moment seemed very far removed from the days when a liberal intellectual such as Robert Maynard Hutchins could declare: “The notion that the sole concern of a free society is the limitation of governmental authority and that that government is best which governs least is certainly archaic. Our object today should not be to weaken government in competition with other centers of power, but rather to strengthen it as the agency charged with the responsibility for the common good.”

BACK TO THE FOUNDERS
Reagan was the first president since FDR who spoke frequently and substantively about the Founders and the Constitution. This is a remarkable and telling fact. Woodrow Wilson also spoke often on these subjects, but quite differently than FDR did. While Wilson was openly critical of the founding because of its emphasis on limited government, FDR’s invocations of it were mischievous — he appeared to be defending or proposing a restoration of the principles of the founding while in fact attempting a wholesale modification of our constitutional order. After FDR, our presidents practically ceased making reference to the founding or the Constitution — until Reagan arrived.

It is also significant that Reagan rejected the reformist assertion that the presidency, or our democracy in general, was inadequate to the times.

From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

Reagan had so fully internalized the thought of so many of his political forebears, such as Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, that it is not clear whether he knew he was paraphrasing them. Where he got his principles, though, is no mystery. In his First Inaugural Address, in 1801, Thomas Jefferson said: “Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.” Unlike Hutchins and other liberals, Reagan didn’t think Jefferson’s philosophy was “archaic.”

Did Reagan succeed in curbing the size and reach of the federal government? The answer appears to be no, at least if total federal spending or the size of the federal bureaucracy is used as the main metric. Although Reagan had some success in keeping the growth of government spending below what it would have been under a second term of Jimmy Carter (indeed, far below what Carter’s last five-year budget plan had projected), over the long run the Reagan years appear to have been a small speed bump on the road to serfdom. Between 1981 and 2006 (the last year for which I ran the numbers for my book), inflation-adjusted federal spending grew by 84 percent, while the population grew by only 30 percent. If per capita spending had grown only at the rate of inflation, federal outlays in 2006 would have been $800 billion lower than they actually were — under, remember, a Republican president and a Republican Congress.

On the other hand, in 1981 federal spending accounted for 22.2 percent of GDP; in 2006 it was 20.3 percent. So the growth in the economy over the last generation has allowed federal spending to soar way beyond the rate of population growth while falling slightly as a portion of GDP. William Voegeli commented on this in The Claremont Review of Books:

This measure hovered in a very narrow band for the whole era, never exceeding 23.5% or falling below 18.4%. Adding expenditures by states and localities confirms the picture of a rugby match between liberals and conservatives that is one interminable scrum in the middle of the field. Spending by all levels of government in America amounted to 31.6% of GDP in 1981, and 31.8% in 2006.

The difficulties Reagan had controlling spending and the growth of government were not lost on conservatives during and immediately after his presidency. The case for disappointment, verging at times on betrayal, was made often while Reagan was in office. For example, the Winter 1984 issue of Policy Review contained a symposium called “What Conservatives Think of Reagan.” Now recall that in early 1984 the Democrats were engaged in a spirited nomination battle to see who could best reestablish old-school liberalism and overthrow the Reagan usurpation. As late as December 1983 some polls found Reagan trailing the putative strongest Democratic challenger, Sen. John Glenn, and it was far from clear that the economic expansion that had shown signs of robustness in 1983 would continue.

In the midst of this uncertain political situation, conservatives such as Sen. William Armstrong (R., Colo.) said: “What’s the sense of having a Republican administration and a Republican Senate if the best we can do is a $200 billion deficit?” Terry Dolan, head of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, complained: “There has been no spending cut. There has been no turnover of control to the states. There has been no effort to dismantle the Washington bureaucratic elitist establishment. . . . The question when Reagan got elected was whether he was going to be closer to Eisenhower as a caretaker or to Roosevelt as a revolutionary. He’s been generally closer to Eisenhower, preserving the status quo established by previous liberal administrations.” On and on the conservative commentariat fulminated. Conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans: “This has been essentially another Ford administration. It has been business as usual, not much different from any other Republican administration in our lifetime.” Paul Weyrich: “The radical surgery that was required in Washington was not performed.”

In the early years after Reagan left office, the refrain of disappointment continued. Midge Decter wrote in Commentary in 1991: “There was no Reagan Revolution, not even a skeleton of one to hang in George Bush’s closet.” “In the end,” concurred William Niskanen, chairman of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, “there was no Reagan Revolution.” The late Thomas B. Silver argued: “Judged by the highest goal he set for himself, [Reagan] was not successful. That goal was nothing less than a realignment of the American political order, in which the primacy of the New Deal was to be challenged and overthrown. It cannot be said that Reagan in any fundamental way dismantled or even scaled back the administrative state created by FDR.”

The hatred of the Left for George W. Bush was amusing, but that of the Right was hilarious, especially when they compared him unfavorably to the Gipper, who they'd loathed in office and whose legacy they'd invented out of whole cloth.

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AS W SHOULD HAVE DONE IN IN JANUARY 2005...:

Get ready for another uproar (Ruben Navarrette, August 26, 2009, San Diego Union Tribune)

[A]s divisive and shrill as the health care discussion has been at times, the soon-to-be resurrected immigration debate could be much worse. The issue, expected to be on Congress' fall agenda, will provide its share of theatrics. Imagine cable television filling air time with footage of protesters waving American flags and screaming about how illegal immigrants are invading and “colonizing” the United States, letting Spanish drown out English and turning the land of Ozzie and Harriet into that of Jose and Maria. Those cultural fears will be front and center as Americans needlessly fret about losing control over their own country and their own destiny.

And, if Obama wants to get an immigration reform package through Congress, he will again need help from conservative Blue Dog Democrats.

Just like with health care. And if Obama panders to the Blue Dogs too much, he could alienate more liberal Democrats. Just like with health care.

...so should the UR have in January 2009. Though Mr. Obama had even greater reason to pass an amnesty, just for the economic stimulus it would have provided.

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THE SAFETY DANCE:

Obama Dances Awkwardly With Bush Policies (Dan Balz, August 26, 2009, Washington Post)

On the same day Holder made his announcement, it became clear that some elements of the Bush administration's policies for handling suspected terrorists would continue. The current administration will continue the policy of rendition -- shipping suspects abroad for interrogation -- although, administration officials insist, under stricter guidelines that will prevent them from being tortured.

That was the latest example of an area of continuity between Obama's and Bush's national security policies, particularly the policies that were in practice during the last years of Bush's presidency.

The most obvious area of continuity in foreign policy involves two of the key architects of Bush's policies in the final two years of his presidency. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, continue to play central roles in military and security policy of the Obama administration.

In Afghanistan, Obama's departures from Bush's policies have been aimed at augmenting the size of U.S. forces and stepping up the nation's commitment to the war there. In Iraq, Obama has ordered a withdrawal of U.S. forces, as he pledged during the campaign, but on a slightly elongated timetable. In reality, given the relative success of Bush's troop surge policy and the agreements negotiated at the end of his administration, the shift from U.S. to Iraqi dominance in securing the country was already in the works.

In other areas of national security policy, Obama has made alterations but not always full breaks with Bush. In some cases, he has repackaged the rhetoric that describes these policies, but Bush administration officials see clear links.

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HIS BROTHER MADE IT TO THE OVAL...:

Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies (JOHN M. BRODER, 8/27/09, NY Times)

Mr. Kennedy was the last surviving brother of a generation of Kennedys that dominated American politics in the 1960s and that came to embody glamour, political idealism and untimely death. The Kennedy mystique — some call it the Kennedy myth — has held the imagination of the world for decades and came to rest on the sometimes too-narrow shoulders of the brother known as Teddy.

Mr. Kennedy, who served 46 years as the most well-known Democrat in the Senate, longer than all but two other senators, was the only one of those brothers to die after reaching old age. President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were felled by assassins’ bullets in their 40s. The eldest brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., died in 1944 at the age of 29 while on a risky World War II bombing mission. [...]

Senator Kennedy was at or near the center of much of American history in the latter part of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. For much of his adult life, he veered from victory to catastrophe, winning every Senate election he entered but failing in his only try for the presidency; living through the sudden deaths of his brothers and three of his nephews; being responsible for the drowning death on Chappaquiddick Island of a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide to his brother Robert. One of the nephews, John F. Kennedy Jr., who the family hoped would one day seek political office and keep the Kennedy tradition alive, died in a plane crash in 1999 at age 38.

Mr. Kennedy himself was almost killed, in 1964, in a plane crash, which left him with permanent back and neck problems.

He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy.

Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, one of the institution’s most devoted students, said of his longtime colleague, “Ted Kennedy would have been a leader, an outstanding senator, at any period in the nation’s history.”

Mr. Byrd is one of only two senators to have served longer in the chamber than Mr. Kennedy; the other was Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. In May 2008, on learning of Mr. Kennedy’s diagnosis of a lethal brain tumor, Mr. Byrd wept openly on the floor of the Senate.

Born to one of the wealthiest American families, Mr. Kennedy spoke for the downtrodden in his public life while living the heedless private life of a playboy and a rake for many of his years. Dismissed early in his career as a lightweight and an unworthy successor to his revered brothers, he grew in stature over time by sheer longevity and by hewing to liberal principles while often crossing the partisan aisle to enact legislation. A man of unbridled appetites at times, he nevertheless brought a discipline to his public work that resulted in an impressive catalog of legislative achievement across a broad landscape of social policy.

Mr. Kennedy left his mark on legislation concerning civil rights, health care, education, voting rights and labor. He was chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions at his death. But he was more than a legislator. He was a living legend whose presence insured a crowd and whose hovering figure haunted many a president.

Although he was a leading spokesman for liberal issues and a favorite target of conservative fund-raising appeals, the hallmark of his legislative success was his ability to find Republican allies to get bills passed. Perhaps the last notable example was his work with President George W. Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind education law pushed by Mr. Bush in 2001. He also co-sponsored immigration legislation with Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee. One of his greatest friends and collaborators in the Senate was Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican.

Mr. Kennedy had less impact on foreign policy than on domestic concerns, but when he spoke his voice was influential. He led the Congressional effort to impose sanctions on South Africa over apartheid, pushed for peace in Northern Ireland, won a ban on arms sales to the dictatorship in Chile and denounced the Vietnam War. In 2002, he voted against authorizing the Iraq war; later, he called that opposition “the best vote I’ve made in my 44 years in the United States Senate.”

...but his own legislative legacy means that to some considerable extent we live in Ted Kennedy's America. Of course, his isolationism meant that the South Vietnamese live in Ted Kennedy's Vietnam and had he had his way, Eastern Europe would still be to some extent Ted Kennedy's Iron Curtain and Iraq would be Ted Kennedy's Ba'athist regime, etc. Among the tragedies of his life is that where the older brothers became heroes fighting the Axis powers, he was only too willing to countenance equally vile evils. And even setting aside the personal damage he did to people, he can never be forgiven his betrayal of his own religion to embrace abortion. For all the talk of how much he cared for the weakest members of society, the fact is he helped kill tens of millions of the most vulnerable.

The great irony of hios career was that he was at his very best when he helped to prevent government from limiting people--immigration reform, civil rights, deregulation--largely mistaken when he either helped or turned a blind eye to government interference in people's lives--all of the various mandates and regulations he helped pass--and a fellow traveler with evil when he collaborated with regimes that oppressed and killed people, from the legal regime of Roe to the foreign regimes of North Vietnam, Iraq, etc. His inconsistency on these questions made him a lesser man than a Ronald Reagan or a George W. Bush who applied their humanitarianism universally and illustrates the essential incoherence of modern liberalism, of which he was the last icon.

MORE:
Coincidentally, Michael Barone wrote about this dissonance today in a different context, Obama's lyrical Left struggles with liberalism (Michael Barone, August 26, 2009, Washington Examiner)

[U]nlike most New Republic writers of the time, [Randolph Bourne] vehemently opposed U.S. entry into World War I -- not out of pacifism, but for fear of what it would do to the country. "All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offense or a military defense," he wrote in 1918, "and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become -- the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's business and attitudes and opinions."

This was a perceptive description of the dominant trend of the unlyrical warlike Left of the first two-thirds of the 20th century. In World War I, the Wilson administration nationalized the railroads and shipyards; in World War II, the Roosevelt administration mobilized 16 million into the military (the proportionate equivalent today would be 35 million) and commandeered much of the private-sector economy.

The Wilson war policies provided a blueprint for much of the New Deal. The Roosevelt war policies were a template for the makeshift welfare state of the postwar years. Lyndon Johnson declared a "war" on poverty. It was even clearer that war was the health of the state in Britain, where voters rejected the welfare state in the 1930s depression and embraced it after the experience of wartime mobilization and controls.

But in the late 1960s, the American Left started going Randolph Bourne's way. They rejected Lyndon Johnson's "guns and better" and renounced the Vietnam war. They cheered rather than objected when Richard Nixon abolished the military draft. They supported civil rights and tolerance of diverse lifestyles and multiculturalist responses to immigration. They opposed military action in Grenada, in the Gulf war, in Iraq and oppose it today in Afghanistan. [...]

The problem for Obama and America's lyrical Left is that dovishness abroad and statism at home don't readily go together.

The Death of Ted Kennedy: The Brother Who Mattered Most (Richard Lacayo, Aug. 26, 2009, TIME)
-OBIT: U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy dies at age 77 (Reuters, 8/26/09)
-OBIT: Sen. Edward Kennedy dies at 77 (Kathy Kiely, 8/26/09, USA TODAY)

A gifted speaker and skilled legislator, his career was punctuated by a series of personal setbacks and humiliations — often of his own making. The most devastating came in 1969, when a car that Kennedy was driving hurtled off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Mass., killing a young female passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy fled the scene and did not report his role in the accident until the next day.

Decades later, Kennedy still refused to discuss the incident, according to his biographer, Adam Clymer, who wrote Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography in 1999.

Though he disagreed with church leaders on the issues of abortion and gay rights, Kennedy was a devout Catholic who clung to his religion's belief in the potential for human redemption.

-OBIT: Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy Dies at 77 After Cancer Battle (Joe Holley, 8/26/09, Washington Post)

Kennedy served in the Senate through five of the most dramatic decades of the nation's history. He became a lawmaker whose legislative accomplishments, political authority and gift for friendship across the political spectrum invited favorable comparisons to Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and a handful of other leviathans of the country's most elite political body. But he was also beset by personal frailties and family misfortunes that were the stuff of tabloid headlines.

For years, many Democrats considered Kennedy's own presidency a virtual inevitability. In 1968, a "Draft Ted" campaign emerged only a few months after Robert Kennedy's death, but he demurred, realizing he was not prepared to be president.

Political observers considered him the candidate to beat in 1972, but that possibility came to an end on a night in July 1969, when the senator drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., and a young female passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned.

The tragedy had a corrosive effect on Kennedy's image, eroding his national standing. He made a dismal showing when he challenged President Jimmy Carter for reelection in 1980. But the moment of his exit from the presidential stage marked an oratorical highlight when, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, he invoked his brothers and promised: "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on. The cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."

Instead of a president, Kennedy became a major presence in the Senate, which he had joined in 1962 with the help of his politically connected family. He was a cagey and effective legislator, even in the years when Republicans were in the ascendancy. When most Democrats sought to fend off the "liberal" label, the senior senator from Massachusetts wore it proudly.

-OBIT: Edward Kennedy dies at 77; 'liberal lion of the Senate': The Massachusetts Democrat was the last surviving son in a legendary political family. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2008. (Rich Simon and Claudia Luther, August 26, 2009, LA Times)

Though his most cherished legislative goal of universal health insurance eluded him, Kennedy helped write a number of laws that ranged from making it easier for workers who change or lose jobs to keep their health insurance, to giving 18-year-olds the right to vote, to deregulating the airlines, helping lower airfares.

He several times spearheaded legislation to raise the minimum wage and, in the early 1970s, wrote the law creating Meals on Wheels, which delivers meals to seniors. He was influential in reforming immigration laws and in expanding Head Start programs.

In 1982, he helped gain an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and he was a principal sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which negated Supreme Court decisions that made it more difficult for minorities to win lawsuits charging job discrimination by employers. In 1990, he worked with then-Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) to gain passage of the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act giving disabled Americans greater access to employment, among other things. That same year, he was author of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act providing funds for community healthcare and support services.

And every major education law passed since the 1960s bears Kennedy's imprint, according to the National Education Assn., which gave Kennedy its highest award in 2000.

"Americans have so much affection for the Kennedy family, and they often fail to see past the legend and the celebrity," the group's then-president, Bob Chase, said at the time.

-OBIT: Sen. Edward Kennedy Dies After Battle With Cancer (NAFTALI BENDAVID, 8/26/09, WSJ)

Mr. Kennedy died with one of his lifelong goals, universal health care, tantalizingly within reach yet struggling on Capitol Hill. Some advocates have said his absence has hurt the chances for legislation, and hope Mr. Kennedy's passing will give new momentum and emotional force to his favored cause.

Mr. Kennedy was embraced early on as an heir to a heroic legacy and long seen as a president-in-waiting. But his own mistakes -- especially a car crash near Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, in which a campaign aide died -- helped cost him the presidency when he sought it in 1980. In later years, episodes like the rape trial of his nephew William Kennedy Smith in 1991 gave him the reputation of an irresponsible playboy.

-OBIT: Senator Edward Kennedy dies at 77 (Jurek Martin, August 26 2009, Financial Times)
-OBIT: U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy dies at 77 (Stephen Dinan, 8/26/09, Washington Times)

Outside of Washington Mr. Kennedy was a divisive figure, loved by liberals and hated by conservatives. But inside the Senate he was known as a gracious and gifted lawmaker, eager to work across the aisle if it meant getting major legislation passed.

He built a legislative empire unequaled in modern times, with more than 300 of his bills signed into law.

-OBIT: A Liberal Icon and a Legendary Legislator: A Five-Decade Senate Legacy (Seth Stern, 8/26/09, CQ)

n the end, his influence on the way the United States lives its collective life in the 21st century may well exceed the imprint left by his two even more famous older brothers, President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. “For more than four decades in the Senate, Teddy has led the fight on the most important issues of our time: civil rights, social justice and economic opportunity,” his niece Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy, said in 2008. “I know his brothers would be so proud of him.”

Sometimes, Kennedy wound up getting less or giving away more than his liberal allies would have preferred. Most recently, he said he harbored regrets over joining with President George W. Bush to enact the No Child Left Behind overhaul of federal education aid and the Medicare prescription drug benefit. But he understood better than anyone that ideological purity is almost always the principal opponent of legislative accomplishment. “Teddy Kennedy understood that nothing in the Senate gets done without bipartisan support,” says Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University. “He was able to work with the most astonishing collection of political conservatives to really amass one of the most remarkable legislative records of any senator of the 20th century or young 21st century.”

-TRIBUTE: Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009): The Kennedy who most changed America. (Timothy Noah, Aug. 26, 2009, Slate)

In 1965, Kennedy was floor manager for an immigration bill that ended four decades of preferences for Northern Europeans at the expense of Asians and other groups and, some have argued, paved the way for Barack Obama's presidential victory. In 1972, Kennedy helped shepherd Title IX, which banned sex discrimination in education programs and fostered the expansion of athletic programs for women in high schools and colleges. In 1974, Kennedy sponsored the "post-Watergate amendments" to campaign finance law, limiting the size and sources of private contributions to candidates and creating a public financing system for presidential elections. In 1986, Kennedy advanced key amendments to the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, guaranteeing continued health coverage to workers after they lost their jobs. In 1990, Kennedy sponsored the Americans With Disabilities Act, which enacted civil rights protections for the handicapped. In 1997, he sponsored the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which extended medical care to families with children that didn't qualify for Medicaid. Every one of these laws expanded in tangible ways the promise of American life.

-TRIBUTE: Romanticizing the late Ted Kennedy: A great man, with a dark past (Mehdi Hasan, 26 August 2009, New Statesman)
-TRIBUTE: Ted Kennedy Was No Victim: Ted Kennedy Courtesy Gerald Posner Teddy Kennedy ably shouldered the grief from his siblings’ death and pushed for health-care reform for decades. Gerald Posner recollects his first meeting with the senator, and why he could never fill John and Bobby’s shoes. (Gerald Posner, 8/26/09, daily Beast)
-TRIBUTE: Ted Kennedy: a tale of American shame and redemption (Michael White, 8/26/09, the Guardian)
-TRIBUTE: Triumph And Tragedy: The see-saw life of Edward M. Kennedy (Sean Wilentz, August 26, 2009, New Republic)
-TRIBUTE: Ted Kennedy: Global Hero (Adam Clymer, 8/26/09, Daily Beast)
-TRIBUTE: Ted Kennedy: Keeper of the Liberal Flame: Kennedy was the champion of the uninsured, the undocumented, and the forgotten. (Harold Meyerson, August 26, 2009, American Prospect)
Icons Aren't What They Used to Be
Journalists find another word to abuse. (Joe Queenan, 7/20/09, WSJ)

The term "icon" has two basic meanings, neither of which apply to Michael Jackson, Greg Norman, Ed McMahon, most Scottish mystery writers or anyone from Paul Revere & the Raiders. Originally it referred to sacred images painted on tiny wooden panels back in the days of the Eastern Empire. Thus, in theory, Farrah Fawcett's famous '70s poster could vaguely qualify as an icon. But for the longest time the word "icon" was used to refer to what Webster's describes as "an object of uncritical devotion." No more. Today it is used to describe anyone reasonably famous who is completely over the hill, on a respirator, or stone dead. Or, in the case of Mickey D's, beloved but inanimate.

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ANOTHER MAN OVERBOARD:

Feingold: No health care bill before Christmas (Richard Moore, 8/25/09, Lakeland Times)

U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold told a large crowd gathered for a listening session in Iron County last week there would likely be no health care bill before the end of the year - and perhaps not at all.

It was an assessment Feingold said he didn't like, but the prospect of no health care legislation brought a burst of applause from a packed house of nearly 150 citizens at the Mercer Community Center. [...]

The senator, a declared proponent of health care reform in principle, nonetheless did not seem too concerned about a potential failure of the Obama administration's effort. He said there was merit to the idea of trying a variety of proposals in various states first.

"Lindsay Graham and I sponsored legislation to have pilot programs in five states," Feingold told the audience.

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WAS DICK CHENEY TOO BUSY?:

George W. Bush CIA insider key to Obama plan (JOSH GERSTEIN, 8/25/09, Politico)

[N]ow, Obama has chosen a man who was at the heart of Bush’s intelligence effort to play a key role in overseeing the new administration’s own interrogation policies: John Brennan, a 25-year CIA veteran who was privy to the extreme tactics Obama has declared off limits. [...]

This isn’t the first time Brennan has drawn controversy. When Brennan’s name was floated as a leading candidate for CIA director during Obama’s transition, liberal activists loudly questioned the possible choice, and Brennan later withdrew.

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SO WHO EXACTLY IS HUMANIZED...:

What if torture works? (Mehdi Hasan, 25 August 2009, New Statesman)

[A]s the Guardian reports today, in its coverage of the latest CIA revelations:

Some of the techniques were judged to have been a failure, with the mock execution described as "transparently a ruse, and no benefit was derived from it". But the document says valuable intelligence was gained on various plots round the world, including one to hijack aircraft to fly into Heathrow airport.

This raises the intriguing yet disturbing question: what if torture, on the odd, rare occasion, works? What if useable, valuable and accurate intelligence is gleaned from detainees that either prevents actual terror attacks, or helps disrupt a terrorist plot or leads to the arrest and detention of wanted terrorists? Does it then become permissible or defensible? [...]

The bigger issue is: why is it "unjustifiable"? There are, of course, countless familiar and obvious moral objections which revolve around human rights, dignity, autonomy, etc. As Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, for example, has argued:

[Torture] dehumanizes people by treating them as pawns to be manipulated through their pain.

...when you don't torture a terrorist to see where they're planning to kill next? Is he more human if he gets away with murder than if you waterboard him? Are you more humane if you let people die rather than being mean to him? Are the victims better off dead than living at the cost of a brief waterboarding of one of their attackers?

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NOW THAT'S WORTH A STATE BORDER RULE VIOLATION:

Bellying up to Kentucky Fried Chicken's double down (LA Times: Daily Dish, August 24, 2009)

The sandwich does indeed exist, and it is called the double down. It is made of two Original Recipe fillets, bacon, Swiss and pepper jack cheese and something called the Colonel's sauce.

The bad news? The sandwich is only being tested in Providence, R.I., and Omaha, Neb. But if it does well -- and really, why wouldn't this sandwich do well? -- it could head out West.

No wonder God has not totally given up on us.

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SURE, PARTISANSHIP IS SUPPOSED TO STOP AT THE WATER'S EDGE...:

Democratic Congressman: Obama demand for settlement freeze 'mistaken' (Barak Ravid, 8/25/09, Ha'aretz)

The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee said last week that the Obama administration is making a mistake in demanding Israel completely freeze construction in the settlements. Congressman Howard Berman, a Democrat from California, made these comments during a closed meeting with Jewish leaders in Los Angeles.

...but apparently you can frag the leader of your own party....

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MATCH OF THE DAY:

Violence erupts at West Ham v Millwall match (Chris Irvine, 25 Aug 2009, Daily Telegraph)

A man has been stabbed and at least two people have been arrested as "large-scale" crowd trouble broke out between fans outside a West Ham v Millwall football match. [...]

Reports suggested that some of the fans had been throwing missiles and bricks at one another and the violence between the two sets of fans was described as "serious" by BBC News.

Police called on reinforcements in order to help calm the violence, which has been going on for several hours.

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NEW STUDIES REVEAL THE BLUE DOG HAS EXTENDED ITS RANGE TO NJ:

Health care plan raises cost concerns (Erik Larsen, August 22, 2009, Asbury Park Press)

[U.S. Rep. John Adler, D-N.J.] said he shares much of the same consternation as many of his constituents over the existing legislation proposed.

"The bill that's coming through the House, with or without the public option, isn't good for America," Adler said matter-of-factly. "We have Congressional Budget Office projections of a trillion-dollar increase in costs that will have to be borne by taxpayers or insurance purchasers; meaning businesses and households. Either way, that's a cost we can't afford."

While he won't speculate on what will happen when the House reconvenes on Sept. 8, he said acceptable reform is one that keeps all the good parts of the American health care system but does a better job at controlling costs.

"I'm hearing different views from different people, but I'm hearing a consistent concern about cost to taxpayers and to insurance purchasers, and I share that concern that real health care reform has to involve cost controls to make private insurance affordable."

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CHOOSING SIDES:

King on Holder: 'You wonder which side they’re on' (Ben Smith, 8/25/09, Politico)

A "furious" Rep. Peter King, the hawkish, maverick Long Island Republican, blasted a "disgraceful" Eric Holder for opening an investigation of CIA interrogators and chided his own party for what he described as a weak response to the move in an interview just now with POLITICO.

"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on," he said of the attorney general's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

"It’s a total breach of faith, and either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of his party or he’s lost control of his administration," said King, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

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GOING TOWARDS THE NOISE:

Hero Teacher Halted ‘Columbine-Style’ Attack (KTVU, August 25, 2009)

Hillsdale High teacher Kennet Santana admitted Tuesday he was merely reacting to the chaos around him when he tackled and subdued a former student, who had entered the school armed with 10 pipe bombs, a sword and a chainsaw.

Santana’s actions were being praised Tuesday for preventing a ‘Columbine-Style’ massacre at the San Mateo high school attended by more than 1,000 students.

He told KTVU that his Monday had a pretty normal start. It was around 8 a.m. and he had just checked in at the school office when the events began to unfold.

“I was on my way to make some copies,” he told KTVU. “I heard the first bang --- it sounded more like a crash to me. So that slowed me down. The second bang came right after that. There was a rush of students and teachers going away from the noise.”

What Santana did not know at the time was the noise was two pipe bombs exploding in a hallway. Fortunately, no one was injured by the blasts and instead of joining the exodus out of school, Santana decided to go toward the noise.

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ALL THINGS COME TO HE WHO WAITS:

Sadrists Promised Major Positions in New Gov't (Shadha al-Jubori, 8/25/09, Asharq Al-Awsat)

Asmaa al-Mousawi, a high-ranking member of the Sadrist trend that is led by Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, revealed that the movement had received a number of assurances prior to it joining the Iraqi National Alliance, which replaces the United Iraqi Alliance. These assurances ensure that there is no repeat of the "mistakes" of the United Iraqi Alliance which resulted in the withdrawal of one party from the coalition, and the split of another. These assurances include the Sadrist trend being offered high-ranking positions in government should the Shiite coalition win the forthcoming parliamentary elections in Iraq.

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DOG BITES WOMAN:

Applause, boos greet lawmaker (Patricia C. McCarter, 8/25/09, Huntsville Times)

The union man was angry.

He loudly reminded U.S. Rep. Parker Griffith, D-Huntsville, of a promise he made to U.S. Steel Workers Local 193 in Courtland last spring that if they helped him get elected, he'd do everything he could to get health insurance for all Americans.

While surrounded by many more conservatives than liberals in the Monday night town hall meeting at the University of North Alabama, union President Phil Everett wanted to know: "Are you a Democrat or are you a Republican?"

The Democratic congressman took a negative stance on the Democratic-proposed economic stimulus package and the cap-and-trade pollution bill, and has offered conservative-leaning answers to dozens of questions on health care reform.

In fact, applause nearly drowned him out as he walked over to shake the unhappy union man's hand and said, "I'm an American, and a good one." [...]

Griffith was asked why, if he believed what he said he believed, did he align himself with the party of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama.

"Conservatives could not have stopped this (health care reform) bill (from coming to the floor for a vote)," he said, adding that only the conservative arm of the Democratic Party - the Blue Dogs, of which he is a member - could.

Another speaker commended him for his stance, but said he was concerned that if Pelosi was privy to everything he was saying, "she might not let you back in chambers."

Griffith laughed and said, "If she doesn't like it, I've got a gift certificate to the mental health center."

Christie Carden, the 25-year-old organizer of the Huntsville Tea Party Movement, asked if he would vote for Pelosi for speaker again. Griffith said that if matter came up for a vote today, "I would not vote for her. Someone that divisive and that polarizing cannot bring us together."

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HE TALKS, WE WIN:

75% Worried That Gitmo Closing Will Set Dangerous Terrorists Free (Rasmussen, August 25, 2009)

Seventy-five percent (75%) of U.S. voters are at least somewhat concerned that dangerous terrorists will be set free if the Guantanamo prison camp is closed and some prisoners are transferred to other countries. Fifty-six percent (56%) are very concerned. [...]

Support for the president’ s plan to close the prison camp for suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba continues to erode. It’s been steadily dropping since Obama announced the camp closure just after taking office in January. Only 32% of voters now favor closing the prison camp, down six points from May and down 12 points since the President announced his decision in January.

Mr. Obama had done so little of any significance before he got to the White House that each of us could look at him and see there whatever we wanted--he was the ultimate Rorschach blot. Whose bright idea was it to let him start defining the image into something recognizable?

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IT'S ALL JUST THE THIRD WAY:

Cameron’s Tories: the heirs to Blairism: Promoting patient choice, regulating our behaviour... Cameron is channelling New Labour circa 1997. (Rob Lyons, 8/25/09, Spiked)

Once upon a time, the UK Conservative Party proclaimed a mix of free-market rhetoric and social moralising. Under Margaret Thatcher, the message (more preached than practised) was that the state was ruining the British economy; the sooner government left business alone to get on with creating wealth, the better. But just as Tony Blair was the product of the domination of the Conservatives in the Eighties and Nineties, so David Cameron is now sounding more and more like a protége of New Labour.

Cameron’s speech to Conservative activists in Bolton, England, last week started by talking about ‘values’. There is, perhaps, nothing so quintessentially New Labour as talking about ‘values’. It’s as if Cameron had been taking advice from Labour deputy PM Peter Mandelson. ‘I know perfectly well that some of the changes we have made in this party over the past few years have not been easy for the party to accept’, Cameron said. ‘But there is one change we’ve made where, frankly, it has felt like pushing on an open door – and that is making crystal clear our wholehearted commitment to the NHS. Why? It’s not to do with ideology, or philosophy, or any abstract political theory. It is the simple, practical, commonsense, human understanding of a fantastic and precious fact of British life.’

In other words, the Conservatives don’t do ideology, philosophy or political theory anymore. All they have is the same pragmatic, managerial approach to politics that New Labour does.

Indeed, she practiced Pinochetism as Blair practiced Thatcherism as Cameron will practice Blairism...

MORE:
A Working Model (Richard W. Rahn, May 16, 2008, Washington Times)

Thirty years ago, a young Jose Pinera, who had earned a Ph.D. at Harvard, was Chile's labor minister. He saw the coming disaster in the government old-age pension system.

Inspired by an idea from the late Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, he developed a solution that empowers workers and gives them real financial security. Pinera-type social security systems have now been adopted by more than 30 countries and cover several hundred million people — for a very simple reason — it works!

Under the Pinera-type social security systems, workers are required to invest in highly diversified, qualified funds. Because they actually own their pension funds (like 401(k) funds in the United States), workers can choose their age of retirement, whether it is age 50 or 80. The longer they work, the more money they will have — but again each individual determines his or her own retirement age. (The very poor and those unable to work are still covered by a government system.)

Mr. Pinera is here in Berlin, selling his concept to German opinion leaders, as part of a multi-country "Free Market Road Show" sponsored by the European Center for Economic Growth and the Hayek Institute of Vienna, Austria.

The Chilean privatized system began in 1981, exactly 100 years after Bismarck instituted his system in Germany. It has been 29 years since the system went into effect in Chile so Mr. Pinera now can answer his critics, not only with theoretical arguments, but with hard data.

The results are remarkable. Chile's citizens have on average experienced a 10 percent per year, above inflation, compounded growth rate in their pension funds for the last 29 years. The result is most Chileans are no longer poor, but are, in fact, "small capitalists."

The Chilean government, increasingly freed from paying pensions out of tax funds (almost all Chileans have moved into the private accounts, though they could have stayed in the old government system), is now running a budget surplus of 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), which could pave the way for the abolition of the income tax.

The new Chilean system has provided so much investment capital that Chile moved from being a poor country to being a solid middle-income country with the highest per capita income in South America. Critics in the U.S. and elsewhere claim investing pension funds in stocks and bonds is risky, but the real risk to the elderly is being trapped in government social security schemes headed toward insolvency.

The Swedish Model (Richard W. Rahn, August 18, 2009, Washington Times)

One notable success has been pension reform. Sweden was the first nation to implement a mandatory government retirement system for all its citizens. Sweden, like the United States and most other countries, was faced with an increasing, unfunded social security liability as a result of low birthrates and people living much longer. After studying the problem in the early 1990s, the Swedes approved, in 1998, moving toward a Chilean private pension system, first developed by former Chilean Labor Minister Jose Pinera. (Seventeen countries have adopted variations of the Pinerian system, which has been very successful in Chile.)

The new Swedish pension system has four key features, including partial privatization, individual accounts, a safety net to protect the poor and a transition to protect retirees and older workers. The benefits have been substantial budgetary savings, higher retirement income and faster economic growth.

Those who wish to chase the Swedish model need first to decide which model they seek: The high-growth, pre-1960 model; the low-growth model of the 1970s and 1980s; or the reformist, welfare-state model of recent years. The irony is that the current Democratic Congress and administration are rapidly emulating the parts of the Swedish model that proved disastrous and rejecting those parts that are proving to be successful.

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WHY EXEMPT ACADEMIA?:

RI gov to shut down state government for 12 days (RAY HENRY, 8/24/09, AP)

Rhode Island will shut down its state government for 12 days and hopes to trim millions of dollars in funding for local governments under a plan Gov. Don Carcieri outlined Monday to balance a budget hammered by surging unemployment and plummeting tax revenue.

The shutdown will force 81 percent of the roughly 13,550-member state work force, excluding its college system, to stay home a dozen days without pay before the start of the new fiscal year in July. [...]

The governor ordered the shutdown in an executive order but said he's willing to negotiate a different deal with state employee unions so long as it saves the same amount of money, roughly $22 million. But time is short: the first shutdown day has been scheduled for Sept. 4. Additional shutdown days have been scheduled every month through June.

There's a lot of mileage for the GOP in taxpayers vs. taxeaters.

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BUT IT ISN'T HATE WHEN THE LEFT DOES IT:

HBO’s Potential New Star ‘Licked Doorknobs’ to Make Republicans Sick (John Nolte, 8/25/09, Big Hollywood)

The first reaction to a story like this is get wrapped ’round the axle of HBO’s hypocrisy, so let’s get that out of the way: Of course no Republican who had behaved in the same manner as ”sex columnist” Dan Savage would get a shot at an HBO show. But there’s really no hypocrisy when you realize that Bill Maher’s network is waging ideological war. Through that prism of clarity, the network’s desire to do business with and thrust Mr. Savage further into the American cultural/political landscape is perfectly consistent. [...]

Acting out his burning hostility in such an inappropriate manner wasn’t a one shot deal, either. As recently as 2006, Savage declared in a videotaped interview that Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli should:

“…be dragged behind a pickup truck until there’s nothing left but the rope.”

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A PEOPLE THAT BELIEVES THEMSELF A STATE IS ONE:

Fayad: De facto state within 2 years (JPOST.COM, 8/25/09)

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad on Tuesday unveiled a plan to create a de facto Palestinian state in two years. [...]

"We must confront the whole world with the reality that Palestinians are united and steadfast in their determination to remain on their homeland, end the occupation and achieve their freedom and independence," he continued.

It's taking them long enough.

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AND THEY WONDER WHY PEOPLE ARE CONFUSED?:

U.S. Raises Estimate for 10-Year Deficit to $9 Trillion (EDMUND L. ANDREWS, 8/25/09, NY Times)

“A lot of people will look at this deficit and say we cannot afford health care reform,” said Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. But Mr. Orszag said the opposite was true: the only way to control spiraling Medicare costs, he said, was to get control of overall health care costs...

So it is about rationing?

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NO PEAKING:

Bacteria Desalinate Water, Generate Power (Eric Bland, 8/25/09, Discovery News)

"(Using this approach) you basically need zero power input, and it could even produce energy if you use organic material as the input," said Liu.

For now, microbial fuel cells, whether they desalinate water, generate electricity or create hydrogen, methane or other gases, are limited to small-scale laboratory devices. That will change next month, however, when Logan and his colleagues install a larger microbial fuel cell to turn waste water from a Napa Valley winery into hydrogen gas.

"This project is just a demonstration for now," said Logan. "But ultimately (the winery) could use the power generated by the microbial fuel cell to power cars, forklifts or other vehicles."

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ELECTIONS DON'T MAKE EVERONE ELECT:

A mean streak in the US mainstream: The US tolerates more inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here (Mary Dejevsky, 8/25/09, Independent)

The reason why Obama is finding health reform such a struggle – even though it was central to his election platform – is not because an extreme wing of the Republican Party, mobilised by media shock-jocks, is foaming at the mouth, or because Republicans have more money than Democrats to buy lobbying and advertising power. Nor is it only because so many influential groups, from insurance companies through doctors, have lucrative interests to defend – although this is a big part of it.

It is because very many Americans simply do not agree that it is a good idea. And they include not only mainstream Republicans, but Democrats, too. Indeed, Obama's chief problem in seeking to extend health cover to most Americans is not Republican opposition: he thrashed John McCain to win his presidential mandate; he has majorities in both Houses of Congress. If Democrats were solidly behind reform, victory would already be his.

The unpalatable fact for Europeans who incline to think that Americans are just like us is that Democrats are not solidly behind Obama on this issue. Even many in the party's mainstream must be wooed, cajoled and even – yes – frightened, if they are ever going to agree to change the status quo. Universal healthcare is an article of faith in the US only at what mainstream America would regard as the bleeding- heart liberal end of the spectrum. [...]

The point is that, when on "normal", the needle of the US barometer is not only quite a way to the political right of where it would be in Europe, but showing a very different atmospheric level, too. For there is a mean and merciless streak in mainstream US attitudes, which tolerates much more in the way of inequality, deprivation and suffering than is acceptable here, while incorporating a large and often sanctimonious quotient of blame.

This transatlantic difference goes far beyond the healthcare debate. Consider the give-no-quarter statements out of the US on the release of the Lockerbie bomber – or the continued application of the death penalty, or the fact that excessive violence is far more common a cause for censorship of US films in Europe than sex. Or even, in documents emerging from the CIA, a different tolerance threshold where torture and terrorism are concerned.

Some put the divergence down to the ideological rigidity that led Puritans and others to flee to America in the first place; others to the ruthless struggle for survival that marked the early settlement years and the conquest of the West.

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THE BIGGEST HERO TO COME OUT OF NOTTINGHAM SINCE ROBIN HOOD:

Broad: a new hero takes fame in his stride: Amid the fervour, England's blue-eyed boy of the future keeps his feet on the ground (David Lloyd, 25 August 2009, Independent)

Nothing it seems, fazes Stuart Broad. Whether described as the next Andrew Flintoff, talked about as English sport's newest sex symbol or even promoted as a candidate to model fancy underwear, the only response is a knowing smile and a string of sensible words.

By taking five wickets in the space of 47 balls at The Oval, Broad changed his life. He may not fully appreciate that yet, but he will. In just a few overs of top-quality fast bowling, the 23-year-old not only put England on the road to an Ashes-clinching victory but also guaranteed that his picture would be used on front as well as back pages, in magazines and on billboards.

Not only that, but a private life that has probably never required much protecting will now need a little more guarding. "I don't think they have paparazzi in Nottingham," said Broad. If they don't, they will soon, Stuart.

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GOD SAID, MATISYAHU, KILL ME A SONG:

That Old Testament Sound (Lia Grainger, 8/24/09, National Post)

As is often the case with reggae music, Matisyahu's songs contain religious references, though he draws on Judaism rather than Rastafarianism. He feels that the two religions, rather than conflicting, complete a circle, because both make use of the stories in the Old Testament. "When I was 14 I started listening to Bob Marley and was hearing what I considered Jewish phases, but in a different context," Matisyahu says. "Bob Marley was singing about these powerful feelings for Zion, and it made me want to discover Judaism on my own terms."

The journey towards becoming a practising Hasidic Jew was not one that started at birth for Matisyahu. Born Matthew Miller and raised in White Plains, N.Y., he was brought up a Reconstructionist Jew, and spent much of his teenage years as a devoted fan of the jam band Phish, following them on tour around the country. It was a semester abroad in Israel that led him to adopt Orthodox Judaism, after which he gave up music completely, opting instead to devote himself completely to religious practice and study.

"It's sort of like the story of Abraham sacrificing his son," says Matisyahu of his time without music. "The son was his ultimate creation, but then in the end he doesn't have to kill him. It's the same thing that happened to me. Music was my main thing, and I wanted to show God and myself that I would be willing to give up everything." He says that after two or three years of barely even listening to music, opportunities arose to perform, and he decided to return to his life's other passion.

Once Matisyahu started performing, his rise was quick, and though his religion is quite visible when he's onstage - he often wears the traditional flat-top hat and long black jacket to perform - critics and fans came to realize that his music was not a gimmick.

One of the nice things about the Internet Archives' live music collection is there's a bunch of Matisyahu

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NOW IF ONLY THEY FOLLOW THE NORWAY MODEL:

Kurdistan oil strike delivers barrels by the million (Tamsin Carlisle, August 25. 2009, The National)

Gulf Keystone Petroleum may have found up to six times as much oil in Iraqi Kurdistan as it originally thought, making its oil strike the second multibillion barrel discovery in the region this year.

After encountering more oil while drilling its Shaikan-1 test well deeper, the British company said it revised its estimate of oil in place to between 1.5 billion and 3 billion barrels. That is up from the 300 million and 500 million barrel estimate it made earlier this month, and could translate to as much as 2 billion barrels of recoverable crude.

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I WOKE UP WITH WHAT?::

Liberalism without labor unions?: Hey Democrats: Can liberal interest groups and social elites really form the basis of a successful political party? (Michael Lind, Aug. 25, 2009, Salon)

Looking back, we can see that the history of American liberalism since the Depression falls into two periods: the New Deal up until the 1970s, when industrial labor provided the muscle of the reform coalition, and the neoliberal period, when unions have been eclipsed in the alliance by the black civil rights movement and other social movements: consumerism, environmentalism, feminism and gay rights. Necessary and important as they are, there are two problems with these liberal social movements as the base of a progressive party.

First, unlike unions, they are not membership organizations funded by dues from their members. They are mostly AstroTurf movements that depend on their funding and strategic direction on a handful of progressive foundations, and their leaders are appointed by donors and board members, not elected by followers. The work they do is valuable, but they cannot be substitutes for genuinely popular organizations.

Second, the members of most of these nonprofit movements are drawn disproportionately from the white college-educated professional class; their self-assignment to one or another single-issue movement does not disguise the fact that they tend to belong to the same social elite. Like the progressivism of the 1900s, but unlike the labor movement and agrarian populism, the progressivism of the 2000s is a movement of haves motivated by pity for the have-littles and have-nots, rather than a movement of have-littles and have-nots motivated by self-interest. And because they are, or believe themselves to be, motivated by philanthropy, the progressive haves are less interested in the economic struggles of the have-littles of the broad working class than in rescuing a far smaller number of have-nots from dire poverty. And even those elite progressives who are concerned about the working class are motivated by noblesse oblige: "We're from Washington, and we're here to help!"

Is the future of American liberalism a politics of charity rather than a politics of solidarity? In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder whether the relatively brief influence of labor unions in the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century was not an exception to the rule of elitism in American politics. You can write a narrative of American history in which, first, agrarian populism and 19th-century labor movements are crushed by repression and bloodshed by the 1900s. Then organized labor, after a brief, unforeseen period of influence from the 1930s to the 1960s, is crushed a second time by neoliberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, leaving an America in which the only significant conflicts are those within the economic elite. In such a political order, the only left that counts will be the left based on money rather than votes or members. Progressivism becomes a movement of the privileged and charitable who are interested in doing good to other Americans rather than with other Americans.

In such a system, it is hard to speak of a politics of the left at all, inasmuch as politics is a matter of popular participation.

If the Democratic Party was a woman he'd be gnawing his own arm off.

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DON'T THINK OF A MASSIVE BOONDOGGLE:

Obama Allies Find Words Fail Them (JONATHAN WEISMAN, 8/25/09, WSJ)

In the rhetorical battle over health care, the forces backing President Barack Obama's overhaul have spent years polling and using focus groups to find the precise language that would win over voters -- an effort that doesn't at the moment appear to be working.

When Mr. Obama told grass-roots organizers last week that the mandatory purchase of health insurance would "be affordable, based on a sliding scale," the phrasing precisely mirrored language that had been poll-tested and put before batteries of focus groups by Democratic consultants over the past few years.

The words had been carefully chosen in an effort to take away the rhetorical targets of health-overhaul foes and replace them with terminology that would bring ordinary Americans on board. But under steady attack from opponents using more-emotional language, some of the president's allies are rethinking the linguistic strategy.

That's what you get when you take George Lakoff seriously and pretend that it isn't your politics that is unpopular, just your phraseology.

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GENUINE ART:

High and Low Relief: Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Met (Peter Schjeldahl, 8/24/09 , The New Yorker)

“Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a rather scholarly show of some four dozen works from the museum’s collection, augmented with loans, gives me a chance to comb out tangled thoughts about a very American, chronically underrated artist, who died in 1907, after suffering from cancer for several years, at the age of fifty-nine. I have taken the occasion to visit, at last, the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, the sculptor’s painstakingly preserved estate, on rambling hilltop grounds, in Cornish, New Hampshire. Among the abundant works to be seen there is a copy of his most powerful achievement, the Shaw Memorial (1884-97), on Boston Common. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw commanded the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, a corps of African-American soldiers which included two of Frederick Douglass’s sons, during the Civil War. In an audacious combination of high and low relief, the mounted officer leads his richly individualized troops, their ranks bristling with shouldered rifles, beneath a wafting, solemn angel. Shaw and much of the regiment were killed in an assault on Fort Wagner, in Charleston Harbor, in 1863. The shared expression of the many faces harrows. It strikes me as the courage, indistinguishable from indifference, of the already dead. Morbid and exalted in equal measure—an epic of sacrifice—the work has a European parallel in Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” (1889), representing the legend of six men who, in 1347, volunteered to be executed in return for the lifting of an English siege of their city. Saint-Gaudens became friends with Rodin during a sojourn in Paris in the eighteen-nineties, and also with James McNeill Whistler. Like them—and like other superb contemporaries, including the muralist Puvis de Chavannes and the architect Stanford White—he was modern in spirit but retained conservative forms, consequently landing afoul of histories of modern art that venerate avant-gardism. Might we have reached a point of being allowed to praise Saint-Gaudens without apologizing to Picasso? It would amount to rekindling a long-lapsed wish for art that is both of the moment and genuinely public.

The wish lapsed among the intellectuals, not the public.

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DID HE FLY COMMERCIAL...?

Barack Obama reveals his reading list for Martha's Vineyard holiday (Tom Leonard, 8/25/09, Daily Telegraph)

At the serious end are Hot, Flat And Crowded – Why We Need A Green Revolution And How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman and John Adams, a biography of the second US president by David McCullough. McCullough is a particularly tactful choice as he lives down the road from where the Obamas are staying.

The novels are The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller set in Washington DC, Lush Life by Richard Price – a crime thriller set in New York – and Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a worthier tale about small-town life on the Colorado plains.

...because that isn't a reading list, just the first five books someone saw on the rack in an airport bookstore.

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THE BUSINESS OF LOBBIES IS LOBBYING:

The NRA's Main Target? Its Members' Checkbooks. (Richard Feldman, December 16, 2007, Washington Post)

[T]he truth is that much of the public debate over gun rights and gun control is disingenuous. Gun owners of every stripe -- liberal, moderate, conservative -- and non-owners alike can and do agree that violent criminals, juveniles, terrorists and mental incompetents have no right to firearms. Federal and state laws, despite poor enforcement by the courts, underscore that. Further, there's no significant debate -- nor should there be -- over private ownership of guns for lawful purposes such as target shooting, hunting, self-protection and collecting.

What we do have, though, is an organization whose senior leadership is dedicated to keeping the gun debate alive and burning in the American consciousness, for its own self-serving and self-preserving reasons. That organization is the National Rifle Association.

Unfortunately for American gun owners, the nation and the NRA itself, this major lobbying group has become intoxicated with money and privilege. The leadership has lost sight of its mission. Safeguarding the rights of gun owners has become secondary to keeping the fundraising machinery well greased and the group's senior staff handsomely compensated.

I know, because I once worked for it.

In 1984, I landed my dream job as Northeast regional representative of the NRA. I was a young lawyer, keen on politics and the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. This post promised to indulge both passions, and for a time it did. But soon enough, I was watching with growing dismay as the NRA morphed from a reasonable, responsible voice of sportsmen and firearms owners into a giant money machine that provides more benefits to its insiders than to its 3 million-plus members.

During my tenure at the NRA, the theme was "We're not in the business of fundraising; we fundraise to stay in business." The "business" of the NRA then was defending the Second Amendment rights of a considerable number of Americans (if pollsters are correct that guns are kept in almost one of every two American homes). But today, the association's primary business is fundraising. And nothing keeps the fundraising machine whirring more effectively than convincing the faithful that they're a pro-gun David facing down an invincible anti-gun Goliath.

Well, David was better armed.

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YOU CAN'T HAVE A HIGH QUALITY RELATIONSHIP WITH A BOGUS IDEA:

What is civilization?: Everyone is in favour of civilization, but exactly what is it? A British intellectual has taken up the challenge of defining a very slippery concept. : a review of In Search of Civilization By John Armstrong (Francis Phillips, 24 August 2009, MercatorNet)

Armstrong picks his way carefully through these contradictions to provide his own definition: "Civilization is constituted by high-quality relationships to ideas, objects and people." Readers acquainted with the posted comments to Mercatornet articles will recognise the intense, even violent, arguments that ensue whenever general statements of this kind are made: who is this author to define high-quality relationships, my opinion is as valid as his -- Beethoven and Britney Spears (to use the author’s own example) cater for different tastes, neither superior nor inferior… and so on.

The author recognises that the modern democratic, rather than the past hierarchical and deferential, society will lead to this kind of intellectual anarchy. In effect, he is appealing to like-minded (high minded?) readers and as a reader I am very sympathetic to his thesis, even as I recall countless arguments with highly educated friends who completely reject anything that presupposes shared or objective truths. ("History is bunk", stated Henry Ford. "Religion is bunk" I was recently informed by a friend).

"Love", Armstrong continues, is the one-word version of the phrase ‘high quality of relationship’." The aim of civilization should be to make us love goodness, beauty and truth -- and the greater the freedom of ideas and behaviour in a society the greater our need for civilization. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, with its definition of "the best that has been thought and said", is quoted, as is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which first stated that a high degree of national wealth was necessary for a civilized society. Yet wealth alone is not enough: the core problem of the West, according to the author, is that "material prosperity has increased while spiritual prosperity hasn’t". What is this prosperity of the soul? A somewhat circular argument: the love of goodness, beauty and truth and their integration into our daily lives. He concludes: civilization occurs when a "high degree of material prosperity and a high degree of spiritual prosperity come together to mutually enhance one another."

And since only monotheism can render objective truths, there are rather few civilizations. And its religious nature is why the Left is barbarian.

MORE:
-INTERVIEW: What Is Civilisation?: Why is civilisation an important idea? Is it about art, or is it a social and political concept, as suggested in the phrase 'the clash of civilisations'? Melbourne philosopher John Armstrong tackles some big questions. (Alan Saunders, 10/07/06, ABC: Philosopher's Zone)

Alan Saunders: Well, let's look at the big question that is going to be addressed in your series: the simple question of what is civilisation? I mean can we define it?

John Armstrong: I think we can, really quite well. Civilisation is fundamentally to do with two kinds of prosperity being integrated: the material prosperity of control over the environment, control over resources, and the ability to use those, to mould those to your ends and do things with them. That's the kind of material prosperity aspect. And then the other side of it is what I might call the imaginative prosperity, which is really to do with having good values and having good ends through your trying to use your resources well. And I think that the concept of civilisaton is just the idea of these two things being fully integrated and working very well together.

-REVIEW: of In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea by John Armstrong ( Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Times of London)
-REVIEW: of In Search of Civilization ( Noel Malcolm, Daily Telegraph)
-REVIEW: In Search of Civilization (Steven Poole, The Guardian)
-REVIEW: of In Search of Civilization (Elizabeth Speller, Financial Times)
-REVIEW: of In Search of Civilization (Fred Inglis, Times Higher Education Supplement)
-REVIEW: of In Search of Civilization (Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times)

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ARE IDLE THREATS REALLY TORTUROUS?:

What's Missing from the CIA Docs: Why is the Obama administration using heavy, retro-Bush era blackouts in a newly released CIA report? (John Sifton, 8/25/09, Daily Beast)

Several new facts emerge in the OIG report. We learn, for instance, that CIA interrogators working in the “High Value Detainee” (HVD) program at times went beyond even the permissive boundaries set by the Bush-era White House: They threatened detainees with death, conducted mock executions, threatened to rape detainees’ mothers, and kill their children.

You can see how these would be revelations if the CIA had actually executed them, raped their mothers, and killed their children, but is it still a "revelation" if all we did was talk mean to terrorists?

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THINK OF ALBANY AS TIMES SQUARE...:

Giuliani, Seeing Opening, Mulls a Governor Bid (DANNY HAKIM, 8/25/09, NY Times)

He is already laying the groundwork. On Friday he traveled to Long Island to encourage the state Republican Party chairman, Joseph N. Mondello, to step aside, a maneuver that party insiders viewed as the former mayor’s most concrete step yet toward a run.

On Monday, Mr. Mondello announced his resignation, and Mr. Giuliani’s lieutenants were working the phones to drum up support for the replacement they prefer, the Niagara County Republican chairman, Henry F. Wojtaszek, a longtime supporter of Mr. Giuliani’s.

Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to sound out party leaders about a candidacy have also intensified. He has crisscrossed the state meeting with local officials; after a motivational speech to a paying audience in Buffalo last Tuesday, he met with local Republican leaders in a private meeting room to talk about the race. In recent weeks, he has also discussed his possible candidacy with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and met in Washington with Representative Peter T. King, a Republican who has considered running himself but said he would not if Mr. Giuliani became a candidate.

Mr. Giuliani declined to be interviewed, but several people who have spoken to him said he sees parallels between the current conditions in Albany and those in the city before his election as mayor. Voters were willing to take a chance on him then, he has said, in part because they were fed up with the dysfunction.

“Several times, he said to me that he sees state government similar to where New York City was in 1993: out of control,” said Mr. King, who met with Mr. Giuliani late last month at the Capitol Hill Club. “So many people are saying the state can’t be governed, which is what everyone was saying about the city then. In Rudy’s mind, this is a challenge.”

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MALTHUSIAN SILLINESS NEVER PEAKS:

‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy (MICHAEL LYNCH, 8/25/09, NY Times)

Like many Malthusian beliefs, peak oil theory has been promoted by a motivated group of scientists and laymen who base their conclusions on poor analyses of data and misinterpretations of technical material. But because the news media and prominent figures like James Schlesinger, a former secretary of energy, and the oilman T. Boone Pickens have taken peak oil seriously, the public is understandably alarmed.

A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum. And this has been demonstrated over and over again: the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil first claimed in 1989 that the peak had already been reached, and Mr. Schlesinger argued a decade earlier that production was unlikely to ever go much higher. [...]

Just as, in the 1970s, it was the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution, today it is the invasion of Iraq and instability in Venezuela and Nigeria. But the solution, as ever, is for the industry to shift investment into new regions, and that’s what it is doing. Yet peak-oil advocates take advantage of the inevitable delay in bringing this new production on line to claim that global production is on an irreversible decline.

In the end, perhaps the most misleading claim of the peak-oil advocates is that the earth was endowed with only 2 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil. Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent — another 2.5 trillion barrels — in an economically viable way. And this doesn’t even include such potential sources as tar sands, which in time we may be able to efficiently tap.

Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 a barrel as new supplies come forward in the deep waters off West Africa and Latin America, in East Africa, and perhaps in the Bakken oil shale fields of Montana and North Dakota.

Taxes are the only way to make it uneconomical.

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DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF NAZISM!:

Obama's Summer of Discontent: The politics of charisma is so Third World. Americans were never going to buy into it for long. (Fouad Adjami, 8/25/09, WSJ)

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

It was true to script, and to necessity, that Mr. Obama would try to push through his sweeping program—the change in the health-care system, a huge budget deficit, the stimulus package, the takeover of the automotive industry—in record time. He and his handlers must have feared that the spell would soon be broken, that the coalition that carried Mr. Obama to power was destined to come apart, that a country anxious and frightened in the fall of 2008 could recover its poise and self-confidence. Historically, this republic, unlike the Old World and the command economies of the Third World, had trusted the society rather than the state. In a perilous moment, that balance had shifted, and Mr. Obama was the beneficiary of that shift.

So our new president wanted a fundamental overhaul of the health-care system—17% of our GDP—without a serious debate, and without "loud voices." It is akin to government by emergency decrees. How dare those townhallers (the voters) heckle Arlen Specter! Americans eager to rein in this runaway populism were now guilty of lèse-majesté by talking back to the political class.

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LUCKY FOR HIM HE HAS AN IMAGINARY FRIEND:

Iran MPs snub Ahmadinejad Ramadan feast: Report (AFP, 25 August 2009)

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited parliament's 290 MPs to an Iftar feast to break the Ramadan fast... but almost nobody came, a reformist newspaper reported.

"On Sunday evening, only 20 out of the 290 lawmakers attended the party hosted by the president," the Etemad newspaper said.

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IT'S NOT LIKE HE HAD ANY CHOICE...:

Obama to Reappoint Bernanke as Fed Chief: Signs of Economic Recovery Cited by President's Chief of Staff; Central Banker's Renomination Requires Senate Confirmation (JON HILSENRATH, DAVID WESSEL and SUDEEP REDDY, 7/24/09, WSJ)

President Barack Obama will announce the nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second term as Federal Reserve chairman on Tuesday, opting for continuity in U.S. economic policy despite criticism in Congress of the low-key central banker's frantic efforts to rescue the financial system.

...but it's still amusing to watch him follow W.

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TRY HIDING HIM AS EFFECTIVELY AS YOU'VE HIDDEN HIS VP:

Death of a Salesman: The more Obama talks about health care, the lower his approval rating goes (Fred Barnes, 08/31/2009, Weekly Standard)

Between July 20 and July 30, President Obama was a busy man, barely out of the public eye while campaigning furiously for his health care initiative. He did four town hall events, spoke at two hospitals, delivered a radio address, was interviewed on two network TV news shows, and held a prime time press conference--all devoted to promoting his health care plan. On this issue as on no other, Obama personally took his case to the people.

Something else occurred during that time frame. The president's job approval rating fell 9 points, from 61 percent to 52 percent in the Gallup Poll. This was an unusually precipitous decline from which Obama hasn't recovered. In mid-August, after more weeks of barnstorming for his health care program, his approval rating remained in the low 50s. Only Bill Clinton among recent presidents had a lower approval after seven months in office.

For Obama, there's still worse news. Not only has he lost ground, but public support for his health care proposal has collapsed to the point that a majority of Americans prefer no reform at all to his plan. And the more he stumps for it, the less support it attracts. Rather than a peripheral phenomenon, the noisy opposition in congressional town hall meetings turns out to be a reflection of the deep national suspicion of Obamacare.

Two conclusions are inescapable. The first is that Obama is not Mr. Persuasive, a compelling orator like FDR, swaying public opinion with his words. Quite the contrary, he has failed to sustain public backing for his economic stimulus package, his decision to shut down Guantánamo, his proposed spending, the takeover of General Motors, bailouts in general, and now health care reform. [...]

There's a corollary. The impulse at the White House to rely on Obama as salesman-in-chief, to put him on the road, is surely mistaken. For him, the bully pulpit has limited utility. In fact, presidential scholar George C. Edwards III argued in his book On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit that presidential speechmaking no longer moves public sentiment.

The second conclusion to draw is that Obama has been dragged down by his health care policy. The more he's identified himself with it, the less the public likes him. There's nothing irrational about this. Why should people without a partisan allegiance to Obama hang with him when they dislike his signature policy? There's no good reason.

At some point you just have to stop the bleeding, don't you?

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THE WAIT WAS AS LONG AS THE PRESIDENCY:

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WE ARE ALL GEOCENTRIST NOW:

'Big Wave' Theory Offers Alternative to Dark Energy (Clara Moskowitz, 17 August 2009, Space)

Mathematicians have proposed an alternative explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe that does not rely on the mystifying idea of dark energy.

According to the new proposition, the universe is not accelerating, as observations suggest. Instead, an expanding wave flowing through space-time has caused distant galaxies to appear to be accelerating away from us. This big wave, initiated after the Big Bang that is thought to have sparked the universe, could explain why objects today appear to be farther away from us than they should be according to the Standard Model of cosmology.

"We're saying that maybe the resulting expanding wave is actually causing the anomalous acceleration," said Blake Temple of the University of California, Davis. [...]

Temple compared the wave to what happens when you throw a rock into a pond. In this case, the rock would be the Big Bang, and the concentric ripples that result are like a series of waves throughout the universe. Later on, when the first galaxies start to form, they are forming inside space-time that has already been displaced from where it would have been without the wave. So when we observe these galaxies with telescopes, they don't appear to be where we would expect if there had never been a big wave.

One potential issue with this idea is that it might require a big coincidence.

For the universe to appear to be accelerating at the same rate in all directions, we in the Milky Way would have to be near a local center, at the spot where an expansion wave was initiated early in the Big Bang when the universe was filled with radiation.

Nice dead end Galileo led the credulous down.

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WEHEN YOU FORGET HOW YOU GOT ELECTED IN THE FIRST PLACE:

Obama's Big Bang could go bust (MIKE ALLEN & JIM VANDEHEI, 8/24/09 , Politico)

The Obama theory was simple, though always freighted with risk: Use a season of economic anxiety to enact sweeping changes the public likely wouldn’t stomach in ordinary times. But the abrupt swing in the public’s mood, from optimism about Obama’s possibility to concern he may be overreaching, has thrown the White House off its strategy and forced the president to curtail his ambitions.

Some Democrats point to a decision in June as the first vivid sign of trouble for Obama. These Democrats say the White House, in retrospect, made a grievous mistake by muscling conservative Democrats in swing districts to vote for a cap-and-trade energy bill that was very unpopular among their constituents.

Many of those members were pounded back home because Democrats passed a bill Republicans successfully portrayed as a big tax increase on consumers. The result: many conservative Democrats were gun-shy about taking any more risky votes — or going out on a limb on health care.

The other result: The prospects for winning final passage of a cap-and-trade bill this year are greatly diminished.

The Blue Dogs and the UR are in trouble to exactly the extent that they moved away from being moderate Republicans with D's after their names.

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IN OTHER WORDS...:

Officials Weigh Circumcision to Fight H.I.V. Risk (RONI CARYN RABIN, 8/24/09, NY Times)

Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

The topic is a delicate one that has already generated controversy, even though a formal draft of the proposed recommendations, due out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the end of the year, has yet to be released.

Experts are also considering whether the surgery should be offered to adult heterosexual men whose sexual practices put them at high risk of infection. But they acknowledge that a circumcision drive in the United States would be unlikely to have a drastic impact: the procedure does not seem to protect those at greatest risk here, men who have sex with men.

...if you're serious about stopping the spread of AIDs you need to take off more than their foreskins....

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ARE THEY REALLY GOING TO...:

CIA director defends interrogation techniques (Tom Braithwaite, August 24 2009, Financial Times)

Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, on Monday defended the organisation’s interrogation techniques as the Obama administration prepared to release details of alleged prisoner abuse. [...]

In a message to CIA staff, made public by the agency, Mr Panetta said the dossier was old and had been seen by the Department of Justice and Congress for years, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” – some of which the agency’s critics categorise as torture – had ended, and they had worked.

“The CIA obtained intelligence from high-value detainees when inside information on al-Qaeda was in short supply,” he wrote. “Whether this was the only way to obtain that information will remain a legitimate area of dispute, with Americans holding a range of views on the methods used.”

...prosecute guys for successful interrogations that were handled differently than Mr. Holder would prefer?

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THE WAY HE WERE:

Can Nixon Save the GOP?: Sam Tanenhaus tries to resurrect a more-agreeable breed of conservatism. (Carl Swanson, Aug 23, 2009, New York)

So you think all this anti-Obama rhetoric is for naught? It won’t help restore the GOP to power?

One thing that really struck me during the campaign was Obama’s race speech. Not so much what he said about black people, but what he said about white people. And I watched it and thought, This is [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan’s argument about how white ethnics, who are not accountable for America’s legacy of slavery, have their grievance, too. And Obama really got that. Somehow he’s absorbed more of this conservative history. He is a kind of [Edmund] Burke. And I do think he and Clinton were the model contemporary presidents, which will of course shock all my conservative friends. They adjusted to the realities of the politics of their day, which is exactly what Burke and Disraeli and Buckley said politicians are supposed to do.

Setting aside how peculiar it is to be talking about the Obama presidency in the past tense, it seems early to compare him to Bill Clinton. If the UR does react to the reality of losing both chambers of Congress to the GOP by zagging as far rightwards as Bubba did, then he will indeed by conforming to the modern model of Thatcher, Blair, Howard, Harper, Clinton and W. That he has to first receive the same drubbing as his Democratic predecessor suggests he absorbed as little history as Mr. Tanenhaus has.

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BOUT OUR NATIVISMN AND CLIMATE HYSTERIA ARE TOTALLY DIFFERENT....:

The end was nigh: Richard Overy’s comprehensive account of the fear of ‘civilisational decline’ that gripped Britain between the world wars, writes Matthew Price, poses more than a few challenges for the doomsayers of today.: a review of The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars by Richard Overy (Matthew Price, The National)

In his suggestive new book The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, the distinguished historian Richard Overy looks back to the time of Spengler to explore how the paradox of progress and peril consumed almost every aspect of British society in the two decades between the First and Second World Wars. His subject matter, Overy writes, “is in no sense an insular history”. As America does today, Britain then considered itself the hub of western civilisation – and its putative crisis was cast by intellectuals, writers, artists, politicians and scientists as a “crisis of civilisation”, tout court. Fear and doubt, then as now, were pervasive – over the resilience of capitalism, the health of the population, the direction of society and, above all, about whether Europe would soon destroy itself in another violent conflagration. The discourse Overy surveys was widespread: “There were few areas of intellectual endeavour, artistic, literary, scientific, philosophical, that were not affected in some form or other by the prevailing paradigms of impending decline and collapse,” he writes. “The sense of crisis was not specific to any one generation... nor was it confined to one political or social outlook.”

Overy has gathered a rich harvest of material – pamphlets, broadsides, books, lectures, newsreels and radio broadcasts – from a diverse assortment of English writers and thinkers, among them EM Forster, the brothers Aldous and Julian Huxley, HG Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw and the historian Arnold Toynbee. If the world was indeed ending, there was as much eloquence from these figures as there was gloom about their predicament. (After a health crisis in 1936, Forster mused that he was being nursed “with so much kindness and sense,” despite living in a “civilisation which has neither kindness or sense.”)

Few did more to establish the tenor of the era than Arnold Toynbee, Britain’s own Spengler. In Toynbee’s view, all civilisations hewed to the same pattern, which Overy describes as “creative expansion, mechanistic consolidation, internal decay prompted by cultural stagnation, social division, and a final universal Caesarism”. Just as past civilisations – Mayan, Roman, Greek – had seen glory and then disappeared from the face of the earth, the West would meet a similar fate. His ideas found a receptive audience in the inter-war years. Lecture halls featured talks on topics like “The Decay of Moral Culture” and the poetic if overwrought “The Smoke of Our Burning”. Death was on everyone’s minds – in 1924, one lecturer asked “Why not Commit Suicide?” (Overy does not say how the question was answered). In the mid-1930s, John Boulting (of the famed filmmaking duo the Boulting Brothers), recoiled after a trip to London, where he found only “dirt, disorder and a terrifying din”, another sign of a society plunging “headlong, blindly and almost eagerly towards a gigantic carnival of self-extermination”.

Today, this erudite hysteria may seem unintentionally funny, the hyper-articulate ravings of terrified intellectuals. But Overy notes that these views were hardly outside the mainstream: Britain had been overcome by a tidal wave of despair, and as the 1920s gave way to the years of the Slump, the agitation only increased. Writers fed the public’s appetite for the literature of crisis – The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through the World Chaos, by the socialist writer GDH Cole, sold some 50,000 copies in 1932. (Whatever the state of British civilisation, these years proved a boon to the publishers like Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, and Victor Gollancz, the proprietor of the Left Book Club.)

Overy contends that this was not merely a time of escalating and overheated rhetoric: the prophets of decline were deadly sincere, looking to science, economics, medicine and history to construct elaborate proofs of the nearing of the end. If, as has been suggested, this was primarily the discourse of an educated elite, whose views “reflected the prejudices and the expectations of the educated classes”, the theories of decline found a wide and eager audience – they flourished, Overy writes, “in the first real age of mass communication”.

The Morbid Age is a showcase for the brightest minds of the era, yet the fruits of all this fevered fretting were often less than palatable. The discourse of crisis was extreme in tone; the terms used to describe the state of Britain were invariably apocalyptic and millennial. Moderate voices were drowned by a series of emotive keywords that recur again and again in the literature Overy surveys: decay, menace, disease, barbarism, chaos, descent, sick. Even among some of the most progressive thinkers of the age, as Overy shows, the diagnosis that British civilisation was approaching collapse bore a deeply reactionary tint.

Perhaps the most sinister manifestation of this current was the intellectual vogue for eugenics. The rise and fall of civilisations could, in part, be explained by theories of racial purity. In Britain, many concluded that the wrong people – the poor and the mentally handicapped – were giving birth at a rate that threatened to engulf society in a wave of mediocrity. “We are getting larger and larger dregs at the bottom of our national vats,” concluded one biologist. To counter the trend, the British Eugenics Society, whose members included Julian Huxley and Keynes, promoted a campaign of sterilisation that looked very much like a similar programme implemented in Nazi Germany.

This ugly esteem for eugenics was but one manifestation of the great faith laid at the feet of science, whose advances were widely believed to represent the only possible hope for salvation. “Confidence in the power of science to deliver what was appropriate for modern society was widespread” writes Overy.

By their dimness shall you know the Bright.

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WOULDN'T IT PROVE...:

Don’t Blame Obama (ROSS DOUTHAT, 8/24/09, NY Times)

In reality, the health care wrestling match is less a test of Mr. Obama’s political genius than it is a test of the Democratic Party’s ability to govern. This is not the Reagan era, when power in Washington was divided, and every important vote required the president to leverage his popularity to build trans-party coalitions. Fox News and Sarah Palin have soapboxes, but they don’t have veto power. Mr. Obama could be a cipher, a nonentity, a Millard Fillmore or a Franklin Pierce, and his party would still have the power to pass sweeping legislation without a single Republican vote.

What’s more, health care reform is the Democratic Party’s signature issue. Its wonks have thought longer and harder about it than any other topic. Its politicians are vastly better at talking about the subject than Republicans: if an election is fought over health care, bet on the Democrat every time. And for all the complexity involved, it’s arguably easier to tackle than other liberal priorities. It’s more popular than cap and trade, it’s less likely to split the party than immigration and it’s more amenable to technocratic interventions than income inequality.

If the Congressional Democrats can’t get a health care package through, it won’t prove that President Obama is a sellout or an incompetent. It will prove that Congress’s liberal leaders are lousy tacticians, and that its centrist deal-makers are deal-makers first, poll watchers second and loyal Democrats a distant third.

...that representational government works and that Democratic Health Care doesn't represent the will of the people?

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REASON ALONE FOR THE CHAIRMAN TO KEEP HIS JOB:

Policy Makers Seek to Learn From 1937's Stalled Comeback (MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS, 8/24/09, WSJ)

The economy was recovering briskly during Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term in the White House. The jobless rate, which had peaked at 25% in 1933, fell to 14% in 1937 -- not exactly cause for celebration but a relief nonetheless.

The comeback stalled in 1937. Banks, nervous about the fragile recovery, were holding huge amounts of cash in reserve at the Fed. Fearing an inflationary surge should the banks decide to lend that money out to businesses and individuals, the Fed -- which had made the mistake of tightening monetary policy soon after the 1929 stock-market crash -- miscalculated again. The Fed ratcheted up banks' reserve requirements three times, starting in 1936. The banks reacted by cutting lending even further.

"There's no doubt that [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke is heavily influenced by these two mistakes of the Fed during the Depression and is absolutely intent on not repeating them," says Alex J. Pollock of the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington.

Compounding the Fed's errors, the federal government tightened fiscal policy. Congress approved a big bonus for World War I veterans in 1936, providing a spark of consumer spending. But lawmakers allowed the subsidy to lapse in 1937. At the same time, the government began collecting the first Social Security taxes, on top of income and capital-gains tax increases that Mr. Roosevelt approved in 1934-35.

Tightening the monetary and fiscal screws sent the economy into free fall again -- the second trough of the W. Unemployment shot up to 19%, prolonging the nation's suffering.

Not only does Ben Bernanke understand better than anyone the danger of deflation, but any replacement would have to demonstrate his inflation-hawk bona fides by hiking rates into the deflation, as Mr. Bernanke himself had to do, causing the recent stall out.

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COMPETITION AS BACK DOOR DEREGULATION:

The Competition Cure: A better idea to make health insurance affordable everywhere. (WSJ, 8/24/09)

[John Rother, executive vice president of AARP]: "There are states and localities where health care is much less expensive than others, and if we allow people to buy all their insurance from those places, it will raise the rates there. And it's called risk selection. It's a real problem, given the fact that health care costs can vary substantially from one place to another. So I think while the idea sounds appealing, the consequence would be it would make health care more expensive for those people who live in those low-cost areas."

How did Mr. Rother arrive at this conclusion?

His claim assumes that what makes insurance expensive in places like New Jersey—where the annual cost of an individual plan for a 25-year-old male in 2006 was $5,880—is merely the higher cost of medical services in the Garden State. He sounds an alarm in the rest of the country by suggesting that an individual living in, say, Kentucky—where an annual plan for a 25-year-old male cost less than $1,000 in 2006—would be asked to subsidize plan members living in high-priced states.

That's not how interstate insurance would work. Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis who has written extensively on this subject, notes that insurance companies operating nationally would compete nationally. The reason a Kentucky plan written for an individual from New Jersey would save the New Jerseyan money is that New Jersey is highly regulated, with costly mandated benefits and guaranteed access to insurance.

Affordability would improve if consumers could escape states where each policy is loaded with mandates. "If consumers do not want expensive 'Cadillac' health plans that pay for acupuncture, fertility treatments or hairpieces, they could buy from insurers in a state that does not mandate such benefits," Mr. Herrick has written.

A 2008 publication "Consumer Response to a National Marketplace in Individual Insurance," (Parente et al., University of Minnesota) estimated that if individuals in New Jersey could buy health insurance in a national market, 49% more New Jerseyans in the individual and small-group market would have coverage. Competition among states would produce a more rational regulatory environment in all states.

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HOW ARE YOU GOING TO CONVINCE PEOPLE REAGANISM IS A FAILURE...:

All the President’s Zombies (PAUL KRUGMAN, 8/24/09, NY Times)

The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

...when it even held made the Second Great Depression so short and shallow?

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YOU SHOW US A HEALTH BILL THAT LOWERS THE DEFICIT AND THAT DEMOCRATS WOULD SUPPORT...:

Growing deficit frames health care debate (John Fritze, 8/24/09, USA TODAY)

As the White House prepares to release worse-than-expected deficit projections this week, even Democrats in Congress said that whatever health care bill emerges this fall will have to cost less than the $1 trillion price tag contemplated earlier this year.

"It's going to have to be significantly less than what we've heard talked about," Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., one of six senators from both parties seeking a bipartisan health care bill, said on CBS' Face the Nation. "We've got to have the deficit reduced as a result of this effort. That is absolutely imperative."

...and we'll show you Eric and Julia Roberts in one place at the same time.

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CREATE JOBS? HE CAN'T EVEN FILL THE ONES HE CONTROLS:

Obama’s Team Is Lacking Most of Its Top Players (PETER BAKER, 8/24/09, NY Times)

Of more than 500 senior policymaking positions requiring Senate confirmation, just 43 percent have been filled — a reflection of a White House that grew more cautious after several nominations blew up last spring, a Senate that is intensively investigating nominees and a legislative agenda that has consumed both.

While career employees or holdovers fill many posts on a temporary basis, Mr. Obama does not have his own people enacting programs central to his mission. He is trying to fix the financial markets but does not have an assistant treasury secretary for financial markets. He is spending more money on transportation than anyone since Dwight D. Eisenhower but does not have his own inspector general watching how the dollars are used. He is fighting two wars but does not have an Army secretary.

He sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Africa to talk about international development but does not have anyone running the Agency for International Development. He has invited major powers to a summit on nuclear nonproliferation but does not have an assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation.

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WELCOME TO THE PONDEROSA:

Healthcare insurers get upper hand: Obama's overhaul fight is being won by the industry, experts say. The end result may be a financial 'bonanza.' (Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger, August 24, 2009, LA Times)

Lashed by liberals and threatened with more government regulation, the insurance industry nevertheless rallied its lobbying and grass-roots resources so successfully in the early stages of the healthcare overhaul deliberations that it is poised to reap a financial windfall.

The half-dozen leading overhaul proposals circulating in Congress would require all citizens to have health insurance, which would guarantee insurers tens of millions of new customers -- many of whom would get government subsidies to help pay the companies' premiums.

"It's a bonanza," said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc.

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ALL YOU HAD TO UNDERSTAND WAS HOW MARGINAL HIS MANDATE WAS:

Republicans Have Obama Playing Defense: The GOP strategy of principled opposition is winning over independents. (Fred Barnes, 8/23/09, WSJ

Today, the strategy of strong opposition to Mr. Obama seems obvious. But it didn't appear that way to many Republicans after their crushing electoral defeats in 2006 and 2008. Republicans were afraid that crossing Mr. Obama would only make the public dislike them all the more.

Inside Washington, they were urged to reduce the influence of pro-lifers in the party and distance themselves from conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. They were told to warm up to Mr. Obama, the new master of American politics, and they were told to fret about all those voting blocs that were drifting away from the GOP—Hispanics, young people, gays, urbanites, blacks, voters in Northeastern states and independents. To survive, in short, they needed to move the party to the center. Conservatism was dead.

In hindsight, it's fortunate that they ignored the Beltway wisdom. But it was a gamble—it wasn't clear at the time that a strategy of pure opposition would do anything other than marginalize Republicans.

Their first big step was to oppose the economic "stimulus" package. Many in the media insisted Republicans had a death wish when they unanimously rejected it in the House and by a near-unanimous vote in the Senate. The press was wrong. This was the smartest move Republicans have made all year, one with several positive repercussions.

Republicans deconstructed the bill, pointing to its excessive spending, its pork, its favors for Democratic special interests, its lack of actual economic stimulants. Their critique was full-throated and specific. Not only did Republicans begin to revive their reputation as fiscal hawks, they convinced a large chunk of the public that out-of-control spending was a threat to the nation's well-being.

The effect has been to crimp Mr. Obama's plans for further spending. New funds for bailouts are unlikely to be approved by Congress. ObamaCare's cost—a minimum $1 trillion—has become a big reason protesters are turning out against it at town-hall meetings.

They won NH by inundating the state with ads saying that John McCain would tax health care benefits while Mr. Obama would cut tax taxes for 95% of us. That didn't exactly leave him much wiggle room to the Left.

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OKAY, WE'LL BITE...:

Setting the price of a free press: If the 1st Amendment is to mean anything, Congress has to suspend antitrust rules for the newspaper industry so publishers can determine as a group how much to charge for online content. (Tim Rutten, August 22, 2009, LA Times)

[T]he Australian-born media magnate understands that what's required for serious -- which is to say expensive-to-produce -- journalism to survive is that all the quality English-language papers and news sites agree to charge for Web access and then mercilessly sue anyone who makes more than fair use of their work without paying a fee. For such a scheme to work, the papers' owners need to agree on when to act and what to charge. (Murdoch and his digital strategist, Jonathan Miller, believe the Journal's existing website model offers a place for what the latter calls "premium" journalism.)

Putting aside the irony of the man who probably has done more to undermine serious English-language news coverage than anybody else in our lifetimes now proposing to save it, Murdoch is right, and newspaper proprietors should elect his proposal or one of the others also being discussed -- and soon. American papers had combined revenues of $34.7 billion from the advertising in their print editions last year and just $3.1 billion in advertising from their online sites, despite the fact that, on average, 67.3 million people visited them each month.

Unless that imbalance is reduced, all but a few quality papers will disappear. For its part, Congress needs to move quickly to grant the newspaper industry at least a temporary exemption from antitrust and price-fixing laws so that publishers and proprietors can, in essence, collude for survival.

...how exactly do you get NPR and the BBC to charge us for content?

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DON'T YOU HATE WHEN A CONSTITUTION GETS IN THE WAY OF THE LEFT'S PSYCHOSES?:

Honduras high court threatens Zelaya with arrest (AFP, 8/23/09)

Honduras's Supreme Court has rejected a Costa Rica-brokered deal that would have restored ousted President Manuel Zelaya to power and sternly warned that he faces arrest if he returns.

In a ruling late Saturday that fell in line with similar pronouncements by the military-backed regime, the high court said that Zelaya will not be allowed to return to power, and "cannot avoid having to submit to established procedures of the penal process" should he return to Honduras. [...]

The court decision also accused Zelaya of "crimes against the government, treason against the nation, abuse of power" and other misdeeds, as it affirmed the legitimacy of Micheletti's government.

Micheletti's government had been installed as part of a lawful "constitutional succession," the high court found.

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AND IT'S ONLY 90 MINUTES:

If you haven't been keeping up with Inspector Lewis on British tv, and don't want to watch a 4 hour Yanks/Sox game, PBS is finally showing the 2nd series starting this month. Laurence Fox's Hathaway is the best Sergeant since Kevin Whatley's own Lewis and there's a great moment at the end of the 3rd season where Lewis takes his place as an Inspector beside Morse. Tonight they're showing the third episode of Season One.

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COWBOY UP:

Western novelist Elmer Kelton dies at 83 (AP, 8/23/09

Kelton wrote 62 fiction and nonfiction books. "The Good Old Boys" was made into a 1995 TV movie starring Jones for the TNT cable network. Kelton also was known for "The Man Who Rode Midnight" and "The Time It Never Rained."

His first novel, "Hot Iron," was published in 1956, and he recently finished his last book, "Texas Standoff," due out next year. Another novel, "Other Men's Horses," will be released this fall.

The Western Writers of America voted Kelton "Best Western Author of All Time" and gave him its Spur Award seven times. Four of his books won the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

Born in Crane, Kelton grew up on the McElroy Ranch in west Texas. He served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946 and saw combat in Europe during World War II.

-TRIBUTE: Kelton told stories effortlessly and unpretentiously (Ross McSwain, August 22, 2009, Go SanAngelo)

To meet Elmer Kelton on the street for the first time, you would never think the man to be America’s best writer of western novels, an honor bestowed on him a few years ago when his peers, members of the Western Writers of America, voted him to be the best of the best.

Stockmen from all over the Southwest know Elmer Kelton. He looks like them, talks like them, wears clothes like them and can talk prices of lambs, goats, feeder steers, wool and mohair with plenty of ease and knowledge.

He was once described in a story that appeared in the New York Times News Service as “the mild-mannered” man who leaves his editor’s desk at the nationally known Livestock Weekly each day and starts his other career as one of the nation’s best story-tellers and historians.

Kelton writes from experience and from listening well to stories told by oldtime cowboys during his days growing up on one of West Texas’ storied ranches. His characters breathe. Like many West Texas ranch folks that the author has befriended over decades of covering agricultural news, his heroes are complex, flawed and, in some cases, unlikable.

His stories describe the real Old West where there was not near as much gunplay as that shown in the movies. His secret for success with his novels? “I look for natural conflicts and I try to build on character rather than just action,” he said in an interview.

Always a keen observer of human actions and emotions, Kelton has not hesitated to plow new ground in his story-telling. One of my favorite books, written several years ago, was “The Pumpkin Rollers,” in which one of his featured characters was a young ranchwoman with a very strong personality and will to achieve nearly the impossible.

Another book, also a personal favorite of mine, was “Cloudy In The West,” in which he tells the story from a youngster’s point of view. In another book, “Wagontongue,” a former slave maintains his dignity as a cowboy in the Jim Crow era, and he pits an Indian chief against a Buffalo Soldier in a superb historically correct story centered around Fort Concho.

Believable characters and the way they express themselves are keys to Kelton’s success as a regional writer. During a long, seven-hour drive to attend a meeting of the Texas Folklore Society in Sherman several years ago, I learned a tremendous amount about the writing craft from a true master.

MORE:
-ESSAY: True Grit (Elmer Kelton, July 2008, Texas Monthly)

The real cowboy has somehow been lost in all the reckless rhetoric that uses his name in vain. It may be too late to save his reputation from the sneers of the pundits and politicians, but let us at least try to present some of the truth about who he is and what he does.

To begin with, he is a working man, having much in common with millions employed in other occupations, but different in the specifics of his profession. As writer John Erickson has observed, the cowboy is defined by the work he does. That work has to do with domestic animals, specifically cattle, though a good hand with horses and sheep may also qualify for the title.

To call a man a cowboy tells you what he does for a living, but it does not tell you about him as a person. He may be gentle, or he may be rough. He may have a college degree, or he may have trouble reading a newspaper. He may be in church every Sunday, or he may spend the Sabbath getting past a hangover. A cowboy is an individual—tall, short, thin, heavy, loud, quiet, or none of the above.

His job developed out of the vaquero tradition that migrated north from Mexico in the early 1700’s. Working methods and tools of the trade evolved from those favored by Mexican herders on horseback. In South Texas today, the terms “cowboy” and “vaquero” are often used interchangeably, though the true vaquero is Hispanic. In the mountain states of the West, the word is “buckaroo,” an Anglo corruption of “vaquero.”

But cowboying is no regular profession, like bricklaying or accounting. The cowboy is an integral part of the American myth, a symbol of self-reliance and rugged individualism, a descendant of Sir Walter Scott’s knights of old. Of course, this image of a wild but selfless defender of righteousness and justice is just as inaccurate as more-negative depictions. It began with penny-dreadful pulp magazines of the late 1800’s and was augmented by Hollywood western action films, beginning with The Great Train Robbery (1903) and continuing through the spaghetti western invasion of the sixties and seventies. In most of these he tended to be seven feet tall and quick on the trigger.

By contrast, the first western novel widely accepted as literature, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1904), depicted the cowboy as quiet and contemplative, slow to take action and regretful about it afterward. A boisterous group in town for a spree immediately settles down upon learning that they are disturbing a sick woman. The hero meets the villain in the street only when honor leaves him no other option. Wister’s cowboy lived by an unwritten but widely accepted code of conduct that, in general, has guided real cowboys through the generations.

-ESSAY: Bone Dry: Ruined crops, depleted herds, raging wildfires, and water rationing: I thought I had lived through our most devastating drought forty years ago, but this one may be worse. (Elmer Kelton, July 1996, Texas Monthly)
-ESSAY: My Favorite Place: Mesquite Country (Elmer Kelton, May 1989, Texas Monthly)

Perhaps the most special ground for me, because it is my own home country, are the mesquite ranges from San Angelo west, merging with the creosote flats as one approaches the Pecos River, and beyond the Pecos the grandeur of the Davis Mountains and the Guadalupes rising from a desert floor. In the place where I spent my boyhood, I still enjoy the glistening sandhills, rippling with summer heat waves, from Crane and Odessa westward toward Monahans or northward toward Andrews.

Big and empty you might call this thinly settled country. You might even feel it has more history than future, its rural outlook no longer relevant to a state whose population is mostly urban. But it is there, and it is huge. It is home to sturdy holdouts of an independent-minded ranching and farming and oil-patch heritage—my people—who have met the challenge of a stern land and endured for generations.

-ESSAY: Having a Cow: Beyond Beef blames cattle for the decline of civilization—not to mention famine, pestilence, destruction, and death. (Elmer Kelton, April 1992, Texas Monthly)
-EXCERPT: Twin Wells: Chapter One (Elmer Kelton, January 2008, Texas Monthly)
-EXCERPT: Twin Wells: Chapter 12 (Elmer Kelton, December 2008, Texas Monthly)
-AUDIO INTERVIEW: Elmer and Anni Kelton - a Love Story: Part Four (Texana Review, 10/22/08)
-AUDIO INTERVIEW: Elmer and Anni Kelton - a Love Story: Part Three (Texana Review, 5/26/08)
-AUDIO INTERVIEW: Elmer and Anni Kelton - a Love Story: Part Two (Texana Review, 2/23/08)
-AUDIO INTERVIEW: Interview with Elmer Kelton - Part Three (Texana Review, 6/10/07)

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AFTER ALL...:

The Guns of August (FRANK RICH, 8/23/09, NY Times)

I have been writing about the simmering undertone of violence in our politics since October...

...none of the Left's threats towards George W. Bush counted....

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BY "RESET" HE APPARENTLY MEANT...:

Russia's Moves Raise Doubts About Obama's Diplomatic 'Reset' (James Marson, Aug. 23, 2009, TIME)

The much-trumpeted "reset" of relations between Russia and the U.S. was dealt a slap in the face last week as Moscow went on the offensive against Ukraine and Georgia. After Russian President Dmitri Medvedev waded into Ukrainian politics with barbed criticism of his Ukrainian counterpart's "anti-Russian" policies, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin embarked on a provocative trip to reaffirm support for Abkhazia, the Moscow-backed territory that enjoys de facto independence from Georgia.

...back to the point where Nixon, Kissinger, Ford and Carter trusted them. The UR has obviously not read Alex Dryden

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ONE TOUGH BROAD:

Ashes: Andrew Strauss praises team effort as England claim series win (Tom Lutz, 8/23/09, , guardian.co.uk)

The pitch was seen by many as contributing to England's victory after Strauss won the toss and elected to bat and Ponting admitted he was unimpressed by the state of the wicket. "It was a a poor wicket – I'm not blaming the wicket – but it was a poor Test match wicket. But both sides had the same. The difference in this game was our first-innings batting."

Ponting also conceded it had been a mistake not to select Australia's spinner, Nathan Hauritz, in a Test where the ball turned sharply. "In hindsight, no [the decision to leave out Hauritz was incorrect], but I don't think anybody saw that happening," he added. "I think England would have played two spinners if they had."

Stuart Broad bowled superbly in Australia's first innings and Ponting singled the Nottinghamshire player out for praise. "I think Broad's last couple of games have been pretty impressive," he said. "He's stood up probably when his position was in a bit of jeopardy as well."

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UNCERTAIN ALCHEMY:

Democrats' Colorado gold rush turns into a bust (Michael Barone, August 23, 2009, Washington Examiner)

As Fred Barnes pointed out in The Weekly Standard last year, this Colorado model has been a brilliant success. Democrats captured both houses of the legislature and a Senate and House seat in 2004, the governorship in 2006, and a Senate and House seat in 2008. Colorado, which voted for George W. Bush by 8 points in 2000 and 5 points in 2004, voted for Barack Obama by 9 points in 2008. It was a fitting conclusion to a campaign in which Obama accepted his nomination in front of Greek columns in Denver's Invesco Field.

But now, Colorado seems to be going in the other direction. Gov. Bill Ritter, elected by 17 points in 2006 and seeking another term next year, is trailing former Republican Rep. Scott McInnis in the polls and runs only even against a little-known Republican state legislator. Michael Bennet, appointed by Ritter to fill Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's Senate seat, has a negative job rating and runs well under 50 percent against Republican opponents. Barack Obama's job rating in the state has been conspicuously below his national average -- closer to those of still rock-ribbed Republican Rocky Mountain states than the hip states of the Pacific Coast.

Campaigning, it turns out, is easier than governing.

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IT'S NOT THEIR RACE THAT MAKES THEM INCOMPETENT:

PEEVED OBAMA TRUMPS PATERSON'S RACE CARD (FREDRIC U. DICKER and MAGGIE HABERMAN, 8/23/09, NY Post)

President Obama's aides were so furious that Gov. Paterson dragged him into a rant about racism that they sent a message sharply criticizing the governor's comments just hours after he made them, The Post has learned.

Aides to Obama were angered by Paterson's tirade on liberal talk-radio station WWRL on Friday, sources said.

Paterson blamed his political woes on racially slanted coverage and predicted the president would be the next "victim" of biased media.

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THE LINE FORMS ON THE RIGHT, BABE:

Polls show potential GOP challengers would beat Harry Reid (BENJAMIN SPILLMAN, 8/23/09, LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL)

It's the highest stakes ever for a Nevada election, and former boxer Sen. Harry Reid is on the ropes early. Either Republican Danny Tarkanian or Sue Lowden would knock out Reid in a general election, according to a recent poll of Nevada voters. [...]

Nevadans favored Tarkanian over Reid 49 percent to 38 percent and Lowden over Reid 45 percent to 40 percent, according to the poll.

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IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR BREEDERS:

Health Care and Infant Mortality: The Real Story (Steve Chapman, 8/23/09, Townhall)

Our infant mortality rate is double that of Japan or Sweden. But we live different lives, on average, than people in those places. We suffer more obesity (about 10 times as much as the Japanese), and we have more births to teenagers (seven times more than the Swedes). Nearly 40 percent of American babies are born to unwed mothers.

Factors like these are linked to low birth weight in babies, which is a dangerous thing. In a 2007 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists June O'Neill and Dave O'Neill noted that "a multitude of behaviors unrelated to the health care system such as substance abuse, smoking and obesity" are connected "to the low birth weight and preterm births that underlie the infant death syndrome."

Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, also attributes the gap largely to conduct. Comparing white Americans to Norwegians in his 1995 book, "The Tyranny of Numbers," Eberstadt concluded that "white America's higher rates of infant mortality are explained not by poverty (as conventionally construed) or by medical care but rather by the habits, actions and indeed lifestyles of a critical portion of its parents." Whites are not unique in those types of behavior.

African-American babies are far more likely to die than white ones, which is often taken as evidence that poverty and lack of health insurance are to blame. That's entirely plausible until you notice another racial/ethnic gap: Hispanics of Mexican or Central or South American ancestry not only do consistently better than blacks on infant mortality, they do better than whites. Social disadvantage doesn't explain very much.

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LET'S ASSUME FOR A SECOND THE WHITE HOUSE GETS WHAT IT'S DOING...:

Why the Gang of Six is deciding healthcare for 300 million of us: Six senators representing 3 percent of the population are running things because the White House wants it that way (Robert Reich, Aug. 24, 2009, Salon)

We have a Democratic president in the White House. Democrats control 60 votes in the Senate, enough to overcome a filibuster. It is possible to pass healthcare legislation through the Senate with 51 votes (that's what George W. Bush did with his tax-cut plan). Democrats control the House. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is a tough lady. She has said there will be no healthcare reform bill without a public option.

So why does the fate of healthcare rest in Grassley's hands?

It's not even as if the gang represents America. The three Dems in the gang are from Montana, New Mexico and North Dakota – states that together account for just over 1 percent of Americans. The three Republicans are from Maine, Wyoming and Iowa, which together account for 1.6 percent of the American population.

So, I repeat: Why has it come down to these six? Who anointed them? Apparently, the White House. At least that's what I'm repeatedly being told by sources both on the Hill and in the administration. "The Finance Committee is where the action is. They'll tee up the final bill," says someone who should know.

...and the reason for this would be obvious. The furthest Left the President can afford to be on Health and be re-elected is where moderate Republicans stand, not where his own party does.

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GOT MINE, GET YOURS:

The NHS: Britain and America are both right (Daniel Finkelstein, 8/19/09, Times of London)

If you want to understand the rights and wrongs of the NHS argument, you need to start with this. Duke University in North Carolina has a very small basketball stadium and a large number of students who want to attend matches. To solve the problem of ticket allocation, an elaborate system has been developed.

Roughly a week before the game, students pitch tents in front of the stadium. If they want a ticket they cannot leave. At random intervals a horn is sounded at the box office, and those who do not respond within five minutes are removed from the waiting list. There’s more. After almost a week of camping the students at the front of the queue are still not guaranteed a ticket. They merely get a lottery number and have to hope that they will win admittance.

In 1994 the behavioural economists Dan Ariely and Ziv Carmon decided to exploit this ritual to conduct an experiment. They called up students who had camped out but failed to obtain a ticket, offered them admittance and negotiated a price. On average, respondents were willing to pay $175.

Next they called up the lucky winners and made bids to buy a ticket. The average price demanded? A huge $2,400. Remember that both sets of students wanted the tickets badly in the first place. The value they both put on admittance should have been, at least roughly, the same. Instead they were separated by a factor of about 14.

Ariely and Carmon present this finding as corroboration of what is known as the endowment effect. Once someone owns something, once it is theirs, they value it more. This is closely allied to another effect beloved of behavioural economists — loss aversion. People much prefer avoiding losses to making gains.

At the end of the day, too few American voters are uninsured to shake up the system.

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WAY TO BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU:

The Feminist Hawks (VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN, 8/23/09, NY Times Magazine)

David Horowitz, the conservative firebrand, is among those who have seized on the feminist-hawk position. Horowitz may not be an obvious feminist, but as someone who has dedicated his life to political media (producing or contributing to magazines, books, political ads, cable news, talk radio, blogs, video podcasts, even a pamphlet), he’s adroit at adapting ideologies for media platforms. Right now, this one is working for him.

Like many conservatives, Horowitz appears to have come to feminist-hawkism after 9/11. But in his hands, the ideology has fast became a tenacious memebrid — as Tim Hwang, a sociologist and the director of the Web Ecology Project, calls memes that unite two or more cultural phenomena.

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.” [...]

As a fan of intensely specific forms of communication — blogs, memoirs, reality TV — I don’t believe that any idea exists apart from its mode of dissemination. But I also know that ideas that seem especially big and irresistible are usually so elegantly integrated with particular communication technologies that it’s hard to conceive of them separately. Could Rush Limbaugh’s patriotic anti-elitism have coalesced anywhere but on AM radio? Could “family values” have emerged without Christian TV?

And could the feminist-hawk position have emerged without the weird confluences of the Web? Like any wily and surviving creature, this new ideology has faced evolutionary pressures and adapted to its ecological niche.

Forget Bill Safire, David Brooks and other house Republicans, that's the most conservative thing you've likely read in the Times: evolution depends on wiles; patriotism is the preserve of AM listeners; actual concern for women is a function of conservatism, not feminism; and family values depend on Judeo-Christianity. Game...Set...Match.

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BETTER TO OWN IT:

Obama vacations where the elite meet (NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, 8/23/09, Politico)

“The danger for President Obama is that he seems to be in what is one of the most elite summer resorts in the United States. From an image-making point of view, it would be better to be in the Wisconsin Dells or Put-in-Bay, Ohio,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “There is the connotation with Martha’s Vineyard of East Coast elitism…I have a feeling when they decided on Martha’s Vineyard they didn’t know the health care debate would be this brutal.”

Just imagine how unnatural, how John Kerry-like, he'd look engaging in anything other than an elitist pursuit. This is a guy who made bowling seem harder than brain surgery and bike riding geeky.

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OF COURSE, THE REASON THE RULES ARE WORKING FOR THE RIGHT AS THEY NEVER WOIRKED FOR THE LEFT...:

Word for Word | Saul Alinsky: Know Thine Enemy (NOAM COHEN, 8/23/09, NY Times)

Here are excerpts from “Rules for Radicals.”

Mr. Alinsky observes that “any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical”:

One of our greatest revolutionary heroes was Francis Marion of South Carolina, who became immortalized in American history as “the Swamp Fox.” Marion was an outright revolutionary guerrilla. ...Cornwallis and the regular British Army found their plans and operations harried and disorganized by Marion’s guerrilla tactics. Infuriated by the effectiveness of his operations, and incapable of coping with them, the British denounced him as a criminal and charged that he did not engage in warfare “like a gentleman” or “a Christian.”

Don’t worry, Mr. Alinsky advised, if they call you names:

The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” ... Here again we find that it is power and fear that are essential to the development of faith. This need is met by the establishment’s use of the brand “dangerous,” for in that one word the establishment reveals its fear of the organizer, its fear that he represents a threat to its omnipotence. Now the organizer has his “birth certificate” and can begin.

The first step:

The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.

...is that it's the 60% vs the 40%.

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PSSST...HE'S NOT BILL CLINTON:

Concern, Doubts From the Left on Obama's Health-Care Plan (Dan Balz, August 23, 2009, Washington Post)

The immediate cause for the rebellion is growing concern among Obama's progressive allies that he is prepared to deal away the public insurance option to win passage of a health-care bill. Obama insists that he still prefers the public option as part of any legislative package, but some friends on the left now clearly doubt his resolve.

That has given way to broader criticisms: Is Obama tough enough to defeat the interests arrayed against health-care legislation? Has he lost the passion that was such an asset during the campaign? Have his rhetorical skills been muted as he descends into the dry, arcane details of health care? Is he too enamored of bipartisan consensus, given what is seen as Republican implacability? Has he given up the moral high ground in the health-care battle?

There's only one problem with asking those questions--they all assume a Barack Obama who never existed except in their own minds. Consider only the whole Reverend Wright controversy. Mr. Obama immediately dropped his church when it became inconvenient and was incapable of defending his past membership, but was fortunate enough to have opponents who let him slide. He displayed no toughness, no eloquence, and no passion as he abandoned any pretense that he was morally grounded.

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WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS NOW:

A Grand Bargain Over Evolution (ROBERT WRIGHT, 8/23/09, NY Times)

The first step toward this more modern theology is for them to bite the bullet and accept that God did his work remotely — that his role in the creative process ended when he unleashed the algorithm of natural selection (whether by dropping it into the primordial ooze or writing its eventual emergence into the initial conditions of the universe or whatever).

Of course, to say that God trusted natural selection to do the creative work assumes that natural selection, once in motion, would do it; that evolution would yield a species that in essential respects — in spiritually relevant respects, you might say — was like the human species.

Man, these guys aren't even trying anymore.

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WHEN THE FRENCH AND THE DEMOCRATS THINK YOU'RE A SISSY...:

'Is He Weak?' (Jim Hoagland, August 23, 2009, Washington Post)

Shortly after the Group of 20 summit concluded in London in April, Nicolas Sarkozy blurted out to a small group of advisers a question that weighed on him as he watched President Obama glad-hand his way through the gathering: "Est-il faible?" (Is he weak?) [...]

The withering criticism that liberal Democrats are directing at Obama over a public insurance option as part of health-care reform shows his vulnerability. Similarly, his economic spokesmen created confusion about his (and their) resolve this month when they seemed to edge toward, and then back away from, tax increases on the middle class.

Was the president of two minds on these matters and using trial balloons? Had he failed to explain himself to his most senior associates? Or were they trying to bounce him into changing course? Whatever, an air of indecision gathered over a White House that prides itself on crisp decision-making.

"Characteristically, Mr. Obama has been trying to have it both ways," the Financial Times editorialized about the health-care ruckus. "Characteristically" was the dagger in that sentence.

All of their own confusion comes from thinking he's a leader when he's always and only ever been a follower.

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CAN ANYONE HELP WITH THE MATH HERE?:

The cost of healthcare reform: Congressional Democrats are looking at various ways to finance their overhaul legislation. (Noam N. Levey, August 23, 2009, LA Times)

How much is it going to cost to overhaul the system? [...]

In the Senate, a bill developed by the health committee would spend nearly $780 billion over the next decade to expand coverage, not including fees and penalties that could help offset some of that cost, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The bill written by senior House Democrats would spend $1.26 trillion to expand coverage before accounting for the fees and penalties. [...]

How can the country afford that?

Part of the bill would be paid by people and companies that don't abide by new mandates that would require individuals to get coverage and require medium-sized and large businesses to provide health benefits to their employees. The CBO estimated that the Senate health committee bill would generate about $88 billion in such penalties over the next decade. The House bill would produce about $192 billion.

What's $1.25 trillion minus $88 billion?

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GOT MUD ON YO FACE:

Medieval art of jousting is alive and well (Keith Ervin, 8/23/09, Seattle Times)

The Seattle Knights, the troupe of jousting, sword-fighting actors that put on the fair, are building the first of two pirate ships in preparation for the October event and future fairs. Nearby are a Wild West town and a Native American village of tepees used for other family-oriented events at V2 Farm.

The Knights, founded in 1991 by former comic-book artist Dameon Willich, play their parts with relish, goading the audience to cheer them on as they fight with swords, knives, lances and other weapons.

"This is sort of a hobby and a second job at the same time," said Lauren Crosson, of Issaquah, a Seattle Knights pirate for the past two years. "You get to hang out with the best and funniest group of people."

For the mounted knights, wearing as much as 80 pounds of armor and peering through narrow slits in their helmets, the outcome is a bit unpredictable. It takes a special kind of horse to stay on course while running toward an oncoming horse, with a combined speed of 60 to 70 mph, actor Alan Paulsen said.

And plenty of nerve and skill on the knight's part to hit the target. In a "light joust," the knight tries to strike the opponent's shield. In a "heavy joust," they go for the torso.

Lances are built with tips that break off when they hit body armor. "We're crazy, but we're not stupid," Paulsen said.

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IT HAS VERY NEARLY NO CHALLENGERS FOR THE TITLE OF GREATEST CHICK BOOK EVER:

Classic book review: Possession: A.S. Byatt's stunning novel about books and their readers. (Thomas D'Evelyn, Nov. 16, 1990, CS Monitor)

“Possession” is about reading. The characters all read the fictitious Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. In varying degrees, they have bought into the Ash industry that has grown up in England and as far away as New Mexico. The title “Possession” refers not only to the romantic plot, but also to the legal problems that arise with the discovery of new manuscripts by the poet.

The manuscripts are letters to a woman, a poet hitherto unconnected to the hitherto unblemished Ash. The finder of the letters is a mild young scholar named Roland. He is just about to give up scholarship for something that pays, as his girlfriend Val has already done. Through his discovery, Roland meets the beautiful, self-possessed Maud (who specializes in the person Ash corresponded with, the poet Christabel LaMotte).

Before the novel is over, everybody interested in either Ash or Christabel – scholars and “poetic trippers” alike – becomes involved in the hunt for missing evidence as to the nature of their relationship. The book surveys contemporary academic styles with fastidious glee.

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TROTT, TROTT TO WIN...:

Jonathan Trott century puts Ashes within reach (Simon Wilde, 8/23/09, Sunday Times of London)

For the second time in four years at The Oval a South African-born cricketer has taken England to within tantalising reach of regaining the Ashes, lost in Australia in December 2006. Jonathan Trott’s workmanlike century in the fifth and final npower Test match yesterday may have lacked the panache and daredevilry of Kevin Pietersen’s 158 on the same ground in 2005 but it could prove every bit as valuable in purpose.

Trott’s painstaking, chanceless 119, spread across five and a half hours, enabled England’s captain, Andrew Strauss, to declare at 373 for nine and leave Australia 546 to win, a target that has never been met in any first-class match, let alone a Test match. But to England’s frustration, Simon Katich and Shane Watson negotiated 20 overs to stumps, closing on 80 for no wicket.

If Australia somehow score the 466 runs they still need to win, they would take the series 2-1 and retain the Ashes — and in the process probably break English hearts. England’s target is simple: 10 wickets in a minimum of 180 overs. The weather forecast is good for the two remaining days of the match.

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REASONING ABOUT THE IRRATIONAL:

Why bother being nice?: A somewhat limited look at Western thinking on altruism: a review of ON KINDNESS By Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor (Ann Harleman, August 23, 2009, Boston Globe)

Kindness, in today’s thinking, is “either a higher form of selfishness (the kind that is morally triumphant and secretly exploitative), or the lowest form of weakness . . . a virtue of losers.’’ Our suspiciousness of charity, our doubts about the possibility of altruism, our “ghettoization’’ of kindness by relegating it to women, even our sexual hang-ups, according to Phillips and Taylor, are different faces of the same essential error. What makes us want to shunt kindness off to the sidelines? Fear, of course. “The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities. . . . particularly the vulnerability we call desire.’’ Following Winnicott, the authors advocate “a more robust version of kindness.’’ “It is kind to be able to bear conflict, in oneself and others; it is kind, to oneself and others, to forgo magic and sentimentality for reality. It is kind to see individuals as they are, rather than how we might want them to be; it is kind to care for people just as we find them.’’ This version of kindness accommodates ambivalence; it makes room for, and thereby transcends, frustration and hatred. It is the poet’s (or the novelist’s) version - Tolstoy, rather than Dr. Phil. In short, it’s human.

In the course of Phillips and Taylor’s discussion, then, the concept of kindness has widened to take in every human emotion. Yet their answer to the question that sparked the discussion is less satisfying than it might have been. For anyone struggling to construct an ethics outside the framework of religion...

That circle can't be squared.

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AND HE GOT PAID?:

Teacher allegedly paid student after sex (Melinda Rogers, 8/21/09, The Salt Lake Tribune)

A former Helper Junior High School teacher charged with having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old male student paid her victim between $1,400 and $1,500 after the encounters, court documents allege.

Victim?

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IF THOMAS WATT HAMILTON HAD BEEN TAKEN ALIVE...:

Gordon Brown in new storm over freed Lockerbie bomber (Gaby Hinsliff, 8/22/09, guardian.co.uk)

[T]he new letter, addressed to "dear Muammar" and signed off by wishing him a happy Ramadan, suggests that the decision was well enough advanced and Brown well enough briefed to set terms for a homecoming – albeit unsuccessfully. A jubilant Libyan crowd, some waving Scottish flags, greeted Megrahi at the airport.

Last night the Tories redoubled calls for the government to release official records of conversations about the release, as Gaddafi increased the embarrassment by publicly thanking "my friend Brown, his government, the Queen of Britain, Elizabeth, and Prince Andrew who all contributed to encouraging the Scottish government to take this historic and courageous decision". [...]

The business secretary, Lord Mandelson, left hospital today – where he was recovering from a prostate operation – and insisted that it was "completely wrong" and "offensive" to suggest that Megrahi's release was linked to trade deals over oil and gas.

Mandelson met Gaddafi's son during a holiday in Corfu this month, several weeks after the prime minister's meeting in Italy, and has admitted the subject of the Lockerbie bomber was raised. Today he said the Libyans had had "the same response from me as they would have had from any other member of the government".

...but then developed prostate cancer, do you suppose the government would have released him on humanitarian grounds?

MORE:
Secret talks on deal to return Megrahi to Libya (Exclusive by LUCY ADAMS, 1/15/09, The Herald)

According to Libyan officials, senior civil servants at Whitehall have actively "encouraged" them to apply for prisoner transfer for Megrahi - a move likely to be highly unpopular with campaigners and some of the relatives of the victims of the bombing, who want to hear the fresh evidence in open court.

A Libyan source said: "We have been encouraged to apply for the prisoner transfer option once the agreement is ratified, but there are concerns as to whether the UK Government can be trusted."

The Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) was signed off by a delegation from Tripoli and senior UK officials in November and is due to be ratified by the UK and Libyan parliaments in March.

It would take months for an agreement on such a transfer to be reached, partly because Megrahi is serving a life sentence and his case would have to be reviewed by the Scottish Prison Service and the Parole Board.

The final decision will ultimately lie with Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Secretary - a point clarified last year during the very public argument which followed the Scottish Government's discovery that it had not been privy to the details of the Memorandum of Understanding signed between Tony Blair and Colonel Gaddafi in May 2007 as part of the "deal in the desert".

While Whitehall officials denied the deal and subsequent PTA had anything to do with the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, the row between the Scottish and UK Governments highlighted the fact that it was about Megrahi.

Professor Robert Black, one of the architects of the original trial at Camp Zeist, said: "If this happens it will leave a stain on the Scottish criminal justice system because lots of people now believe there is something wrong with the conviction if he decides he wants to go home and is allowed no other options.

"But is that really the path a civilised legal system should be taking? Compelling him to go down that path would leave serious questions about the criminal justice system unanswered."

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HE SPEAKS, WE WIN:

Obama's healthcare messages are backfiring, strategists say (Peter Nicholas, August 22, 2009, LA Times)

The strategists, many of whom saw healthcare reform fail in the Clinton administration, contend that President Obama has advanced too many rationales for his plan, leaving people confused.

For example, Obama has argued that a new healthcare system is necessary to spur an economic recovery. He also has offered up healthcare as an antidote to rising deficits. Earlier this week in a conference call with religious leaders, Obama laid out a "moral" imperative for revamping the nation's healthcare system.

At other points, Obama has portrayed "meddling" insurers as a reason for scrapping the existing system.

His vacation this week is a good test for the White House, which ought to keep him from speaking to the press for a week. They find less is more.

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THEY WANT HIM TO BE WHO THEY IMAGINED, NOT WHO HE IS:

Voices of Anxiety (BOB HERBERT, 8/22/09, NY Times)

Mr. Obama, who has a command of the English language like few others, has been remarkably opaque about his intentions regarding health care. He left it up to Congress to draft a plan and he has not gotten behind any specific legislation. He has seemed to waffle on the public option and has not been at all clear about how the reform that is coming will rein in runaway costs. At times it has seemed as though any old “reform” would be all right with him.

It’s still early, but people are starting to lose faith in the president. I hear almost daily from men and women who voted enthusiastically for Mr. Obama but are feeling disappointed. They feel that the banks made out like bandits in the bailouts, and that the health care initiative could become a boondoggle. Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state the country is in.

More and more the president is being seen by his own supporters as someone who would like to please everybody, who is naïve about the prospects for bipartisanship, who believes that his strongest supporters will stay with him because they have nowhere else to go, and who will retreat whenever the Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him.

People want more from Mr. Obama. They want him to be their champion. But they don’t feel that he is speaking to them in a language that they understand.

Mr. Obama is pretty much the poster child for the "soft bigotry of low expectations," when it comes to communicating. Thus can his unique command of the language leave everyone confused. Eschewing ebonics isn't exactly the same as eloquence and coherence.

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LORD, SAVE HIM FROM HIS SUPPORTERS:

Masters and Slaves of Deception (CHARLES M. BLOW, 9/22/09, NY Times)

The president should have treated health care reform the same way he treated the stimulus package — by personally helping to shape it and push it through from the start.

On Feb. 11, a Gallup poll found that 59 percent of Americans over all supported the economic stimulus package, but only 28 percent of Republicans supported it. This is not so different from the way Americans feel about health care. According to a CNN/Opinion Research poll released this month, 50 percent of Americans said that they favored “Barack Obama’s plan to reform health care,” compared with just 19 percent of Republicans.

The Democrats forged ahead with the stimulus package. The House passed it without a single Republican vote, and the Senate passed it with the help of three moderate Republicans.

Presidents get lots of bad advice, but recommending that he repeat the unpopular stimulus debacle is particularly looney.

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WHICH IS WHY IT WAS SUCH AN OBVIOUS BIFF...:

Somalia and the Two Faces of Islamism (Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, 8/21/09, Hudson Institute)

Somalia is now an open battleground between two main strains of Islamism: that of the more "moderate" and pragmatic Muslim Brotherhood, and that of the more rigid and violent al-Qaeda.

The situation in Somalia is a prism through which can be seen the differences that exist worldwide between Muslim Brotherhood inspired Islamists and al-Qaeda Islamists. The former, represented by Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, show a flexibility and ability to adapt their ideology to certain times and places. The latter, al-Shabaab, are al-Qaeda jihadists who are completely inflexible and uncompromising in their aims to take control of Somalia and the surrounding region, and will not be placated by a long term programme of Islamisation and sharia.

...when W let Ethiopia drive out the prior Courts government, even though it was inevitably temporary.

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SUGAR DADDY::

Sugar Land: Obama's slow roll on free trade. (WSJ, 8/22/09)

Mark it as an early retreat by the Obama Administration to a small group of domestic producers who wield an outsized political influence in the fight against trade liberalization. In states from Florida to Minnesota, sugar producers have their profits guaranteed by a price floor created by the import restrictions. Anyone who doubts their influence in Washington need only review the battle over the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which the sugar growers nearly throttled over the prospect of a 1% increase in annual import quotas.

Each year, the amount of foreign sugar that manufacturers may use is limited to protect U.S. sugar farmers who benefit from artificially higher prices on the domestic market. According to the letter to Secretary Vilsack, signed by companies like Kraft, Hershey and Mars, without some easing "consumers will pay higher prices [and] food manufacturing jobs will be at risk." But scarcity is only half the issue. The other half is a protectionist program that distorts trade and has negative economic consequences.

The costs have been a sticky issue for years. According to a 2006 study by the U.S. International Trade Administration, each sugar job saved by propping up domestic producers costs three jobs in manufacturing, with many companies relocating to countries such as Canada and Mexico where the price of sugar can be one-half to two-thirds the rate in the U.S. So instead of importing sugar, the U.S. brings in more sugary finished products, with imports rising to $18.7 billion in 2004 from $6.7 billion in 1990.

The Administration's reluctance to take on the sugar lobby comes in the context of what is beginning to look like a slow roll by the President on free-trade principles.

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THEY CAN SCORE, BUT CAN THEY DEFEND?:

Harry Redknapp's Spurs side peppered with pace and goal threat: Could Tottenham really challenge for the title this season after so many years of unfulfilled promise? (Alan Smith, 22 Aug 2009, Daily Telegraph)

Ahead of tomorrow's trip to West Ham, wins against Liverpool and Hull prove that Harry Redknapp has assembled a very exciting side, peppered with pace and goalscoring threat.

Jermain Defoe is absolutely flying, in the form of his life, and the support cast isn't bad either. Robbie Keane, Peter Crouch and Roman Pavlyuchenko vie for places in an attack supplied by the clever nous of Luka Modric and the penetrating speed of Aaron Lennon.

In central midfield, Tom Huddlestone has done very well so far alongside the impressive Wilson Palacios while the back door has been bolstered by Sebastien Bassong. When Michael Dawson and Jonathan Woodgate return, Redknapp will be spoilt for choice.

Perhaps the biggest doubt surrounds the goalkeeper. Heurelho Gomes isn't just unpredictable, he tends to get injured on a regular basis, succumbing again at Hull after only 16 minutes. If Spurs are to prosper, Carlo Cudicini might have to play a big part.

Gomes is a fine shot stopper but a nightmare doing anything else with the ball and the rumor that Harry Redknapp wants to replace him with the notoriously boner-prone David James can hardly inspire confidence in Spurs fans. They're d