Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum












West says the school inadequately prepares
students for the black seas of infinity.

Don't make him angry, you wouldn't like him when he's angry.

The Rock/Dwayne Johnson is staring in a new movie, The Race To Witch Mountain, with my favorite 15-year-old actress/celebrity (weird, I know), AnnaSophia Robb. I checked her website again to see if she added anything in support of the movie, and there was a little holiday in my heart because she had. She's noted some magazine interviews she's done and added some photos of her at an Obama rally. Robb also updated her list of favorite movies: Slumdog Millionare, Batman: The Dark Knight, Blood Diamond, Zoolander and Best in Show. Again, great taste. And she has another movie coming out in November with the girl from Little Miss Sunshine.

Too Many Dicks on the Dancefloor*

Looking over my blog links, I noticed there are too many guys and the ratio is way off. So I added Majikthise, who is Canadian also so that makes a twofer as the tactless say. I also added Michael Bérubé who is blogging again and is very funny, especially about the raging stupidity and hubris in politics. Yes he plays hockey. Yes his name looks suspiciously French. No he's not Canadian.** I've also added A Fistful of Euros which provides a European perspective on the Ongoing Clusterfuck*** in the financial markets and wider economy.

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* Doesn't one of the dancers in the video look like a Village Person, specifically Randy the Cowboy?
** Actually, yes he is of French-Canadian ancestry, though. (Added this note after I was corrected in the comments. Reminds me of what Alexander Cockburn once said about the corrections section newspapers tuck away on page 2 or 3, admitting mistakes in previous edtions. The real purpose is to convince the reader everything else in the paper is true.
*** I believe Tom Tomorrow coined this. William Safire recently had a contest in his Language column to name the current situation in the economy and this would be my nomination.

Cocooning
(or Blast from the Past/Back to the Future)

The Vatican and Pope Benedict are cocooning hard these day, but I'd like to think a group of wronged people have hired a 21st Century Robin Hood team, like the one from the cable show Leverage, to subvert "Popery"* from within.

First you had the Pope rehabilitating extreme right wing bishops and in some cases Holocaust-deniers. They backpedaled after an uproar but the damage was done.

Also, the church is bringing back the sale of indulgences which is a good way to raise money, but also a potentially alienating move.

-----------------------
*Popery and Papist were slurs common in the 18th and 19th centuries. JFK's election symbolized a more tolerant attitude in the 20th. Who might have hired possible agent provocateurs who are advising Benedict? Could be disgruntled scientists, feminists, gay rights advocates or perhaps some men who were molested in their youth by priests have funneled their legal reward money back into attacking the church.

Trailer and video from Whit Stillman's Barcelona.

Strange to be cheering on White House economists, but I really do hope these people are successful. Most people admit they don't know what will happen, which on one hand is unnerving, but on another it means they will be willing to try different approaches. It's also good to hear they understand speed is of the essence. Reagan and Clinton didn't fully enact their big economic packages until August. Obama and his propellerheads got it done in a month. From the New York Times:

Sometimes, during the 30-minute briefings that Mr. Summers delivers in the Oval Office nearly every day, Mr. Obama addresses him as Professor, as in, "What do you think, Professor Summers?" Sometimes, as he did in the Roosevelt Room one recent afternoon, Mr. Obama tweaks him and his fellow policy wonks, dubbing them "the propeller-heads."

This, senior White House officials say, is the president’s way of ribbing Mr. Summers, who is back in Washington - he served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton - in the role of what his new boss calls a "thought leader."


...
"The irony is that Summers and Geithner wrote the textbook on how to manage these crises, and they lectured countries all over the world on what to do," said Adam S. Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, lamenting that they did not "follow through with their own prescriptions."

Mr. Summers dismissed the criticism, maintaining that the bailout plan, for which he said Mr. Geithner would announce details in due time, was "tough and ambitious."

In the meantime, Mr. Obama’s chief propeller-head is on to other matters, like housing and huddling in the Roosevelt Room to plan the budget with the president, as he did on Friday, when Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget director, passed out propeller-head hats.

Ian McEwan writes about John Updike.

What I like about Obama going around the country promoting the Stimulus bill is that it shows he's not afraid. Here's the very funny Dave Chappelle joking about being the first black President.

Fareed Zakaria writes about our neighbor to the north Canada:

Guess which country, alone in the industrialized world, has not faced a single bank failure, calls for bailouts or government intervention in the financial or mortgage sectors. Yup, it's Canada. In 2008, the World Economic Forum ranked Canada's banking system the healthiest in the world. America's ranked 40th, Britain's 44th.

We should probably follow their example regarding how they set up their healthy banking system and while we're at it take a look at their health care system.

I vote we skip right to the Swedish Model

Brad DeLong has some notes on the Geithner Financial Rescue Plan:

...

7. The net effect might be that fears that banks are insolvent or will become illiquid will ebb.

8. And the financial crisis and the Bush depression will come to an end.

9. But Geithner said this is not the end--that if the TARP money is expended and if banks still fail their stress tests, then what...

10. This plan does not foreclose a resort to the Swedish model, it is instead an attempt to use the TARP money to escape the necessity for adopting the Swedish model.

Jacob Sullum writes about the next Drug Czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske.

Executives from the financial institutions who received funds from the $700 billion banking bailout faced their critics on the House Financial Services Committee yesterday in Washington. The chief executives at the hearing were: Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America, Robert P. Kelly of Bank of New York Mellon, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley, Ronald E. Logue of State Street, and John G. Stumpf of Wells Fargo - CEOs from the too-big-to-fail banks essentially.

Instead of facing a firestorm, as the regulators at the SEC recently did, they got a "slow burn." One wonders if this happened because the banks are about to endure a "stress test" or because the critics have major employers in their districts who are on the hook to these banks. Maybe they even get campaign contributions from employees of these banks. Even though they were part of the problem, no doubt these CEOs will have to be part of the solution, so perhaps the critics were "looking foward" as Obama would say. Probably it's all of the above.

Robert Reich writes about perp walks at Congress at his blog:

When in 2005 Yahoo surrendered to Chinese authorities the names of Chinese dissidents who had used Yahoo email, and Google created for the Chinese a censored version of its search engine (removing such incendiary wordsa s "human rights" and "democracy," many Americans were outraged. Executives of both companies were summoned to appear before the House Subcommittee on Human Rights. Christopher Smith [(R-NJ)], its chairman, accused Yahoo of entering into a "sickening collaboration." He ridiculed the firm’s avowed justification for revealing the names of dissenters, saying if Anne Frank had put her diaries on email and Nazi authorities wanted to trace her down, Yahoo might have complied if Yahoo’s email system had exposed Nazi Germany to American culture. The late Tom Lantos, a leading Democrat on the committee and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress, asked the assembled executives "are you ashamed? Yes or no?" He called their behavior a "disgrace" and asked how they could sleep at night. James Leach, a Republican from Iowa, accused Google of serving as "a functionary of the Chinese government," adding that "if we want to learn how to censor, we’ll go to you." Smith subsequently introduced a bill to prevent American companies from, among other things, cooperating with censorship, but no one expected it to pass, and neither Smith nor any other member of congress pushed for it.

Perp walks like these may serve a useful public function. Rituals of public shaming are not inconsequential. But they're no substitute for laws and penalties that prevent the conduct in question from recurring.

You have to wonder if Yahoo and Google helped John Poindexter with his - now defunct - Total Information Awareness Program. Hopefully Obama and the new Congress will get tough with laws and penaltites.

Another intelligent guy I would include in my economic crisis rogues gallery along with Robert Samuelson is the blogger Mickey Kaus. He's on a permanent jihad against things like unions, welfare, immigration reform - you know, stuff that would help out the little people suffering during a global economic downturn.

Not sure what to make of the Israeli election. Steffi Graf won the most votes, but Bibi Netanyahu is claiming victory since rightwing coalition parties won the most votes.

Avigdor Lieberman, the ultranationalist, did well on a weird platform, combining a secular attack on the religious - proposing civil marriage for instance - and a vigorous scapegoating of Arab Israelis, the "enemy within."

On this day in 1809 Abraham Lincoln was born to Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, two uneducated farmers, in Kentucky and Charles Darwin was born to wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin, and Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood) in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England.

I believe the first time I read this fact was in Hitchens's bestseller God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Adam Gopnik recently had a book come out on Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life.

To honor this happy coincidence I'm having a super blogfest.

Robert Samuelson comes to mind as someone who's usually either picking on old people over Social Security or picking on "pampered" European workers or ginning up generational warfare on behalf of the well-to-do. But the economic crisis has him writing some relatively decent columns here, here, here, and here which contradict much of what loony-tunes GOP politicians are arguing.

In his columns, Samuelson "talks the economy down" and engages in much-derided "fear mongering":

This democratic (with a small "d") despondency has many causes. As more Americans invested in stocks, more became exposed to the market's wild psychological and financial swings. The plunge in home values has made many workers with secure jobs poorer. And, of course, layoffs themselves have become more democratic. Once, the young and blue-collar workers bore the brunt of firings. Now, managers, investment bankers, journalists, scientists - almost anyone - can be canned. Age confers little security. In December, almost a third of the jobless were 45 and over.

What offends middle-class Americans, most of us, is economic capriciousness. People crave order, predictability and security. They want to believe that personal virtues of studying, working hard and planning will be rewarded in the marketplace. Even in good times, these ambitions are often frustrated. But in today's economy, the disconnect has widened. Setbacks and losses seem increasingly divorced from personal effort. Our whole values system seems besieged.

I'd just add that throughout his career Samuelson has argued against public policy that mitigates all of this.

Brad DeLong, who has an excellent memory, notes one of Nouriel Roubini's gloom and doom scenarios didn't come to pass:

Roubini and Setser, February 2005 http://tinyurl.com/dl20090207: [In the early 2000s] The Federal Reserve responded aggressively to the sharp falls in US equity markets, and the Bush Administration added a massive fiscal stimulus to the Fed’s monetary stimulus: as Ken Rogoff (2003) has noted, the US recovery was the best recovery money could buy.... [F]oreign central banks were unwilling to let their currencies fall against the dollar, and intervened massively... a seemingly unlimited credit line from the world’s central banks funded the expansion of the US fiscal deficit, preventing the growing stock of Treasuries from crowding out private investment....

A cooperative grand bargain... offers the best chance for unwinding of the US external imbalance without a sharp deceleration of US and global growth. However, such a bargain looks increasingly unlikely.... China may be willing to add $240 billion, or even $300 billion, to its reserves for another year. We doubt it will be willing to do so for two more years.... [T]he risk [of] a disorderly unraveling... a sharp correction of the US dollar and of the US bond market, a surge in US long-term interest rates, a sharp fall in the price of a wide variety of risky assets (such a equities, housing, high-yield bonds, and emerging market sovereign debt) - are growing. Such an unraveling could result in a sharp economic slowdown in the US. It will force countries that now depend on US demand growth for their growth to adjust as well...

Tax, Not Shame

Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix and a Democrat, had an Op-Ed in New York Times opposing Obama's plan to cap the executive pay of those managing financial institutions receiving public largesse in order to get credit moving again and prevent a decades-long slump.

Instead he proposes executives like him be taxed of half their wealth instead of a third. Fine.

In the meantime, Obama's plan seems like a good idea. Says Hastings:

Another advantage is that it would also cover the sometimes huge earnings of hedge fund managers, star athletes, stunning movie stars, venture capitalists and the chief executives of private companies. Surely there is no reason to focus only on executives at publicly traded companies.

This week, President Obama proposed imposing a $500,000 compensation cap on companies seeking a bailout. It’s a terrible idea. We all want the taxpayers' money returned, and capping compensation at bailout recipients will just make it that much harder for those boards to hire and hold on to the executives who can lead their companies to compete and thrive.

Perhaps a starting place for "tax, not shame" would be creating a top federal marginal tax rate of 50 percent on all income above $1 million per year. Some will tell you that would reduce the incentive to earn but I don’t see that as likely. Besides, half of a giant compensation package is still pretty huge, and most of our motivation is the sheer challenge of the job anyway.

As Dr. Evil would say, right...

I just don't see a tax increase as politically feasible at the moment, maybe when the economy picks up. My points to Hastings would be:

1) the boards of the companies in the financial market got us in the position we are in, so who cares if they have a tougher time hiring and holding competent executives. They can't do much worse than they've done already.

1a) star athletes, stunning movie stars, venture capitalists and the chief executives of private companies didn't get us into this mess and their industries aren't being bailed out by obscene infusions of public money. Yes hedge fund managers played a substantial role but there is already talk of regulating them.

2) executive positions at companies backed by the government - essentially saved by the government and the taxpayer - will be more desirable than at companies no one trusts. Especially if you figure in his point that executives are mostly driven by the sheer challenge of the job.

3) If he had proposed that once the economy recovers, pay caps should be removed and taxes increased, I wouldn't suspect his motives. But since he doesn't, I will never be using Netflix, not that he would care.

Lux Interior of the Cramps passed away.

What I hope Obama is most bipartisan about is maintaining and improving the good relationship Bush developed with India. The south Asian nation is fast becoming an essential democracy and important part of the global economy. What is making India nervous is the prospect of internationalizing the conflict in Kashmir, so America and our allies will need to be most delicate about that.

Floyd Norris writes that "the countries that opened the most to the international capital markets, and that sought to bring in business with relatively lax regulations, now are suffering the most. Iceland was the wonder economy of the world; now it is broke."

Kenneth S. Rogoff, the Harvard economist, noted at the International Monetary Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week that India, which has "comparatively stringent restrictions on international capital flows," also seemed to have the most optimists and seemed to be in line for economic growth in a year when few countries are.

"Thank heavens for the strong regulatory framework we have in our financial system," he quoted one Indian corporate executive as saying.

Meanhwhile on the homefront, instead merely offshoring work to help it deal with the economic crisis, IBM is attempting to offshore workers:

Big Blue is offering its outgoing workers in the United States and Canada a chance to take an IBM job in India, Nigeria, Russia or other countries.

Through a program dubbed Project Match, IBM will help interested workers whose jobs are on the chopping block to "identify potential opportunities in growth markets and facilitate consideration by hiring managers in those markets," according to an internal company document obtained by CNN.

The company also will help with moving costs and provide visa assistance, it says.

What companies like IBM are finding is that they like the low labor costs, but don't like the lower quality labor or work they are getting in return.

In related news, A.Q. Khan was set free. Say what you want about Musharaff - and I think it was good he was pushed off the stage, relatively peacefully - at least he kept that guy under house arrest. Holbrooke has his work cut out for him and we here at Negative Outlook? wish him the best.

What Say You? (@ the centrists in Congress)









A reliably brilliant piece on the economic mess by Doug Henwood titled "Gloomy, w/ a 15% chance of depression". He always includes great photos of the major personalities involved.

LBO has often described the U.S. economy by invoking the old Timex watch slogan from the 1950s, "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking." Crash follows upon panic follows upon bust, and yet the thing keeps getting up again to binge some more. These remarkable feats of renewal, though, have always come with big help from the U.S. government, either multibillion dollar bailouts or long rounds of indulgent monetary policy from the Federal Reserve. But revive it always has, despite the forecasts from the hard left and the hard right that this time it was different and the medicine just won't work.

Will it work again? Will the megadoses of stimulus do the trick? Or is the jig up? Will what’s widely touted as the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s be a prelude to Great Depression II?

As this is written, the punters on the Intrade betting site - who have an uncanny history in predicting elections - are giving depression a 15% probability. That seems about right. [Note added for web: the value of the web contract soared in the weeks after these words were written. As this note is added, the contract is at 53. That seems too high, but you never know, do you?]

Also, an interview with Henwood by Steve Perry.

Henwood has a new blog where he writes in typical literary fashion:

The IMF, which was off the scene for many years, is, like a vampire salivating at sunset, returning to action. It's already developed a program for Iceland, which is being put through the austerity wringer; apparently being white and Nordic doesn’t earn you an exemption. It's likely to lend some money to some countries that it deems virtuous on easy terms - among them Brazil but not Argentina. More on all this in the coming weeks.

I agree with Martin Wolf of the Financial Times that IMF reform is needed in the medium to long term.

Paul Krugman notes that Obama has ratched up his rhetoric:

Now, in the past few days I've heard criticisms of this plan that echo the very same failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis - the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject that theory, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. So I urge members of Congress to act without delay. No plan is perfect, and we should work to make it stronger. But let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the essential. Let’s show people all over our country who are looking for leadership in this difficult time that we are equal to the task.

Larry Summers warns "deflation is a real risk for the economy."(again, noted by Krugman).Despite all of this I am much more Pollyannaish than Henwood or Wolf or Krugman. Maybe it's a generational thing, although I wasn't much surprised by the crisis after years of neoliberal-Republican misrule, unlike say Bush or McCain or Phil Gramm were.

Brian Beutler writes:

If you’re of the opinion that the events of the past several days are parts of a shrewd political gambit that will ultimately result in the best stimulus package we ever could’ve hoped for, this post isn’t for you. If you’re not, here’s how a motley assortment of folks think the effort can be salvaged.
...
What say you?

I say nay! Obama admitted making mistakes over the nominees, it's not a big deal. If you get tons more of those, then it's death by attrition of course.

Obama has repeatedly publicly said that the American people did not like how the Bush TARP plan was enacted. So they're fighting that and may have to give a little more than they would have liked. (In classic Republican fashion the Republicans have sort of sabotaged the cause, but it's "salvagable." At least Bush passed something which probably gave the economy some breathing space, and I seem to remember at the time certain liberals not wanting to pass anything and to put it off. Some of us have a memory.)

This isn't do or die time for Obama. It's do or die time for centrist Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats.

It's Obama who's inquiring of them: What say you? WHAT SAY YOU?

If they fail the test, they'll suffer the consequences.

Lindsay Beyerstein took photos at a Geoghegan event. She was hired by the Washington Independent as was the highly intelligent David Weigel.

Hackers Crack Into Texas Road Sign, Warn of Zombies Ahead

It happened in Austin, near the University of Texas. I lived in Austin in the early '90s and it's a great town and sort of a mini Silicon Valley. While I had a job in Austin, there was an economics professor at the univerisity whose classes I would audit. He had printouts of Clash song lyrics up on his office door (see below). I remember he also had stacks of BusinessWeek, a great magazine.

Any movie that contains a Clash song gets a thumbs up in my book. Yeah Guy Ritchie borrows heavily from Tarantino and Heat, but it's still a fun movie.

my daddy was a bankrobber
but he never hurt nobody
he just loved to live that way
and he loved to steal your money

some is rich, and some is poor
that's the way the world is
but i don't believe in lying back
sayln' how bad your luck is

so we came to jazz it up
we never loved a shovel
break your back to earn your pay
an' don't forget to grovel

the old man spoke up in a bar
said i never been in prison
a lifetime serving one machine
is ten times worse than prison

imagine if all the boys in jail
could get out now together
whadda you think they'd want to say to us?
while we was being clever

someday you'll meet your rocking chair
cos that's where we're spinning
there's no point to wanna comb your hair
when it's grey and thinning

run rabbit run
strike out boys, for the hills
i can find that hole in the wall
and i know that they never will

Lorrie Moore writes about John Updike.

Martin Amis writes about him for the Guardian.

In my thoughts on Obama's inaugural address I failed to mention one very important part where he said "we will restore science to its rightful place." I guess maybe I left it out because it seems so obvious and also because it's weird that he felt it necessary to mention. I mean science is one of those boring things they teach you at school.

But science has been bent lately to the needs of corporations and their quest for profits and it has also been under assault by the irrationalities of religion.

Dennis Overbye writes about science and democracy at the New York Times:

If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.

Today that dynamic is most clearly and perhaps crucially tested in China. As I pondered Mr. Obama’s words, I thought of Xu Liangying, an elderly Chinese physicist and Einstein scholar I met a couple of years ago, who has spent most of his life under house arrest for upholding Einstein’s maxim that there is no science without freedom of speech.

The converse might also be true. The habit of questioning that you learn in physics is invaluable in the rest of society. As Fang Lizhi, Dr. Xu’s fellow dissident whose writings helped spark the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and who now teaches at the University of Arizona, said in 1985, “Physics is more than a basis for technology; it is a cornerstone of modern thought.”

If we are not practicing good science, we probably aren’t practicing good democracy. And vice versa.

Science and democracy have been the watchwords of Chinese political aspirations for more than a century. When the Communist Party took power it sought to appropriate at least the scientific side of the equation. Here, for example, is what Hu Yaobang, the party’s general secretary, said in 1980. “Science is what it is simply because it can break down fetishes and superstitions and is bold in explorations and because it opposes following the beaten path and dares to destroy outmoded conventions and bad customs.”

Brave words that have yet to be allowed to come true in China. Mr. Hu was purged, and in fact it was to mourn his death that students first began assembling in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Dr. Fang got in trouble initially because he favored the Big Bang, but that was against Marxist orthodoxy that the universe was infinitely unfolding. Marxism, it might be remembered, was once promoted as a scientific theory, but some subjects were off-limits.

But once you can’t talk about one subject, the origin of the universe, for example, sooner or later other subjects are going to be off-limits, like global warming, birth control and abortion, or evolution, the subject of yet another dustup in Texas last week.

I highly recommend the haunting animated film Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman. It's the story of an Israeli veteran of the Israel-Lebanon war of 1982 and his coming to terms with that war and massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Israel invaded Lebanon and installed their ally Bashir Gemayel, senior commander of the "Phalangists" Christian militia. As the movie's website notes

Gemayel was considered extraordinarily charismatic, a fashionable young man, handsome and infinitely admired by all Christian militia soldiers and their families. He was especially esteemed by the Israeli leadership. Gemayel’s appointment as President of Lebanon was designed to ensure relative quiet on the tense border between the two countries.

While giving a speech at the Phalangist headquarters in East Beirut, Bashir Gemayel was killed by a massive explosive charge. To this day it is unknown who was responsible for the murder, but the assumption is that the assassination was orchestrated by Syrian or Palestinian factions or that they collaborated thereon.
That afternoon, Israeli troops penetrated a region in West Beirut that was mostly populated in those days by Palestinian refugees, and they surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Towards evening, large Phalangist forces made their way to the area, driven by a profound sense of revenge after the killing of their revered leader. At nightfall, Phalangist forces entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps aided by the IDF’s illumination rounds. The declared objective of the Christian forces was to purge the camps of Palestinian combat fighters. However, there were virtually no Palestinian combat fighters left in the refugee camps since they had been evacuated on ships to Tunisia two weeks earlier. For two whole days the sound of gunfire and battles could be heard from the camps but it was only on the third day, September 16th, when panic-stricken women swarmed the Israeli troops outside the camps, that the picture became clear: For three days the Christian forces massacred all refugee camp occupants. Men, women, the elderly and children, were all killed with horrific cruelty. To this day the exact number of victims is unknown but they are estimated at 3000.

Better Angels

This song Angels by Wax Poetic is pretty good.




Wax Poetic is a New York trip-hop band who came together in 1997 founded by Turkish-born music guru Ilhan Ersahin and originated at the popular and now defunct club Save the Robots. Norah Jones was a member before her break-out album Come Away with Me.

Seems like most people are afraid of robots, so it's good to see some believe they are worth saving.

Cool for Cats

Hitchens* wishes upon a star.

I have a small wish of my own in this season of public and private Utopias. It is that the emergence—or should I say ascendance?—of Barack Hussein Obama will allow the reentry into circulation of an old linguistic coinage. Exploited perhaps to greatest effect by James Baldwin, the word I have in mind is cat. Some of you will be old enough to remember it in real time, before the lugubrious and nerve-racking days when people never knew from one moment to the next what expression would put them in the wrong: the days of Negro and colored and black and African American and people of color. After all of this strenuous and heated and boring discourse, does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? A “cat” also, in jazz vernacular, can be a white person, just as Obama, in some non–Plessy v. Ferguson ways, can be. I think it might be rather nice to have a feline for president, even if only after enduring so many dogs. (Think, for one thing, of the kitten-like grace of those daughters.) The metaphor also puts us in mind of a useful cliché, which is that cats have nine lives—and an ability to land noiselessly and painlessly on their feet.

In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, Mickey Rourke used "cat." I can't remember who he used it in reference to, but I do remember thinking "that's not a word you hear very often anymore."

Alessandra Stanley writes about Rourke

When Mr. Rourke won a Golden Globe award for “The Wrestler” last Sunday, that comeback within a comeback movie was not merely a vindication for an aging, underemployed, sometimes mocked but mostly forgotten movie star.

It was a needling reminder that the French, after so many years and after so much derision, never gave up on an actor who, in this country, became a living symbol of French contrariness — a human Security Council veto, the Tinseltown embodiment of the force de frappe and fromage de tête.

We mocked the French for admiring Mickey Rourke the way we laughed at their serious assessment of Jerry Lewis as a comic genius. In both cases, the French despised us right back for disparaging artists who are avatars of what they consider to be the best of American popular culture.

I had forgetten the French were fans, but I do remember being a big fan myself in the '80s, and was glad to see he was making a comback back in 2005 and 2006.

In 1980, I was a little shit 10-year-old and in 1990 I turned 20. In between I enjoyed many of Rourke's movies, like Body Heat, Diner, Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Year of the Dragon, Angel Heart**, and Barfly.***

The types of characters he'd play reminded me of a couple of acquaintances of mine at the time, guys who didn't give a shit but also had a certain amount of integrity.
-------------
* Again, Hitchens has all the fun: "And yes, that was me at the ball given by The Root, making a mild fool of myself as I boogied chubbily on down to the strains of Biz Markie, DJ to the capital's black elite." Also at the party: Oprah, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Tom Joyner, Chris Tucker, Samuel L. Jackson, Kal Penn, and token white guys David Gregory and Larry King. The mention of Biz Markie brings back memories of college, when late in the evening/early in the morning the entire drunken party would be singing/yelling along to "Just a Friend."
** Robert De Niro's Satan was portrayed as I imagined him to be.
*** "Drinks for all my friends!"

No-Drama Obama

Although inauguration day was rather dramatic. Obama's mien during his speech was somber and serious, as it was during his victory speech in Chicago.

Regarding the economic crisis, he said: "Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age."

William Safire found this a tolerant note, while I suspect this is why those like John Judis didn't like the speech.

But Obama also said,

"Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched.

But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous."

And he notes that his election marks the coming of age of new generation that will not be hindered by false choices.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.

False choices are presented by those in power in order to limit options and it was good to see Obama note this. It is often a ploy by older, "serious" people to present false choices as the "hard reality." But Obama does recognize there are hard choices, they're just not always the ones presented.

He wisely states, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," which ruffles Safire's feathers. However, Safire notes

"Obama followed that soon enough with a paragraph appealing to hardliners, promising to "responsibly leave Iraq to its people" - hawks can hope the operative word is "responsibly" - and "forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan," which is a dovish way of saying he may have to risk the doves' charge of "Obama’s war.""

Iraq and Afghanistan are the arenas for his hard choices. My favorite part of the speech was the multicultural bit:

"And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that, "Our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken. You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."

(APPLAUSE)

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society's ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy."

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

As the New York Times observed

"There was a lot to reflect on in President Obama’s inaugural speech today, but there were two small points that are worth noting, two things that Mr. Obama mentioned that American politicians, especially presidents, never mention: Vietnam and atheism."
...
"To hear most American leaders tell it, the Constitutional freedom of religion allows you to be a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian Scientist, a Sikh — well you get the idea. Basically, a member of any religion. But they never talk about people who do not participate in an organized religion, or are even — gasp! — atheists."
...
"At another point in his address, the new president was paying homage to our ancestors, “who carried us up the long rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”

“For us,” he said, “they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sanh.”

Khe Sanh? The 1968 battle in Vietnam that was one of the many times the military leadership badly underestimated the power and intentions of the North Vietnamese Army, at great cost in the lives of American Marines?

Military historians still argue about what happened at Khe Sanh, which has become an iconic symbol of the tragic failures of Vietnam. (Go back and listen to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” for an example of what we mean.)

So why did Mr. Obama mention the battle? Perhaps because it also is a symbol of the courage and self-sacrifice of the Marines, and he wanted to include their service to America in his speech? We’re not certain. But it was interesting to note that he stopped there and did not go on to mention, say, Fallujah.

As for his reference to atheists, the answer could be simple: Mr. Obama actually meant it when he said, "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recrminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."

Like Obama's election, the mention of the two topics symbolize a change in the zeitgeist and a new generation. The only old grumpies during the inauguration drama were the non-heteros - and they have their reasons - but they should recognize that religion is their main adversary.

Catherine Winslow

Dance Fucker Dance
(or You're Gonna Go Far, Kid Part Deux)

Okay this is my last post on The House Bunny and hopefully that will get it out of my system. Having paid off my creditors, I can now spend money on frivolous impulse buys like magazines. So I picked up the latest issue of Geek magazine because Janeane Garofalo was on the cover and it would be interesting to learn what she thinks about her new gig on 24.

Coincidently there's a piece on Anna Faris:

To House Bunny's credit, one of the montages shows Faris' character actually learning - it's the first intelligence makeover scene. But Faris who gets story credit on the movie, orginally had something slightly less inspirational in mind when she met with writers Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Luts.

"We met and talked, and they asked what I was thinking about and I said I was playing around with this idea about a Playboy bunny who's thrown out of the Mansion, and maybe she's addicted to drugs or has an abusive father and she has to go back to her small Christian town and everybody hates her, and maybe she can't kick her meth habit... They were smiling and nodding and they came back a week later and said, 'OR... she could become a house mom at a sorority!' I wanted to make something comedic, I was just out-loud musing about why a Playboy bunny would really be kicked out of the Mansion.

Faris was eventually talked down to something slightly more family-friendly. "We really wanted to make sure that even though she had lived in this fantasy deviant lifestyle, for whatever strange reason she was an innocent. We decided not to go down the darker avenues of what a Playboy bunny's duties might be."

The picareque tale with bildungsroman traits reminded me of Zoolander, another story about a beautiful Ingénue and the theme of the cosmetic and superficial versus the authentic. The darker side Faris mentions brought to mind Martin Amis's journalistic journey into the porno industry.

If you're going to be a porno star, what do you need? It's pretty clear by now. You need to be an exhibitionist. You need to have a ferocious sex drive. You need to suffer from nostalgie de la boue (literally "mud nostalgia": a childish, even babyish delight in bodily functions and wastes). And - probably - you need damage in your past. You also need to be humourless. Chloe is not humourless. When she talked to me she was like someone peeping over a wall demarcating two different worlds, telling me stories about the other side.
...
Fifteen minutes later, referring to the achievements of Lola, [porn star] Chloe stabbed a hand through the air at me, and shouted with joy and triumph (Chloe is the director, remember, and she was thrilled to have this scene in the can): "That's the kind of blowjob I was telling you about yesterday!"

I reeled out into the yard with my notebook, laughing, and shaking my head. There are plenty of "jokes" on a porno set, and there is much raucous mirth to dispel tension. But only a Chloe, only an exception, can inject humour. She sounded like Mel Brooks, in The Producers, saying, "That's our Hitler!"

Jeet Heer writes:

Yet it’s worth reminding ourselves in the not too distant past, the exact opposite strategy was followed. In the 1970s both the United States and Israel thought that secular left-wing Arab nationalism was a bigger threat than religious fundamentalism. For that reason, Israel worked strongly to empower Hamas and undermine Fatah.

And he points to a UPI article:

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),” said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” said a former senior CIA official.

Vanity Fair liveblogs the Golden Globes:

8:30
Michael: The glitter on Eva Mendes’s shoulders is putting me into a trance. It also works on the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, who bags the usual speech and makes way for Zac Ephron and Hayden Panetierre who are here to announce Best Actor in a Series.
...

9:00
Julian: Here's the category everybody's been waiting for, which will answer the question: can the Golden Globes conquer death? And yes, as expected it can. Accepting on Heath Ledger's behalf is The Dark Knight director Chris Nolan. So far, the 20-second tribute clip of Ledger as the Joker is the most enthralling portion of the show. Nolan's speech is incredibly classy: "After Heath passed on, you saw a hole ripped in the future of cinema."
...

9:23:
Julian: Apatow-acolytes Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen present Best Adapted Screenplay and tempt death by taking cruel digs at Mickey Rourke, who has no idea who they or Judd Apatow are. Simon Beaufoy wins for writing Slumdog Millionaire. Score another for John Lopez, who says: "Simon Beaufoy traces the journey of his script for Danny Boyle's film in a long-winded and extraneous way that makes me question how much he deserves that award."
...

10:50:
Julian: There's only one possible reason for Sean Penn not showing up: He must have known that Mickey Rourke was going to win the Best Actor award for The Wrestler (right again, John). "It's been a very long road back for me," an emotional Rourke said, right after stumbling up the final few steps of that road to take his award. The cameras catch Darren Aronofsky smugly flicking off Rourke for calling him a "tough son-of-a-bitch." In a heartfelt, touching speech, Rourke thanks Axl Rose and his dogs, among others. And because the ceremony is running so short on time, Rourke sadly becomes the first winner to be ushered out to music. Thanks a lot, Colin Farrell.

It boggles my mind that Anna Faris wasn't nominated for The House Bunny, but it was good to see Kate Winslet and Anna Paquin win. And I was happy to see critics Dana Stevens, Jessica Winters and Stephanie Zacharek single out the House Bunny and Faris for praise.

Granted the livebloggers can't revise or edit and have to post what pops into their heads. At 9:23 Julian writes, "Apatow-acolytes Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen present Best Adapted Screenplay and tempt death by taking cruel digs at Mickey Rourke," whereas I would have said "tempt fate" or "court death" but then again maybe those are cliche.

With the Thrilla from Wasilla a fading memory; with their laissez-faire, free-market Reaganomics under seige by current events and with their Southern Strategy in tatters, conservatives are in desparate need of something they can point to and rally around.

Well now that New York City has been Disneyfied thanks to Rudy Giuliani, there's always Detroit, grand symbol of the failures of the 60s War on Poverty and affirmative action with the added bonus of the United Auto Workers. Michael Scherer at Swampland directs us to Matt Labash's latest Weekly Standard piece.

Somewhere along the way, Detroit became our national ashtray, a safe place for everyone to stub out the butt of their jokes. This was never more evident than at the recent congressional hearings, featuring the heads of the Big Three automakers, now more often called the Detroit Three, as that sounds more synonymous with failure. Yes, they have been feckless and tone-deaf in the past, and now look like stalkers trying to make people love them with desperation moves such as Ford breaking the "Taurus" name out of mothballs, or Chrysler steering a herd of cattle through downtown Detroit for an auto show (some of the longhorns started humping each other in front of reporters, giving new meaning to the "Dodge Ram," which they were intended to advertise).

As Hitchens once wrote in a gentle rebuke to something P.J. O'Rourke had penned, "That's quite funny, but it's not funny enough."

Were you as viscerally upset as I was when Governor Blagojevich played the race card and appointed Edmund Burris to the open Illinois Senate senate?

Then do something about it and help elect Tom Geoghegan to Blagojevich's old congressional seat.

Geoghegan recently had an op-ed in the New York Times.

In the blogosphere, Josh Marshall said

Don’t know what his chances are - he seems more like the type of guy you’d like to see in the House than the type who actually gets there. But let’s see. It’s important to aim high.

Matt Yglesias responds

I would have said something similar about Al Franken, and now he’s a US Senator. And I think of Glenn Nye who’s being sworn in today as a member of the US House of Representatives - you haven’t traditionally seen guys leap from the foreign service into congress. But why not? And couldn’t the House use a labor lawyer slash major intellectual? Part of what happens in times of political change is that new people get pulled into the process. People who don’t usually vote, go vote. People who wouldn’t normally run for office run for office

A native of the 5th district comments in response to Yglesias:

If the machine doesn’t slate a candidate, there could be a dozen (who knows, maybe more?) machine regulars running, and the County Party will be officially neutral (though whoever is favored by Daley and the other bosses on an individual basis will get help), allowing those guys to slug it out.

Then Geoghegan may be able to slip through and get the special election nomination. Beating the Republican will be a cake walk (The only republican candidate I’ve heard about so far is the Ultra-racist head of the Illinois Minuteman Project - she won’t stand a chance).

That’s kind of how the State’s attorney race played out this past fall. The County Party did not endorse, several Party heavyweights slugged it out, and the career prosecutor with no political experience and few connections won the primary and then thrashed Tony Periaca.

Heck, Geoghegan’s probably in a better place than Alvarez was given his history as a Labor lawyer. Some union folk might buck the machine to back one of their own.

No matter what happens, its going to be a fun primary. I’ve got a front row seat, and I’ve just got to pick a side now. I want to see some evidence that Geoghegan can run a strong race, and then I’ll be there to volunteer. Otherwise, I’ll probably go with John Fritchey, since he exorcised the last vestiges of the old Rostenkowski machine from my old neighborhood (he ran Rostenkowski’s successor (I forget his name) out of the Ward Committeeman seat).

I don't know about Fritchey - Blagojevich also ran as a "reform" candidate - but Geoghegan is definitley uncorruptible* and frugal - he once told me he will wait for books to come out in paperback before purchasing them. He's sort of a combo throwback/modern personality. On the one hand he reminds me of Ioan Gruffudd's William Wilberforce, from the movie Amazing Grace, which had moved Annasophia Robb so. On the other hand, he has demonstrated again and again in his writings his appreciation of the absurdities of modern life. But then again he discusses these absurdities in a plainsong, common sense manner, which makes him seem like a very observant, often extremely humorous throwback inserted into the 21st Century.

The primary is March 3, the general is April 7.

Mickey Kaus at Slate approves.

Kathy G at the G spot is ecstatic.

James Fallows is excited.

Katha Pollitt gives him a nice plug in her column.

Hertzberg had published him in The New Republic.

Thomas Frank** in his column in the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed pages (yes we have entered a bizarro alternate dimension)

------------
* the term Boy Scout comes to mind.
** Frank and his cohorts would regularly run Geoghegan pieces in The Baffler.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan
(or ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead)

Rashid Khalidi writes about what people don't know about Gaza.

Juan Cole writes:

The new repertoires of struggle against Israel had four dimensions.

# First, they depended on fundamentalist religious party organization (Hizbullah, Hamas), wherein cadres gained popularity in their own base by providing aid and services (e.g. hospitals, soup kitchens, etc.) This development marked a distinctive move away from the leftist romantic guerrilla model of the late 1960s and the 1970s, which was secular and less organic. Because they are religious and political communities, they can lace their guerrilla organizations and materiel through the civilian sphere. Guerrilla operations might be planned out in a civilian apartment building. Rockets might be stored in a mosque.

What he doesn't say is that leftist groups were systematically targeted and destroyed by regimes in the region (see Saddam Hussein) while their religious rivals were allowed to persist.

Hitchens notes

(Should you ever be in need of a free laugh, look up those Western "intellectuals" who believe that a vote for an Islamist party and an Islamic state is a way to vote against corruption! They have not lately studied Iran and Saudi Arabia.)

In his Op-Ed, Khalidi quotes the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people."

It is no wonder that after decades of violence and humiliation that many Palestinians have turned to fundamentalist religion. Likewise after centuries of persecution and pogroms, capped by the Nazi genocide, it's not surprising there are Jewish people who are gonzo nationalistic and nutters religiouswise.

But I still don't understand why the Israelis feel as if they need to go it alone after all of the evidence that the US has their back. And after the reality that the Saudis and Egyptians and other Arab nations (or rather their moderate political elite) have more to fear from a rising Iran than from Israel?

You're Gonna Go Far, Kid

I was killing some time looking at old blog posts and clicking on some of the links I embedded. In the lengthy post on actress AnnaSophia Robb, I noticed the YouTube video for the Van Halen video for Hot for Teacher had been taken down "due to terms of use violation." So I updated it. Then I had a little holiday in my heart, Robb had updated her website. She has a movie coming out in March with Dwayne Johnson and Carla Gugino. Robb also included a link to a pdf of a lengthy report she wrote about her trip to India to learn more about the Dalits and to lend a helping hand.

I first heard about the Dalits of India a few years ago when I saw the film Amazing Grace,* a film about the 19th century struggle to abolish the African slave trade in England. It’s a powerful story about a crusade for mercy and justice, but it seemed like ancient history until a film footnote said that there is even more slavery in the world today than ever before; India alone has 250 million people are trapped in some form of slavery. That’s almost the entire population of the United States. I couldn’t believe that this could be true in the 21 century.

We here at Negative Outlook? hope Race to Witch Mountain is successful for Robb.

In the meantime, for your viewing entertainment, I can recommend The House Bunny, the heartwarming tale of Shelley Darlington, a Playboy bunny, played by Anna Faris,** who is kicked out of the Playboy Mansion and becomes a house mother to a down-on-their-luck sorority house.

--------------------
* great movie
** if you find you like Ms. Faris, which is not hard to do, check out Smiley Face, in which she portrays a stoner who eats a bunch of her roommates cupcakes, unaware that they are laced with marijuana and comedy ensues.

YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER!

"We are hoping and praying that they will not be able to deny what the Lord has ordained," Burris said Sunday night.

The Million Dollar Question

Rick Perlstein's obit for "anti-American" Philip Agee.

Deep Throat passed away in December.



Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, in
his old-timey FBI action pose.










I hope Obama is pressured into doing something about the warrantless wiretapping compromise the Democrats enacted during the election. (Reformers should point to the Nixon White House.) Glenn Greenwald has been very good on this. In his Salon column, however, he addresses Obama supporters (which I consider myself):

But there is one aspect of the worldview of many Obama supporters that I find genuinely difficult to understand. These supporters insist that by symbolically including and sometimes compromising with even those on the Right with whom he vigorously disagrees, Obama will be able to chip away at the partisan hostilities and resentments, and erode the cultural divisions, that have inflamed and paralyzed our politics. People on the Right may disagree with him, claim these supporters, but they won't be wallowing in rage, suspicions, and hatred towards him. Instead, they'll feel respected and accommodated. They therefore won't be distracted by petty sideshow controversies. As a result, he'll encounter less reflexive resistance to implementing the key parts of his progressive agenda. A New Politics will emerge: one of respectful and civil disagreements, but not consumed by crippling partisan and cultural hatreds.

The one question I always return to when I hear this -- and we've been hearing it a lot to explain the Warren selection -- is this: in what conceivable sense is this approach "new"? Even for those who are convinced this will work, isn't this exactly the same thing Democrats have been doing for the last two decades: namely, accommodating and compromising with the Right in the name of bipartisan harmony and a desire to avoid partisan and cultural conflicts? This harmonious approach may be many things, but the one thing it seems not to be is "new."

In fact, wasn't this transpartisan mentality exactly the strategic premise that drove the Bill Clinton presidency, exactly what Dick Morris' triangulation tactics were designed to achieve? Clinton spent the entire decade extending cultural fig leafs to the Right, from V-chips to school uniforms. Here's how The New York Times explained the 1996 unveiling of his "school uniform" policy:

By supporting measures like the school-uniform option, Mr. Clinton is trying to use the President's bully pulpit in this election year to articulate a moderate Democratic agenda that steps into the area of social issues that have long been the province of Republicans.

Greenwald nicely summarizes what Obama campaigned on, but Morris and Clinton didn't have that strategy in mind. I agree that the wiretapping/FISA compromise during the election was a Morris maneuver, but Clinton and Morris passed rightwing/centrist legislation in order to stay in office. I don't believe Obama will be that transpartisan.* What's "new" is attempting to get beyond the 60s cultural wars without compromising one's principles. In part this mean successfully reframing the debate conservatives want to endlessly engage in. Clinton and Morris engaged in the debate on conservatives' terms and passed conservative legislation without getting much in return.

As I noted earlier, Judis and Krugman point out that the political landscape today is much different - thanks in part to Greenwald and people like him. That's also what is "new" - which Greenwald keeps asking - as is Obama's politcal talent.

Regarding Obama's compromises and political interaction with the center and right, Mandela's quote vis-a-vis the ANC's South African Communist allies I mentioned earlier seems appropriate:

With this victory [1994] came new strains in the ANC-SACP alliance. While a number of Communists, notably Joe Slovo, occupied prominent positions on the ANC benches in parliament and in government, the ANC's programme did not threaten the existence of capitalism in South Africa and was heavily reliant on foreign investment and tourism. In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela famously remarked:

"There will always be those who say that the Communists were using us. But who is to say that we were not using them?"

Greenwald is afraid that the Left will be "used" as the Communists were, but there's a good chance it will be not the Left but some of those on the Right and in the Center who will be treated this way. This is what Obama has campaigned on. And like the South African Communists, these allies** will get some of what they want and a laudatory footnote in the history books.

___________________
* Like most, I don't like the terms postpartisan and transpartisan because they lead to this sort of confusion.

** Already Robert Gates and Lawrence Summers have expressed opinions more in line with Obama's than with their centrist pasts. Of course what Greenwald and Obama's supporters are waiting on is concrete actions.

As the Pendulum* Swings.
(or be Bold!)

John Judis wrote about the emerging liberal consensus back in November. Could it happen? Kind of exciting. His advice:

These guys--and the others who are counseling Barack Obama and the Democrats to "go slow"--couldn't be more wrong. They are looking at Obama's election through the prism of Jimmy Carter's win in 1976 and Bill Clinton's victory in 1992. Both Carter and Clinton did misjudge the mood of the electorate. They tried unsuccessfully to govern a country from the center-left that was moving to the right (in Carter's case) or that was only just beginning to move leftward (in Clinton's case)--and they were rebuked by voters as a result.

Obama is taking office under dramatically different circumstances.

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman agrees:

The reality of this [Southern] strategy’s collapse has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers. Thus, some commentators warning President-elect Barack Obama against bold action have held up Bill Clinton’s political failures in his first two years as a cautionary tale.

But America in 1993 was a very different country - not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes - and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real "real America," a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.

--------------------------
*Actually looks like the whole pendulum apparatus is moving to the left.

Bullies and the thorns in their sides

Helen Suzman is dead at 91.

From the obit by John Burns and Alan Cowell:

In 1959, impatient with the United Party’s tolerance of racial segregation, she became a founder of the liberal Progressive Party, later known as the Progressive Federal Party, which favored a more inclusive, nonracial franchise that would lead to black majority rule. Some of the most relentless enforcers of apartheid eventually developed a grudging respect for her, even a hint of affection. James T. Kruger, the justice minister under Mr. Vorster during the Soweto riots, was one of the "bullies" Mrs. Suzman frequently denounced.

Years later, out of office, Mr. Kruger learned that Mrs. Suzman was planning a tourist visit to the Soviet Union with her husband. A keen amateur philatelist, he approached her in the parliamentary lobby and gave her a sheaf of self-addressed postcards and letters, each bearing new South African stamps, asking her to mail them back to him from Moscow.

When she said that the Soviet postal authorities would not accept South African stamps, she recalled, Mr. Kruger was puzzled. For Mrs. Suzman, the incident demonstrated the occluded world inhabited by many apartheid leaders, who often acted, she said, as if they belonged to the 17th, not the 20th century. "Poor old Jimmy Kruger," she said. "Like most of them, he knew very little of the world beyond South Africa."

The BBC has some video.

Martin Peretz had a blog entry at the New Republic comparing Suzman favorably to Nadine Gordimer. I can't find it now - maybe it was deleted - but his criticism of Gordimer is that she was soft on Communism. (It was admirable how Peretz stuck up for Obama over Israel during the election.)

Actually, the South African Communist Party, according to Wikipedia, "played a dynamic role in the development of the liberation movement in South Africa and had an influence beyond its size."

With this victory [1994] came new strains in the ANC-SACP alliance. While a number of Communists, notably Joe Slovo, occupied prominent positions on the ANC benches in parliament and in government, the ANC's programme did not threaten the existence of capitalism in South Africa and was heavily reliant on foreign investment and tourism. In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela famously remarked:

"There will always be those who say that the Communists were using us. But who is to say that we were not using them?"

In Burns and Cowell's brilliantly written obit, they note that Suzman was aware of her apparent ineffectualness.

This was a variation on a critique she had long endured, and to some extent accepted - that by engaging in what was largely a charade of parliamentary politics in apartheid South Africa, she became complicit, however unwillingly, in the larger deceits of apartheid, which would ultimately be ended not by a small band of white dissenters, but by the more powerful forces of the black freedom struggle and external political pressure.

Among her friends, it was a reality Mrs. Suzman conceded, though she and many opponents of apartheid believed that it was important to keep the hopes of eventual democracy in the country alive and that she could help the victims of apartheid by her efforts to expose the evils of the system in and out of Parliament.

In a 1966 profile in The New York Times Magazine, Joseph Lelyveld, the newspaper's correspondent in South Africa at the time, recounted one of her favorite stories, about an overeager dinner host who gave a black man serving her a lecture on her parliamentary achievements.

"Do you know who this is, John?" the host asked. "This is Helen Suzman, the champion of your cause - the champion of human rights in South Africa."

"She waste her time," John replied, as Mrs. Suzman retold it later, laughing brightly as she repeated the line. "She waste her time."

Hitchens's review of the novel Revolutionary Road

In this microcosmic hell on Earth, there is always a lower circle. Yates shows us the schizophrenic son of the local realtor, on an outing from his asylum, and causes us to feel both the exquisite pain of madness and the unbearable toll that it exacts on the sane. To give you another sketch of the stupendous way in which Yates could both observe and write, here is how a crazy person smokes:

Lagging behind his parents, he stood with his feet planted wide apart on the wet gravel, slightly pigeon-toed, and gave himself wholly to the business of lighting a cigarette - tamping it methodically on his thumbnail, inspecting it with a frown, fixing it carefully in his lips, hunching and cupping the match to it, and then taking the first deep pulls as intently as if the smoke of this particular cigarette were all he would ever have or expect of sensual gratification.

New short story from Lorrie Moore. The context of the quote is that the protagonist Bake is stuck in a coversation with a conservative lobbyist, who says:

"Here is my real problem: this country was founded by and continues to be held together by people who have worked very hard to get where they are." Bake shrugged and wagged his head around. Could he speak of people having things they didn't deserve, in a roomful of such people? Now would not be the time to speak of timing. It would be unlucky to speak of luck. She continued. "And if you don't understand that, my friend, then we cannot continue this conversation."

The sudden way in which the whole possibility of communication was now on the line startled him. "I see you've researched the founding of this country." He would look for common ground.

"I watched John Adams on HBO. Every single episode."

"Wasn't the guy who played George Washington uncanny? I did think Jefferson looked distractingly like Martin Amis. I wonder if Martin is here?" He looked over his shoulders again. He needed Martin Amis to get over here right now and help him.

That ocurred to me also. The actor is Stephen Dillane.

Moore has a new collection out.

Heath Ledger should win all of the awards. Also, Sean Penn is good in Milk and Mickey Rourke is good in the Wrestler.

Robert Gates interview with Charlie Rose.

Gates describes why he changed his mind on the 1975 Helsinki accords.

Jamie Tarabay reports on UN Resolution about religion and freedom of speech.

My theory on why Chinese Democracy took so long to complete is that Axl Rose wanted to time its release with the fall of the Communist Party of China.* If the global economy doesn't recover in the medium term, it's a real possibilty, as durable as they've been. Some of the lyrics to the title track:

If they were missionaries
Real time visionaries
Sittin' in a Chinese stew
To view my disinfatuation

I knew that I'm a classic case
Watch my disenchanted face
Blame it on the Falun Gong
They see the end
And you can't hold on now

Cause it would take a lot more hate than you
To end the fascination
Even with an iron fist
More than you got to rule a nation
When all I've got is precious time

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* The world's largest political party with 70 million members, comprising 5.5 percent of the Chinese population.

Oh look, mistletoe. Now isn't that awkward?

"Indie darling" Feist made a great angel on Stephen Colbert's Christmas special.