born live love die

Krugman starts out with a little snark:

The best thing about the Irish right now is that there are so few of them. By itself, Ireland can’t do all that much damage to Europe’s prospects. The same can be said of Greece and of Portugal, which is widely regarded as the next potential domino.  But then there’s Spain. The others are tapas; Spain is the main course.

Krugman goes on to talk about the problems that Spain is having and the danger it poses for the world economy.

So Spain is in effect a prisoner of the euro, leaving it with no good options.  The good news about America is that we aren’t in that kind of trap: we still have our own currency, with all the flexibility that implies. By the way, so does Britain, whose deficits and debt are comparable to Spain’s, but which investors don’t see as a default risk.  The bad news about America is that a powerful political faction is trying to shackle the Federal Reserve, in effect removing the one big advantage we have over the suffering Spaniards. Republican attacks on the Fed — demands that it stop trying to promote economic recovery and focus instead on keeping the dollar strong and fighting the imaginary risks of inflation — amount to a demand that we voluntarily put ourselves in the Spanish prison.  Let’s hope that the Fed doesn’t listen. Things in America are bad, but they could be much worse. And if the hard-money faction gets its way, they will be.

I’m not an economist, but I see these things as a zero-sum game.  For one economy to win, another one must lose.  I wish I had time to expound on this further.

Scott Horton interviews Bruce Ackerman, Yale law professor and author of The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.

In the period after 9/11 you see “charismatic executive extremism” and “bureaucratic lawlessness” as increasingly powerful forces in America. You don’t seem to feel that the federal judiciary are up to pushing them back, and you propose a structure that looks suspiciously like the French Conseil d’État as a means of quickly challenging executive excesses. But considering the immense hurdles that face someone seeking to amend the constitution, is this a practical solution?

Consider a worst case scenario: An extremist president wins the White House, and her superloyalists prepare to implement her “vision” through sweeping bureaucratic and military initiatives. As planning proceeds, long-term civil servants protest that the new plans ride roughshod over long-standing statutory requirements. But their objections are swept aside by impressive-looking documents issued by the president’s lawyers that rubber-stamp the new initiatives. As the bureaucracy creates new facts on the ground, and the president’s propaganda machine cranks out supportive sound-bites, citizens take their complaints to the courts—and it may take years before the Supreme Court gets into the act.

The entire interview is pretty good, but the idea he seems to dance around is the fact our government, designed over 200 years ago, is based on elections for people.  Elections for people turn on personality more than ability or ideas.  I don’t think our government was made to withstand public relations driven communications apparati that can deliver a honed and focussed message to targeted groups.  We no longer have suffrage exercising a conscious effort to move the republic forward, but one based on little more than personality.

Jimmy Fallon is one of the funniest comedians working today. His impersonations are spot on. Neil Young sings Willow Smith’s “Whip my hair”/

Oh, that’s Bruce Springsteen who joins him.

In my morning reflection time, i.e., while laying in bed, thinking about getting up, I thought about the emotions that were expressed at the MoveOn meeting.

We need to beat these guys.

The saying “Virtue is its own reward” has lost some of its meaning over the years.  The correct meaning is “Virtue is its only reward”.  We do virtuous things not for some external reward, but for the good of the thing we do.  We want the country to do better, not because we are right, but because the country will be better.

I did a potluck event organized by MoveOn tonight.  Here are some of the comments and my thoughts:

Media: it isn’t helping, it is obfuscating, it is making the clear mendacity of the Right out to be equivalent to the truth telling of the Left.

Media exists to sell advertising.  The newspapers of 200 years ago printed things that would be considered libelous today.  They did not try to publish the truth.  They pandered, quite openly, to one group or another.  People bought the paper because it appealed to their positions, not because it was printing the truth.  Fox News is a throw back to that time.  Media seeks to establish a narrative, because it is in narrative that we have understanding.  Narrative supplies protagonists, antagonists, character arcs, plot points.  The story of politics is told using these devices as if it were a soap opera, but not nearly as well.

Progressives are justified in being angry about the outcome of the election.

The Democrats, led by Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi, knew that there was a slim window through which they would be able to push legislation.  The window opened in 2006.  Rahm Emanuel enlisted Blue Dog Democrats for swing districts.  I thought that he was not being progressive enough in his choices.  With the election of Obama in 2008, and control, how ever tenuous, of both houses of Congress, Obama, Pelosi and Reid pushed through a lot of legislation.  It was not as progressive as I wanted it to be.  But it will not be repealed.  See http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/ and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

The Citizens United decision was wrong and is a disaster for America.

Yes.  And nothing will be done about it until 2012.  The 2012 election may or may not include the results of redistricting, I’m not sure, but Obama will run against what is sure to be a dysfunctional Congress.  This Congress plans on doing nothing for two years.  With new candidates, and vulnerable Republican Senators in the 2012 election, the Democrats will retake control of both houses of Congress.  They will pass meaningful election reform legislation and hopefully do something about the idea that corporations are persons.

The arc of history bends toward justice.

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

There was a version of this video on Youtube with text graphics.  Live from Colbert.

I was getting frustrated by the draw that computers have on my kids.  I had already limited their computer time to an hour a night, but only if their homework was done.  Bookzilla started piano in the fourth grade, but dropped it in the seventh.  JMan started piano, grudgingly, in the fourth grade, and doesn’t like the amount of time that it seems to take away from computer gaming.  I have never pushed him to ‘practice’.  I call it ‘piano exercise’ to relate it to a muscular activity.

I reflected on my childhood, and how we had a Hammond organ, and if we wanted to play an instrument, we could play that.  We purchased it because an older sibling wanted to play and my parents were interested in grooming people to play in church.  I wanted to play anything other than a clunky organ.  My neighbors had a piano, and my friend was required to practice 30 minutes a day.  He hated it, but I would have jumped at the chance to play piano.

JMan wants to drop piano now, and I want him to learn more.  He is in the sixth grade and I know that musical knowledge will be something that enriches his life for all of his years, while the knowledge of how to play a computer game will not.  He doesn’t really understand that.

I sometimes think that the kids are addicted to the internet.  I was really frustrated and I said that perhaps we should cut back computer time during the week.  The kids reacted in a way that I did not anticipate.  Over dinner, we discussed the issue rationally, without giving in to emotion.  I was very surprised that the kids listed arguments, examined my arguments, rebutted them.  They tag teamed me.  One would rebut an argument of mine, and while I was responding to that the other one would step in with a counter argument for me.

I had the realization that if this is the way that they responded to things, that they were doing pretty good after all.  There was a calm deliberateness about them that I thought spoke of maturity.  And isn’t that what we want from our children?

The national press corps likes its memes.

From NBC’s Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, Ali Weinberg
*** Obama in defeat: To us, the most striking part of President Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview was his admission that that he and his administration didn’t compromise and work with the Republicans. It was an admission of defeat.

Except for the fact that President Obama didn’t say that.  Here is the link to the interview.  At no point did he say that he didn’t compromise with Republicans.

If the press was paying attention for the last two years, they would have seen a President try to do anything to pry a Republican Senator away from the rest of the Republican Party.  Short of giving up his agenda completely, there was nothing more President Obama could have done.  Republicans voted en bloc against President Obama.

Rep. Kantor outlined the Republican idea of compromise: do it our way.  To which the only reasonable response is “No”.

Much is being made of the most recent election, as if the entire country has been heard.  Voter turnout was around 40%.  The Republican majorities represent less than 25% of the country.  This is not a mandate.

I have two cats, Blitz and Sylvia.  The kids wanted cats and I obliged them.  Before I had kids, I thought cats were interesting.  After having kids, cats are something to be endured.

I have been referring to Blitz as ‘un petit chat noir’, dragging the words out.  We were sitting around the family room and Bookzilla gave translations into Spanish for ‘a little black cat’ and ‘a fat gray cat’, which is what Sylvia is.  I used Google Translator to dial up French, German and Italian.  JMan liked the German translation for Sylvia, ‘eine dicke graue Katze’.  The fun was  winding down and I threw out, “I wonder what the Canadian for little black cat is.”  and Bookzilla replied in a trice.

“A little black cat, eh.”

One of the funniest scenes in “The Princess Bride” is between Inigo Montoya and Vizzini:

Vizzini: Inconceivable!

Montoya: You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

Eric Cantor talks about President Obama.

Cantor also made clear that if there’s going to be any compromise, it’s going to have to come from Obama, who has said he is willing to work with Republicans. Cantor, however, said that Republicans will work with Obama only if he agrees with them 100 percent.

Compromise is when we get our way completely.

Got it.