Scott Shane, "Expert Panel Is Critical of F.B.I. Work In Investigating Anthrax Letters". February 15
Jerry Markon, "Anthrax report casts doubt on scientific evidence in FBI case against Bruce Ivins." February 15
AND, yes, the first one was actually conducted in December, 1941.
It's now nine and-a-half years later. It's beyond time that subpoena power was applied towards getting the facts on an attack on the US government before the American people.
Yesterday was the capper: the FBI, which had resisted all efforts for independent oversight, and, instead, funded its own evaluation restricted to the scientific evidence--presumably the strongest part of its case--has its own panel cast doubt on that.
And there's plenty of reason to wonder about the rest. There's $5.8 million reasons we paid Steven Hatfill after the Bureau tried him in the papers. What reason do the rest of us have to believe the case against Bruce Ivins was any stronger? Not the lab work, apparently.
Look: this was a direct attack on the U.S. Government. 9/11 was not, despite the apparent belief in some circles that the Pentagon is one of the Two or Three Other Branches, Depending on Who's Counting. We've decided that 9/11 was an Act of War, conveniently, since that was what we were prepared to respond to (though, in the event, not as well as we imagined). The anthrax bombings were an act of pure terrorism, though the FBI has somehow managed to conclude they were more like Ivins' ill-conceived ad campaign for More Lab Work. (And these are the guys who invented, or "invented", Criminal Profiling, but the fact that the bomber targeted Tom Daschle, Patrick Leahy, and the news operations of the three major networks, under the cover of a sort of cartoon Islam, is evidently chalked up to coincidence.)
It's time to live up to our War on Terra rhetoric in a way that will, for once, make a difference. It's time to get to the bottom of this. The investigation hasn't answered any questions, and there are serious questions about the investigation.
Wednesday, February 16
Tuesday, February 15
I'm Sleeping As Fast As I Can
Ross Douthat's blog
February 10, 2011, 2:08 PM
A Quiet February
My already-intermittent blogging will cease for most of this month. Real posting will resume once I’ve figured out how to successfully juggle punditry and fatherhood.
OKAY, so I suppose "Give up punditry" is either too easy, or too difficult, since you don't actually engage in any, and yes, I am giving you credit for using the term ironically, except it's not classical irony, but the modern sort which expects to be taken seriously for having employed it. This is, perhaps, a major symptom of the modern disease: you imagine you can call yourself a pundit, and gain points for a little self-deprecation, despite the fact that "pundit" now precisely means "ignoramus who blathers about current events on some mass-market media site". So in effect you're not being ironic, but you're the only one who doesn't realize it.
Anyway, Ross-o, maybe you could start off by not wasting two hours of everyone's time talking to Matt Yglesias on Bloggingheads.
And fer cryin' out loud, every weekend you write one 800-word essay on what you and the Pope think of last week's headlines; through the week you occasionally expound on something Ezra had to say on your "weblog", doing, in other words, what tens of thousands of Americans do better than you, except they aren't paid for their time. What's the fucking problem? I know people who spend more time drinking than you do punditizing and still manage to be good parents. Is the problem that your children are getting old enough to wonder why Daddy's always walking around in his pajamas? Or is it early-middle-age existential terror, and you've begun to wonder what happens when they get old enough to read your shit? Is the problem that punditizing doesn't take you away from parenting often enough? What? Please don't make me hope it's galloping Farah Fawcett-Majorsitis, and the Times in its infinite cluelessness has decided that your incontinent linky-linky thing is no longer cutting edge? They want somebody on top of this Facebook thing? Did someone overhear Pinch asking a copyboy if he knew of "a young Ross Douthat"? Face it, Ross: you're coming up on two years (!) at the Times. That's twice as long as they put up with Kristol having nothing to say. You got the gig for having pretended to lecture the Republican party on how to come back from the Bush administration, and come back it did, except by doing precisely the opposite. I realize that in your world being utterly wrong about everything is grounds for a promotion. But things change. Maybe it's time to read the crayon on the wall. Glad we could have this chat.
REPUBLICAN legislative insanity (but I repeat myself!) continues apace, here as elsewhere. It's worth noting, I guess, that now that Mitch Daniels has deserted the state for full-time contemplation, not even his own party feels like pretending that "let's put social issues on the back burner" was anything but a bad soundbite. A requirement that doctors inform a woman seeking to terminate a pregnancy that "life begins at conception" has been tacked on to the ongoing attempt to require hospital admitting privileges for anyone who performs abortions, and is now out of Senate committee. It's the sort of thing which would have been killed in the "strategy" sessions in previous years. There's a proposal somewhere (I don't follow this stuff too closely, for fear it may be radioactive) which will quadruple marriage license fees unless the couple takes a marriage course first. I trust it will include a good tenderloin recipe for the little woman, and I say "woman" because the real push is for getting a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage on the Indiana ballot within a couple years, despite the fact that the gay marriage ban already on the books has been upheld in court. It's not just nostalgia for the heady days of 2005, when we were young and anti-gay; the impetus, besides really cementing the Republican reputation for never thinking things out beyond the next quarter, is that old "conservative" favorite, making it statutorily impermissible for the courts to rule on the law, and the newer "conservative" favorite, overturning the results of the Civil War via abrogating Federal law. Indiana will not be satisfied just denying civil rights to some of its citizens. It wants to ignore the rights other states grant them into the bargain. And to think I once said that "conservatives" hadn't studied the Civil Rights movement.
I'm not certain whether anyone has bothered to point out that this might have a negative effect on gay and lesbian entrepreneurs who were considering moving businesses to Indiana because of its "business-friendly atmosphere", which Mitch is busy trying to turn into our version of tourism. Though this might be balanced out by the descending divorced gay partners looking to avoid court-ordered alimony altogether.
Again, just short-sightedness and a full-speed rush to whatever reactionary idiocy the GOP thinks will help it at the polls; this is the real reason I hate these guys: not so much that they're assholes, but that they're half-assed assholes. Could we please just admit that the problem isn't going away until we get rid of homosexuals? I'm not talking Final Solution stuff; just make the state less attractive for 'em than it already is. God, it can't take much.
Meanwhile, we're hell-bent on wrecking what's left of the public educational system, which ain't much anyway, so I think I was more amused by this one than anything else:
House OKs home-schooled students on athletic teams
Home-schooled students could play on the athletic teams of their local public school district under a bill the Indiana House passed 60-30 on Monday.
House Bill 1399, which also applies to students who attend nonaccredited schools, goes to the Senate for consideration.
Rep. Tim Wesco, R-Osceola, said that the parents of home-schooled students pay taxes that support public schools, and that the state constitution says those schools should be open to all.
Now, y'know, I'm really thinking that if you didn't want to subject young Mackenzie or Larson (or Rebekah or Seth) to the iniquities of the public school classroom, lettin' 'em into the locker rooms is not a particularly good idea.
But the thing I love about this is the assumption that schools are there to provide this sort of open-ended opportunity even as we strip away the funding; Indianapolis Public Schools have done away with major sports in several high schools, and I didn't hear a peep out of the legislature about Our Precious Extracurricular Rights then. But then, these are the same bozos who defunded fire departments across the state (via the Property Tax Freedoms we raised sales taxes 17% to implement), and now want to know why those departments are charging people for their services. Enjoy the ride, America. If you don't come to it, it'll come to you.
Monday, February 14
Poster Boy
Walter Shapiro, "CPAC 2011: The Only Winners Were Mitch Daniels and Ron Paul". February 12
READERS overly concerned with minutiae may recall that last week, or sometime, the Indianapolis Star debuted its MITCH WATCH ("A weekly look at Gov. Mitch Daniels' activities as he weighs a run for the GOP 2012 presidential nomination") column-within-a-political-round-up-column ("Behind Closed Doors") in an effort to better excuse running a half-page picture of the man every goddam Sunday. With our nation's precious preteritio resources declining nearly as fast as newspaper readership, we're not even going to bother mentioning that recent years have seen such sure-fire Hoosier presidential contenders as Dick Lugar, Evan Bayh, Birch Bayh, Dan Quayle, Mike Pence, and Whichever Crane Brother Didn't Get Caught Molesting Congressional Pages come and go without testing the limitations of traditional page layout.
This week's thrilling installment includes: 1) Mitch went to CPAC, but that doesn't mean he's a candidate; 2) those YouTube Draft Daniels students went to CPAC, and sold tee shirts (one of which replaced Obama's "Hope" logo with 'Solvency". Oh, sorry. Hope you were sitting down.) but that doesn't mean he's a candidate; 3) somebody dug up Mitch's old Princeton pot bust, which is old news to Hoosiers because he's been upfront about it [I love, first, how easily an utter necessity becomes a Virtue, and, second, how overlooking the felonious (he was dealing in his dorm room, not tokin' up in the library stacks) youthful indiscretions of a man who is now, by professional necessity and personal inclination a big fucking hypocrite about the thing qualifies as open-mindedness] so it won't affect his still not being a candidate; 4) Daniels is getting some press notice for being short (the item attributes to "Statehouse gossip" the question of whether his insisted-on 5-foot-7 might be something of a stretch. And yes, "stretch" was their term). Although, you know, James Madison, who did run, and also dealt weed. This prompted the following conversation Chez Riley, which must be prefaced with a note that our living room statement includes an old church lectern used as a dictionary stand:
ME: Honey, how tall are you?
PW: Five-nine.
ME: Could you come in here for a moment? I wanna figure out what size casters we need so you can reach the OED.
He's 4-11 people. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but imagining you're hiding it, coupled with that combover, is suggestive of something pathological; 5) He's having rotator-cuff surgery, which, according to his press secretary, doctors attribute to normal wear-and-tear, but he attributes to falling in December '09 while taking out the garbage. Jes' like folks. This doesn't mean he's a candidate.
And Jes' Like Mitch, who knows better than every scientist on the planet when it comes to global climate trends.
Which brings us to CPAC, I guess, and the continued Press confusion over a sorta-carefully crafted Daniels PR campaign and something that actually means something.
Here's the difference between our political pundit class and med-school students: med-school students generally only imagine they've caught every disease they read about for their first year or so. Evidently with pundits it's a lifetime condition.
Mitch Daniels! Barack Obama! John McCain! We can go on and on and on. The post-Watergate political press always anoints somebody as the Straight-Shootin', Truth-Tellin', Serious Candidate who's gonna pull us out of Our Political Morass ("Since 1948"™) by ignoring the conventional wisdom of campaigns as promoted, interminably, by our post-Watergate political press. Always the same shit, and perpetually in ignorance of the Guy who it touted four years ago for pulling the same schtick. This is an arena, mind you, where Jack Kemp was touted as a serious thinker. Go ahead, motherfuckers. Start talkin' about policy. Dare ya.
Here's the deal, Mr. Shapiro: Mitch Daniels would get points for "talking to a CPAC audience as if they were adults" if that meant something, and if he had a choice in the matter. Daniels can't come across as Mr. Christian Values. Let's give the Republican party credit for the one thing it's good at: insularity. Mitt Romney didn't get away with turning himself into a culture warrior last time. Daniels is a Chamber of Commerce Republican. It's not a philosophical stance. It's not economic analysis. It's the result of having Regional Sales Manager in your DNA. Such people do not like the wingnut religious fringe because they don't like anything that interferes with markets, or threatens advertisers, or has principles which do not begin and/or end with the lining of one's pockets. They believe such people exist at their sufferance, and for one purpose: voting Republican.
I have no idea what Mitch Daniels actually thinks about reproductive rights. I have an absolute certainty about why he told Laura Ingraham he was Indiana's Most Anti-Abortion Governor, Ever, and it has nothing to do with principles, or with the issue, for that matter. Is there some reason to imagine that Mitch Daniels is the single politician on the American scene in the past forty years who isn't a calculating little fraud? Is there something in Daniels' record that suggests Calling Things As He Sees Them, or Taking Brave, Unpopular Stances without regard for the political consequences? Or analyzing situations with an open mind? No. It's precisely the opposite. He first proposed a one-year tax increase to solve Indiana's "deficit" "problem", then withdrew it quicker'n you'd pull your fingertips out of an open flame. Afterwards the sole consideration in Daniels-dominated legislatures has been slashing budgets (and assorted accounting tricks) in order to display a showy budget surplus which countered his work at OMB. We haven't had a discussion over educational priorities over the past six years in Indiana; we just had a chart that showed how much spending "had" to be cut. We haven't actually had a discussion of priorities at all; just six years of trying to correct Mitch Daniels' record. We've had nothing resembling leadership at all. Just Mitch Daniels, Libertarian Logo.
He hasn't stood up for any principles. When he's had a foolproof majority in both houses dedicated to reducing spending, Daniels has reduced spending. It doesn't matter whether you consider this to be an accomplishment or not; the question remains how applicable it is to that Federal deficit Daniels helped create. It doesn't take any courage, any vision, or even any math skills to stand up in front of a CPAC dinner and promise to cut Social Security and Medicare; it also doesn't accomplish anything, or address the real consequences. If it takes some small amount of calculation to insist that Defense spending be left on the table, well, that's less about bravery than a measure of the incontinent arms dealing that dominates both parties. If you're clamoring for a balanced budget, and Defense-related spending is 60% of that budget, and we outspend the rest of the world combined, how do you not bring it up if you're serious? Especially when you know that, in the event, you won't be taking any heat for it, because real Defense cuts are about as likely as real campaign finance reform. How does this get mistaken for political realism?
Let me note, again, that I'm from Indiana, Mr. Shapiro. I'm inured to Republicans the way a herd of cows is inured to the noise of a nearby freeway. As far as I'm concerned, any legislative session which ends with us still not putting strumpets in stocks, nor Carmel getting the money to build prangers at the center of all those roundabouts, nor the state park system getting sold to Wal*Mart, is a good session. In fact, any session of the Indiana General Assembly that ends is a good session. For chrissakes, the best I can hope for around here is an Evan Bayh governorship. I started off with low expectations. I would have been happy to continue thinking of Mitch Daniels as a malignant hobbit who'd won the governorship with a cornball routine that would have made Homer & Jethro blush, but who coulda been worse; I wasn't going to forget his work for the Bush administration, but that's a given. But in the event it's been clear from Week 1 that the Daniels program has been to obfuscate his record, or replace it with transparently false claims, blame the Democrats for everything, and then use the bullshit to fertilize his own fields.
Had you or I, Mr. Shapiro, set out to create a Mitch Daniels Presidential persona from the fabric of his political accomplishments that CPAC speech is about the best we could have done. That might make it a good speech, but it doesn't make it a smart one. And if things are as bad as we all imagine, it's time that distinction trumped political posturing on the punditry scorecard.
READERS overly concerned with minutiae may recall that last week, or sometime, the Indianapolis Star debuted its MITCH WATCH ("A weekly look at Gov. Mitch Daniels' activities as he weighs a run for the GOP 2012 presidential nomination") column-within-a-political-round-up-column ("Behind Closed Doors") in an effort to better excuse running a half-page picture of the man every goddam Sunday. With our nation's precious preteritio resources declining nearly as fast as newspaper readership, we're not even going to bother mentioning that recent years have seen such sure-fire Hoosier presidential contenders as Dick Lugar, Evan Bayh, Birch Bayh, Dan Quayle, Mike Pence, and Whichever Crane Brother Didn't Get Caught Molesting Congressional Pages come and go without testing the limitations of traditional page layout.
This week's thrilling installment includes: 1) Mitch went to CPAC, but that doesn't mean he's a candidate; 2) those YouTube Draft Daniels students went to CPAC, and sold tee shirts (one of which replaced Obama's "Hope" logo with 'Solvency". Oh, sorry. Hope you were sitting down.) but that doesn't mean he's a candidate; 3) somebody dug up Mitch's old Princeton pot bust, which is old news to Hoosiers because he's been upfront about it [I love, first, how easily an utter necessity becomes a Virtue, and, second, how overlooking the felonious (he was dealing in his dorm room, not tokin' up in the library stacks) youthful indiscretions of a man who is now, by professional necessity and personal inclination a big fucking hypocrite about the thing qualifies as open-mindedness] so it won't affect his still not being a candidate; 4) Daniels is getting some press notice for being short (the item attributes to "Statehouse gossip" the question of whether his insisted-on 5-foot-7 might be something of a stretch. And yes, "stretch" was their term). Although, you know, James Madison, who did run, and also dealt weed. This prompted the following conversation Chez Riley, which must be prefaced with a note that our living room statement includes an old church lectern used as a dictionary stand:
ME: Honey, how tall are you?
PW: Five-nine.
ME: Could you come in here for a moment? I wanna figure out what size casters we need so you can reach the OED.
He's 4-11 people. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but imagining you're hiding it, coupled with that combover, is suggestive of something pathological; 5) He's having rotator-cuff surgery, which, according to his press secretary, doctors attribute to normal wear-and-tear, but he attributes to falling in December '09 while taking out the garbage. Jes' like folks. This doesn't mean he's a candidate.
And Jes' Like Mitch, who knows better than every scientist on the planet when it comes to global climate trends.
Which brings us to CPAC, I guess, and the continued Press confusion over a sorta-carefully crafted Daniels PR campaign and something that actually means something.
What was most striking about Daniels' speech, which inspired careful listening rather than pep-rally applause, was that it treated his CPAC audience as adults rather than as just another constituency group demanding pandering. Whether it was dismissing the easy-answer attacks on earmarks ("in the cause of national solvency, they are a trifle") or suggesting that most voters do not appreciate the sharp-edged rhetoric of the Republican right ("it would help if they liked us, just a bit"), Daniels' speech was an exercise in speaking truth to conservatives who have the power to derail a presidential candidacy.
Here's the difference between our political pundit class and med-school students: med-school students generally only imagine they've caught every disease they read about for their first year or so. Evidently with pundits it's a lifetime condition.
Mitch Daniels! Barack Obama! John McCain! We can go on and on and on. The post-Watergate political press always anoints somebody as the Straight-Shootin', Truth-Tellin', Serious Candidate who's gonna pull us out of Our Political Morass ("Since 1948"™) by ignoring the conventional wisdom of campaigns as promoted, interminably, by our post-Watergate political press. Always the same shit, and perpetually in ignorance of the Guy who it touted four years ago for pulling the same schtick. This is an arena, mind you, where Jack Kemp was touted as a serious thinker. Go ahead, motherfuckers. Start talkin' about policy. Dare ya.
Here's the deal, Mr. Shapiro: Mitch Daniels would get points for "talking to a CPAC audience as if they were adults" if that meant something, and if he had a choice in the matter. Daniels can't come across as Mr. Christian Values. Let's give the Republican party credit for the one thing it's good at: insularity. Mitt Romney didn't get away with turning himself into a culture warrior last time. Daniels is a Chamber of Commerce Republican. It's not a philosophical stance. It's not economic analysis. It's the result of having Regional Sales Manager in your DNA. Such people do not like the wingnut religious fringe because they don't like anything that interferes with markets, or threatens advertisers, or has principles which do not begin and/or end with the lining of one's pockets. They believe such people exist at their sufferance, and for one purpose: voting Republican.
I have no idea what Mitch Daniels actually thinks about reproductive rights. I have an absolute certainty about why he told Laura Ingraham he was Indiana's Most Anti-Abortion Governor, Ever, and it has nothing to do with principles, or with the issue, for that matter. Is there some reason to imagine that Mitch Daniels is the single politician on the American scene in the past forty years who isn't a calculating little fraud? Is there something in Daniels' record that suggests Calling Things As He Sees Them, or Taking Brave, Unpopular Stances without regard for the political consequences? Or analyzing situations with an open mind? No. It's precisely the opposite. He first proposed a one-year tax increase to solve Indiana's "deficit" "problem", then withdrew it quicker'n you'd pull your fingertips out of an open flame. Afterwards the sole consideration in Daniels-dominated legislatures has been slashing budgets (and assorted accounting tricks) in order to display a showy budget surplus which countered his work at OMB. We haven't had a discussion over educational priorities over the past six years in Indiana; we just had a chart that showed how much spending "had" to be cut. We haven't actually had a discussion of priorities at all; just six years of trying to correct Mitch Daniels' record. We've had nothing resembling leadership at all. Just Mitch Daniels, Libertarian Logo.
He hasn't stood up for any principles. When he's had a foolproof majority in both houses dedicated to reducing spending, Daniels has reduced spending. It doesn't matter whether you consider this to be an accomplishment or not; the question remains how applicable it is to that Federal deficit Daniels helped create. It doesn't take any courage, any vision, or even any math skills to stand up in front of a CPAC dinner and promise to cut Social Security and Medicare; it also doesn't accomplish anything, or address the real consequences. If it takes some small amount of calculation to insist that Defense spending be left on the table, well, that's less about bravery than a measure of the incontinent arms dealing that dominates both parties. If you're clamoring for a balanced budget, and Defense-related spending is 60% of that budget, and we outspend the rest of the world combined, how do you not bring it up if you're serious? Especially when you know that, in the event, you won't be taking any heat for it, because real Defense cuts are about as likely as real campaign finance reform. How does this get mistaken for political realism?
Let me note, again, that I'm from Indiana, Mr. Shapiro. I'm inured to Republicans the way a herd of cows is inured to the noise of a nearby freeway. As far as I'm concerned, any legislative session which ends with us still not putting strumpets in stocks, nor Carmel getting the money to build prangers at the center of all those roundabouts, nor the state park system getting sold to Wal*Mart, is a good session. In fact, any session of the Indiana General Assembly that ends is a good session. For chrissakes, the best I can hope for around here is an Evan Bayh governorship. I started off with low expectations. I would have been happy to continue thinking of Mitch Daniels as a malignant hobbit who'd won the governorship with a cornball routine that would have made Homer & Jethro blush, but who coulda been worse; I wasn't going to forget his work for the Bush administration, but that's a given. But in the event it's been clear from Week 1 that the Daniels program has been to obfuscate his record, or replace it with transparently false claims, blame the Democrats for everything, and then use the bullshit to fertilize his own fields.
Had you or I, Mr. Shapiro, set out to create a Mitch Daniels Presidential persona from the fabric of his political accomplishments that CPAC speech is about the best we could have done. That might make it a good speech, but it doesn't make it a smart one. And if things are as bad as we all imagine, it's time that distinction trumped political posturing on the punditry scorecard.
Friday, February 11
That Blogosphere Thing
THANKS to Brendan we're adding Leonard Pierce's place to the blogroll just as soon as we work up the energy to do so.
Told Ya
APOLOGIES for cranking out more column inches on Mitch Daniels this week than the man is tall, though in my defense it doesn't take much. Besides, you try living in Indiana, where the Daniels Suck-off Machine has been roaring away full blast since 2007, when The Franchise looked as vulnerable as Bush's, speaking of Suck. The tiniest (sorry) Daniels utterance is now a banner fucking headline in these parts, spit back out by his fluffers and examined for clues.
The "Will Mitch run for President?" shit started here about as soon as he'd won reelection, an interesting contrast to what the man himself was up to, which was hiding from the public for three months as the crappy economy he'd been taking credit for since the primaries backed up the toilet, ran across the floor, and ruined the carpet. God knows how much money the man had to slosh around during the campaign; if you watched local news, as I do for some reason, you saw at least one ad, every goddam break, from March thru November. It didn't seem to matter that he had no primary opponent, nor afterwards that the Democratic contender had apparently lapsed into a vegetative state before Midsummer. That's how much money he had. The spots--I hate to keep bringing this up, but then every last thing about the man is stage managed, and every last bit of business is instructive--consisted of hammer blows to the solar plexus, delivered in what had, twenty years earlier, been referred to as "the MTV style": flash cuts touting his Outstanding Economic Record at near subliminal speed. The exact ratio of Outright Lies to Misstatements of Fact is not precisely known, because the damned stuff flew so fast, but the ratio of Bullshit to Truth can be extrapolated as "Nine Months" to "Zero".
And the instructive part is this: Daniels' handlers knew that the Corndog Eaters at Home weren't going to freeze-frame his claims and step through them, but hear sonic booms and see flashing lights and believe whatever they were told; this much had been proven in the early days of the Iraq war Mitch financed for us. And they sure knew that "journalists" weren't going to question the ads' claims, not when they were the difference between profit and loss for the year.
It's actually been enjoyable to watch with jaundiced eye, as they try to fit the same Tinseltown PR BS Reagan wore to a guy with the physical stature of Alan Ladd and the personal charm of Lawrence Tierney. Sure, sure, we're taking about Republicans, and politicians, and public relations, so they're liars three times over, but tailoring's in the details. The opening Let Daniels Be Daniels Era lasted for the first twenty minutes, when he proposed a temporary tax increase to balance the budget (such, reader, was the fixation on that little bit of business--the key to his future office-seeking--that he was willing to raise taxes to try to balance his stint at OMB); he did manage to roam free for the rest of that spring, snarling and nipping at anyone who disagreed with him in public, especially over the big Toll Road scam, before they realized they had to get him under control as much as possible. Between summer 2005 and Election Day 2008 he mostly cut ribbons on any and every hardware store that opened, and thanked the brave entrepreneur for recognizing Indiana's "pro-business" environment, and employing 2500 Hoosiers.
And so it has gone, a never-ceasing tale of the contrast between facts, even reasonable disagreement over facts, and what gets reported instead. Through 2008, Indiana residents joined the habitués of financial news television as the only people in the nation being pummeled into believing how great everything was going; afterwards, and safely after Daniels' reelection, they were informed that, bad as things were, it was much, much worse in Michigan or Illinois. They were told this despite the fact that a large percentage of Hoosiers can actually identify "Michigan" as "the place where cars used to be made", and so might have understood the problem. They were told this even after it demonstrably was no longer true.
So yesterday, in the rapidly escalating pace of Mitch Daniels talks to media outlets about how he hasn't decided whether to run yet but people are urging him to, Mitch talked to Politico, just before the traditional Explaining What He Really Meant to someone else, this time Mary Beth Schneider at the Indianapolis Star. (This time the "confusion" concerned his gush about the "unbelievable letterhead" he'd have if he decided to run):
Now, I don't think we should ever make too much of someone's ability to speak extemporaneously. And in Daniels' case it's theoretically impossible to make too little of his ability. It is true that most of us, in that situation, might have conveyed the Number of Very Impressive People who would be backing us by referencing that, not office supplies. Still, not everyone's sharp on his feet. But the matter does tend to come up along the Presidential trail, and they'd best be figuring out now how to keep him away from anyone who contradicts him, and that includes potential debate opponents. And it's certainly fair to ask, not about flubs or flusters, but the mentality behind them: "unbelievable letterhead"? He's talking about Republican donors, not astrophysicists, Nobel chemists, or military veterans. Y'know, there's a difference between believing in unfettered Capitalism and having to do your own laundry every time you meet another CFO because you don't want the maid to see your underwear.
That Star article is here, at least for the next ten minutes, before they expect you to pay for it, just in case you'd like to see Daniels turn the coy routine from "I'm being urged to run" over to "Gee, I haven't even thought about whether I'd continue as Governor, since I'm not really planning to run yet."
Now, on the one hand, this is precisely the sort of infuriating codswallop Reagan got away with routinely, and that Daniels has coasted on while safely ensconced in Indiana, where nobody who counts asks embarrassing questions, and no one at all can remember 18 months ago, when he was still insisting he'd run his last campaign. On the other, though, this is a fine example of why Politics and Golf are so closely allied. It's the thin veneer of banality placed artfully (or artfully enough, for the audience) over a solid core of utter dishonesty. It's a wedge shot pitched just inches short of the cup, saving a quadruple bogie.
(This, of course, follows the Daniels Not Campaign giving "Indiana Lt. Governor" Becky Skillman an incurable but only-debilitating-enough-that-she-has-to-step-aside-for-a-Pence-for-Governor-campaign mystery illness. Which, we're guessing, the plucky night-school student will find the wherewithal to overcome for two years if called upon, before collapsing at the finish line.)
Of course the real story was the one that everybody missed:
Now, as much as I'm looking forward to Daniels trying that "You people are too stupid to understand the brilliance of my plan" routine on a national level, the way he did here with the Toll Road and Daylight Savings edicts, it's the future of Indiana First Lady Cheri "Another Margarita, Manolo, And Why Don't You Try To Find The Goddam Tequila Bottle Before You Make This One?" Daniels, who was also dead-set against his runs for governor, which really interests me. Cheri's been spotted four times since 2004, unless I missed a couple, mostly at the State Fair. She was "rumored" to be the driving force behind Daniels' embarrassing refusal to live in the Governor's Mansion, or "Dump", and to remain in his gated reservoirshore community in violation of state law, while building a grander McMansion more in keeping with his stature (sorry), but no closer to Marion county. The old money Meridian-Kessler neighborhood where the actual Mansion is located gets a lot darker at night than Geist does, if you catch my drift. Has anyone ever run a major Presidential campaign while keeping his spouse a secret?
Damn, I'd love to take this woman's side, too, and not just because I agree her husband shouldn't have run for Governor. If only I didn't remember the night in October, 2001, when Mitch Daniels' Indiana home became the site of the only anthrax bomb mailed to a Bush administration official, anywhere. an "hysterical" Cheri was the only one there that night; she lived in alabaster Hamilton county while Mitch was saving us from prosperity in darkest D.C., which must've been what confused SPECTRE. It turned out the envelope was stuffed with a comic amount of talcum powder. And the rest, as they say, isn't history, and may not even still be a police report someone could find. She would, at least, reverse the trend, and be the nations' first First Lady with a Stepford husband, even if he really is the bride of the Cato Institute. Let's just put it this way: Mitch may be concerned about Cheri on the campaign trail, but history tells us it's not her feelings about it that concern him.
The "Will Mitch run for President?" shit started here about as soon as he'd won reelection, an interesting contrast to what the man himself was up to, which was hiding from the public for three months as the crappy economy he'd been taking credit for since the primaries backed up the toilet, ran across the floor, and ruined the carpet. God knows how much money the man had to slosh around during the campaign; if you watched local news, as I do for some reason, you saw at least one ad, every goddam break, from March thru November. It didn't seem to matter that he had no primary opponent, nor afterwards that the Democratic contender had apparently lapsed into a vegetative state before Midsummer. That's how much money he had. The spots--I hate to keep bringing this up, but then every last thing about the man is stage managed, and every last bit of business is instructive--consisted of hammer blows to the solar plexus, delivered in what had, twenty years earlier, been referred to as "the MTV style": flash cuts touting his Outstanding Economic Record at near subliminal speed. The exact ratio of Outright Lies to Misstatements of Fact is not precisely known, because the damned stuff flew so fast, but the ratio of Bullshit to Truth can be extrapolated as "Nine Months" to "Zero".
And the instructive part is this: Daniels' handlers knew that the Corndog Eaters at Home weren't going to freeze-frame his claims and step through them, but hear sonic booms and see flashing lights and believe whatever they were told; this much had been proven in the early days of the Iraq war Mitch financed for us. And they sure knew that "journalists" weren't going to question the ads' claims, not when they were the difference between profit and loss for the year.
It's actually been enjoyable to watch with jaundiced eye, as they try to fit the same Tinseltown PR BS Reagan wore to a guy with the physical stature of Alan Ladd and the personal charm of Lawrence Tierney. Sure, sure, we're taking about Republicans, and politicians, and public relations, so they're liars three times over, but tailoring's in the details. The opening Let Daniels Be Daniels Era lasted for the first twenty minutes, when he proposed a temporary tax increase to balance the budget (such, reader, was the fixation on that little bit of business--the key to his future office-seeking--that he was willing to raise taxes to try to balance his stint at OMB); he did manage to roam free for the rest of that spring, snarling and nipping at anyone who disagreed with him in public, especially over the big Toll Road scam, before they realized they had to get him under control as much as possible. Between summer 2005 and Election Day 2008 he mostly cut ribbons on any and every hardware store that opened, and thanked the brave entrepreneur for recognizing Indiana's "pro-business" environment, and employing 2500 Hoosiers.
And so it has gone, a never-ceasing tale of the contrast between facts, even reasonable disagreement over facts, and what gets reported instead. Through 2008, Indiana residents joined the habitués of financial news television as the only people in the nation being pummeled into believing how great everything was going; afterwards, and safely after Daniels' reelection, they were informed that, bad as things were, it was much, much worse in Michigan or Illinois. They were told this despite the fact that a large percentage of Hoosiers can actually identify "Michigan" as "the place where cars used to be made", and so might have understood the problem. They were told this even after it demonstrably was no longer true.
So yesterday, in the rapidly escalating pace of Mitch Daniels talks to media outlets about how he hasn't decided whether to run yet but people are urging him to, Mitch talked to Politico, just before the traditional Explaining What He Really Meant to someone else, this time Mary Beth Schneider at the Indianapolis Star. (This time the "confusion" concerned his gush about the "unbelievable letterhead" he'd have if he decided to run):
Daniels later explained his remarks by saying, "I was just reporting to them that an awful lot of very impressive people are still urging (his candidacy). That's all."
Now, I don't think we should ever make too much of someone's ability to speak extemporaneously. And in Daniels' case it's theoretically impossible to make too little of his ability. It is true that most of us, in that situation, might have conveyed the Number of Very Impressive People who would be backing us by referencing that, not office supplies. Still, not everyone's sharp on his feet. But the matter does tend to come up along the Presidential trail, and they'd best be figuring out now how to keep him away from anyone who contradicts him, and that includes potential debate opponents. And it's certainly fair to ask, not about flubs or flusters, but the mentality behind them: "unbelievable letterhead"? He's talking about Republican donors, not astrophysicists, Nobel chemists, or military veterans. Y'know, there's a difference between believing in unfettered Capitalism and having to do your own laundry every time you meet another CFO because you don't want the maid to see your underwear.
That Star article is here, at least for the next ten minutes, before they expect you to pay for it, just in case you'd like to see Daniels turn the coy routine from "I'm being urged to run" over to "Gee, I haven't even thought about whether I'd continue as Governor, since I'm not really planning to run yet."
Now, on the one hand, this is precisely the sort of infuriating codswallop Reagan got away with routinely, and that Daniels has coasted on while safely ensconced in Indiana, where nobody who counts asks embarrassing questions, and no one at all can remember 18 months ago, when he was still insisting he'd run his last campaign. On the other, though, this is a fine example of why Politics and Golf are so closely allied. It's the thin veneer of banality placed artfully (or artfully enough, for the audience) over a solid core of utter dishonesty. It's a wedge shot pitched just inches short of the cup, saving a quadruple bogie.
(This, of course, follows the Daniels Not Campaign giving "Indiana Lt. Governor" Becky Skillman an incurable but only-debilitating-enough-that-she-has-to-step-aside-for-a-Pence-for-Governor-campaign mystery illness. Which, we're guessing, the plucky night-school student will find the wherewithal to overcome for two years if called upon, before collapsing at the finish line.)
Of course the real story was the one that everybody missed:
Daniels suggested three things could keep him from plunging in: his wife’s concerns, the calculation that his party or the country aren’t ready for his tough-love message or the emergence of another capable candidate. People close to the governor say his wife, Cheri, is very cool to a run. It “would be safe to say” she is uneasy with a campaign, he said.
Now, as much as I'm looking forward to Daniels trying that "You people are too stupid to understand the brilliance of my plan" routine on a national level, the way he did here with the Toll Road and Daylight Savings edicts, it's the future of Indiana First Lady Cheri "Another Margarita, Manolo, And Why Don't You Try To Find The Goddam Tequila Bottle Before You Make This One?" Daniels, who was also dead-set against his runs for governor, which really interests me. Cheri's been spotted four times since 2004, unless I missed a couple, mostly at the State Fair. She was "rumored" to be the driving force behind Daniels' embarrassing refusal to live in the Governor's Mansion, or "Dump", and to remain in his gated reservoirshore community in violation of state law, while building a grander McMansion more in keeping with his stature (sorry), but no closer to Marion county. The old money Meridian-Kessler neighborhood where the actual Mansion is located gets a lot darker at night than Geist does, if you catch my drift. Has anyone ever run a major Presidential campaign while keeping his spouse a secret?
Damn, I'd love to take this woman's side, too, and not just because I agree her husband shouldn't have run for Governor. If only I didn't remember the night in October, 2001, when Mitch Daniels' Indiana home became the site of the only anthrax bomb mailed to a Bush administration official, anywhere. an "hysterical" Cheri was the only one there that night; she lived in alabaster Hamilton county while Mitch was saving us from prosperity in darkest D.C., which must've been what confused SPECTRE. It turned out the envelope was stuffed with a comic amount of talcum powder. And the rest, as they say, isn't history, and may not even still be a police report someone could find. She would, at least, reverse the trend, and be the nations' first First Lady with a Stepford husband, even if he really is the bride of the Cato Institute. Let's just put it this way: Mitch may be concerned about Cheri on the campaign trail, but history tells us it's not her feelings about it that concern him.
Thursday, February 10
It's Never Too Early To Smack A Few Fungos
Arthur B. "Yes, I Still Show My Face" Laffer, "Reaganomics: What We Learned (Shit Still Floats)". February 10
HERE'S everything I know about Economics: 1) it's often called "The Dismal Science" after Thomas Carlyle, who was only half right; 2) it seeks to understand the use of resources and of production, though, alone among the "sciences" it does so by eschewing adequate description for naked acquisitiveness; 3) Bertrand Russell and George Barnard Shaw both dropped its study as undergraduates, one because it was too difficult, and the other because it was too easy, but I can never remember which was which; 4) The artificial excitement generated by the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics to Milton Friedman for his seminal unification of the theories of Charles Ponzi and Willie Sutton led to precisely the sort of thing anyone familiar with a college faculty would have predicted. In fact, it had the same effect on Economics that the whole, comparable, Superstar Chef thing has had: a slight reduction in the prison population coupled with someone's greasy fingerprints all over your business; and 5) and this is more an opinion that a fact, it turns out we should have done the theoretical work on the atom bomb at White Sands, and dropped the thing on the University of Chicago. Hindsight's 20/20.
Anyway, Arthur Laffer's still with us; I'm not sure whether this should be added to Economics' list of unpardonable sins, or chalked up to the same slackjawed American credulity which kept James Doohan in the public eye for thirty-five years.
But enough about Nixon.
No, really, I'm sure Laffer demonstrates this somewhere, though here isn't that place. Having lived a good chunk of my unlettered life during that period, including an abortive launch into the American economic system, I have to say that my own vertiginous reaction to those times seemed to have mirrored what was going on behind them, and that, for example, the Cold War, the hot War in Indochina and the two Oil Embargoes seemed to play a supporting role. Not to mention the gradual loss of US global economic hegemony as the Second World War receded in the rearview, but then, whadda I know? The early 60s saw the publication of Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed; the later 60s saw the growing concern over the crap culture of Saturday morning kiddie teevee, the safety record of nuclear power, and the toxic effects of cigarettes and Tab™ (separately, let alone together). These are the sorts of values that economists typically do not fit on cocktail napkins.
It's the dawn of the environmental and consumer movements. It is, conversely, the dawn of the anti-environmental and anti-consumer movements, funded by corporate shells with names like Americans for Responsible Cyclamate Consumption. It's the beginning of a decade-long effort by Detroit to avoid making safer, more fuel-efficient cars, and if the track record there doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the fight over evil government regulation I think there's a seat on the Americans for Responsible Voluntary Childseat Use board of directors with your name on it.
Compare, of course, the 180 years previous, with no ignorant tax increases, dollar devaluations, wage and price controls, minimum-wage hikes, misguided spending, or pandering to unions, when the stock market did nothing but go up. Are you even trying, Doc?
Q.E.D. For those of you not old enough to remember, we saved a little gas for you. Though for those of you both young and curious, all the superstar economists and all the world's cocktail napkins mostly conspired after this to keep US petroleum consumption at or above 50% of the world's total, by, for example, screaming bloody murder when Jimmy Carter mentioned conservation.
Okay, whichever one of those Brits dropped economics because it was too simple, I'm with him.
Yes, and what a glorious almost thirteen months it was, until he was forced to sign the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, the first of four tax increases marking the rest of his term, designed to counteract the bracing effects of Reaganomics!, such as the 25% stock market decline in the interim.
Ahem. Though we will admit, when you don't wanna do something, bullshit's as good a reason as any.
Q,E.D.! Jesus Christ, does this shit really fly in Economist circles? Or do they just have a good laugh about it while snorting blow from the bungholes of catamites?
By 1988 that top 1% of income earners had collected sixty fucking percent of the wealth created during the Reagan years; the top 20% got 99%. Were they paying that much more in taxes? Because that would make it a wash.
And it took only 1.4 million new Federal bureaucrats to handle the reduced work load! Y'know, somebody, sometime--I nominate Mitch Daniels--needs to explain to me why simple is always better than complex, except when they decide it isn't. You don't go to a mechanic who can only work on flathead Fords. You don't go to a doctor who stopped studying surgery when anesthesia was introduced. If this were just proposed as an ethical argument that would be one thing, and bad enough at that. But it's not; it's supposed to be a declaration of apodictic certainty even though the facts say otherwise. Incontinent deregulation has been a decidedly mixed bag, which even Republicans are willing to admit if we're talking about Jimmy Carter. Our fucking food supply is at risk thanks to "Reaganomics", which, incidentally, somehow managed to confuse "simplifying regulations" with "letting major industry donors write, and enforce, their own safety regulations". Today, thanks to incontinent deregulation, I can choose any of a dozen telecom providers to hand my personal information over to the Feds, warrant-free (Efficiency!), and use whatever crappy phone/plan combination I deem least offensive to call my Poor Wife and explain why I'm stuck at the airport waiting for some deregulated sub-carrier to show up and cram me onto a flight. In exchange, some bozo selling crooked and unregulated derivatives gets to steal my life savings without missing any work days due to incarceration.
Thank you, sir, for removing the negative impact of a price floor from my employment so I can watch my wages decline for a lifetime. May I have another?
Okay, where do we begin, exactly? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the combined Reagan/Bush I jobs creation number is 18.5 million, considerably less that Clinton's 23.1 million, which is, in itself, larger than those imaginary 82-90 numbers. Second, did Reaganomics end in 1990? I guess I missed the ceremony. Always interested when I hit an unexpected bump. Is it 1990 because that's when Bush I had to raise taxes (again, after St. Ronnie did it seven times) to deal with the overwhelming success of Trickledownism?
Finally, there's that "added since", which incorporates the eight horrible years of Reagan Lite. Without attribution.
And none of this is really, ultimately meaningful, except that we may note that the whole Reaganomics game comes a cropper when simply compared (honestly) to his successor, not to mention once we note the steady decline in real wages for 80% of the population since that glorious day when Ronald Reagan entered center stage, a good quarter century after he should have been reduced to playing the Nelson's befuddled neighbor with the pruning fetish.
HERE'S everything I know about Economics: 1) it's often called "The Dismal Science" after Thomas Carlyle, who was only half right; 2) it seeks to understand the use of resources and of production, though, alone among the "sciences" it does so by eschewing adequate description for naked acquisitiveness; 3) Bertrand Russell and George Barnard Shaw both dropped its study as undergraduates, one because it was too difficult, and the other because it was too easy, but I can never remember which was which; 4) The artificial excitement generated by the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics to Milton Friedman for his seminal unification of the theories of Charles Ponzi and Willie Sutton led to precisely the sort of thing anyone familiar with a college faculty would have predicted. In fact, it had the same effect on Economics that the whole, comparable, Superstar Chef thing has had: a slight reduction in the prison population coupled with someone's greasy fingerprints all over your business; and 5) and this is more an opinion that a fact, it turns out we should have done the theoretical work on the atom bomb at White Sands, and dropped the thing on the University of Chicago. Hindsight's 20/20.
Anyway, Arthur Laffer's still with us; I'm not sure whether this should be added to Economics' list of unpardonable sins, or chalked up to the same slackjawed American credulity which kept James Doohan in the public eye for thirty-five years.
For 16 years prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency, the U.S. economy was in a tailspin—a result of bipartisan ignorance that resulted in tax increases, dollar devaluations, wage and price controls, minimum-wage hikes, misguided spending, pandering to unions, protectionist measures and other policy mistakes.
But enough about Nixon.
No, really, I'm sure Laffer demonstrates this somewhere, though here isn't that place. Having lived a good chunk of my unlettered life during that period, including an abortive launch into the American economic system, I have to say that my own vertiginous reaction to those times seemed to have mirrored what was going on behind them, and that, for example, the Cold War, the hot War in Indochina and the two Oil Embargoes seemed to play a supporting role. Not to mention the gradual loss of US global economic hegemony as the Second World War receded in the rearview, but then, whadda I know? The early 60s saw the publication of Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed; the later 60s saw the growing concern over the crap culture of Saturday morning kiddie teevee, the safety record of nuclear power, and the toxic effects of cigarettes and Tab™ (separately, let alone together). These are the sorts of values that economists typically do not fit on cocktail napkins.
It's the dawn of the environmental and consumer movements. It is, conversely, the dawn of the anti-environmental and anti-consumer movements, funded by corporate shells with names like Americans for Responsible Cyclamate Consumption. It's the beginning of a decade-long effort by Detroit to avoid making safer, more fuel-efficient cars, and if the track record there doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the fight over evil government regulation I think there's a seat on the Americans for Responsible Voluntary Childseat Use board of directors with your name on it.
In the late 1970s and early '80s, 10-year bond yields and inflation both were in the low double digits. The "misery index"—the sum of consumer price inflation plus the unemployment rate—peaked at well over 20%. The real value of the S&P 500 stock price index had declined at an average annual rate of 6% from early 1966 to August 1982.
Compare, of course, the 180 years previous, with no ignorant tax increases, dollar devaluations, wage and price controls, minimum-wage hikes, misguided spending, or pandering to unions, when the stock market did nothing but go up. Are you even trying, Doc?
For anyone old enough today, memories of the Arab oil embargo and price shocks—followed by price controls and rationing and long lines at gas stations—are traumatic. The U.S. share of world output was on a steady course downward.
Q.E.D. For those of you not old enough to remember, we saved a little gas for you. Though for those of you both young and curious, all the superstar economists and all the world's cocktail napkins mostly conspired after this to keep US petroleum consumption at or above 50% of the world's total, by, for example, screaming bloody murder when Jimmy Carter mentioned conservation.
Then Reagan entered center stage.
Okay, whichever one of those Brits dropped economics because it was too simple, I'm with him.
His first tax bill was enacted in August 1981. It included a sweeping cut in marginal income tax rates, reducing the top rate to 50% from 70% and the lowest rate to 11% from 14%. The House vote was 238 to 195, with 48 Democrats on the winning side and only one Republican with the losers. The Senate vote was 89 to 11, with 37 Democrats voting aye and only one Republican voting nay. Reaganomics had officially begun.
Yes, and what a glorious almost thirteen months it was, until he was forced to sign the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, the first of four tax increases marking the rest of his term, designed to counteract the bracing effects of Reaganomics!, such as the 25% stock market decline in the interim.
Changing tax rates changed behavior, and changed behavior affected tax revenues. Reagan understood that lowering tax rates led to static revenue losses. But he also understood that lowering tax rates also increased taxable income, whether by increasing output or by causing less use of tax shelters and less tax cheating.
Moreover, Reagan knew from personal experience in making movies that once he was in the highest tax bracket, he'd stop making movies for the rest of the year.
Ahem. Though we will admit, when you don't wanna do something, bullshit's as good a reason as any.
And so it was with his tax cuts. The highest 1% of income earners paid more in taxes as a share of GDP in 1988 at lower tax rates than they had in 1980 at higher tax rates.
Q,E.D.! Jesus Christ, does this shit really fly in Economist circles? Or do they just have a good laugh about it while snorting blow from the bungholes of catamites?
By 1988 that top 1% of income earners had collected sixty fucking percent of the wealth created during the Reagan years; the top 20% got 99%. Were they paying that much more in taxes? Because that would make it a wash.
On the regulatory front, the number of pages in the Federal Register dropped to less than 48,000 in 1986 from over 80,000 in 1980.
And it took only 1.4 million new Federal bureaucrats to handle the reduced work load! Y'know, somebody, sometime--I nominate Mitch Daniels--needs to explain to me why simple is always better than complex, except when they decide it isn't. You don't go to a mechanic who can only work on flathead Fords. You don't go to a doctor who stopped studying surgery when anesthesia was introduced. If this were just proposed as an ethical argument that would be one thing, and bad enough at that. But it's not; it's supposed to be a declaration of apodictic certainty even though the facts say otherwise. Incontinent deregulation has been a decidedly mixed bag, which even Republicans are willing to admit if we're talking about Jimmy Carter. Our fucking food supply is at risk thanks to "Reaganomics", which, incidentally, somehow managed to confuse "simplifying regulations" with "letting major industry donors write, and enforce, their own safety regulations". Today, thanks to incontinent deregulation, I can choose any of a dozen telecom providers to hand my personal information over to the Feds, warrant-free (Efficiency!), and use whatever crappy phone/plan combination I deem least offensive to call my Poor Wife and explain why I'm stuck at the airport waiting for some deregulated sub-carrier to show up and cram me onto a flight. In exchange, some bozo selling crooked and unregulated derivatives gets to steal my life savings without missing any work days due to incarceration.
With no increase in the minimum wage over his full eight years in office, the negative impact of this price floor on employment was lessened.
Thank you, sir, for removing the negative impact of a price floor from my employment so I can watch my wages decline for a lifetime. May I have another?
The results of the Reagan era? From December 1982 to June 1990, Reaganomics created over 21 million jobs—more jobs than have been added since.
Okay, where do we begin, exactly? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the combined Reagan/Bush I jobs creation number is 18.5 million, considerably less that Clinton's 23.1 million, which is, in itself, larger than those imaginary 82-90 numbers. Second, did Reaganomics end in 1990? I guess I missed the ceremony. Always interested when I hit an unexpected bump. Is it 1990 because that's when Bush I had to raise taxes (again, after St. Ronnie did it seven times) to deal with the overwhelming success of Trickledownism?
Finally, there's that "added since", which incorporates the eight horrible years of Reagan Lite. Without attribution.
And none of this is really, ultimately meaningful, except that we may note that the whole Reaganomics game comes a cropper when simply compared (honestly) to his successor, not to mention once we note the steady decline in real wages for 80% of the population since that glorious day when Ronald Reagan entered center stage, a good quarter century after he should have been reduced to playing the Nelson's befuddled neighbor with the pruning fetish.
Wednesday, February 9
Back Home Again--Daniels 2012 Update Edition
-Montag, in comments at Roy's.
I BELIEVE I've mentioned before the three things which infest American culture to a greater degree now than they did in the days when I felt confident they'd disappear under their own dead weight: putting people in prison for smoking weed, the power of hard-sell advertising to push people's buttons, and Reaganism. The last doesn't mean I thought the Right was going to wise up, or something; just that I figured--let's make that "to a high degree of certainty"--that the Reagan presidency would be all the evidence moderately sane people needed to be done with it, that they'd look back at it sorta shamefacedly, as they would swallowing goldfish, or roller disco, or breaking Indian treaties, and move on quickly. Or at least a sizable percentage would. It's not like I felt it would be replaced by something more than marginally better. I spent most of '82 confidently predicting to anyone who'd listen that Reagan wouldn't even run for reelection; apparently that came within a couple more months of recession of proving true.
But of course in the event it proved about as wrong as could be, as the guy I'd figured got elected just so America could show itself how much it hated Jimmy Carter, and who had already proven--without equivocation, Reader!--that he possessed neither the intellect nor the interest to lead anything grander than a Jaycees parade, that his ideology was a sham, his economic "program" a crock, and his view of American history hopelessly entangled with the oeuvre of Cecil B. DeMille, where it wasn't shaped by D. W. Griffith, was reelected in a landslide over Walter "Where's the Beef" Mondale, the Hubert Humphrey of his generation. The subsequent eight-month improvement in the GDP, on its way to hurtling downward towards the Crash of '87 and the longest recession in post-war history, convinced Americans of the erroneous Republican portrayal of Reagan as a sort of Economics idiot savant, and, somewhat more accurately, convinced them that he worked just as well asleep as awake, so no one disturbed him for the Iran-Contra scandal or the S&L implosion.
I'm a lot sadder but no wiser these days; I haven't the foggiest idea of how the Daniels campaign pulled off the same bullshit twenty years later, and without even the tiniest uptick in any economy Mitch has had his mitts on to blow out of proportion. Just turning Daniels' record into something tentatively approaching competence requires, first, that you simply disregard his three years directing Bush's OMB and, second, that you agree to accept the accounting trick which "solved" Indiana's "deficit" while simultaneously pretending that a $2 billion debt to the Feds doesn't exist, and that a 17% increase in sales taxes is not a tax increase.
And all that gets you to the place where you can say, "Hooray, Mitch 'The Blade' Daniels! He sorta temporarily plugged a budget shortfall in Indiana so long as he had Republican legislatures which simply slashed spending by whatever percentage was needed, regardless of consequence! Just the solution we need in Washington!" This is an electoral strategy which apparently requires that anyone old enough to remember the Gramm-Rudman Act is now so old they're automatic Republicans.
Like I say, I'm no wiser, but I've got no idea how this plays out in Republican presidential politics, where Daniels is so impure of thought he had to swear to Laura Ingharam that he was the most anti-abortion governor in the state's history. I'm not sure how you position yourself as The Rational Alternative in an asylum for the criminally insane anyway, and then he's got to do so with a record that doesn't withstand scrutiny.
There's a lot of bushwa these days about Reagan's pragmatism (and little note of the Fibonacci increase in Republican lunacy). But Reagan ran as, and was, a full-fledged nutjob for his day; that his actual governance might've fallen short of banning fluoridation and legislating ketchup as a basic food group always seemed to me to have more to do with a residual level of sense the country still couldn't manage to shake. Now it has. Now Mitch has been forced to flay any remaining flesh from Indiana's public schools in the hopes of reviving some Republican PATCO nostalgia. Forced to actually speak to, I mean at, a group of teachers at the Statehouse last week he informed them that they made too much money! "Twenty-two percent more than the Hoosier taxpayers who pay your salary!" said the man who cashed in ten years as a Senatorial aide to the tune of 50 million dollars. Of course the average public school teacher in Indiana in 2009 actually made less than the Indiana median household income, but that sort of thing never bothered Reagan, did it?
Tuesday, February 8
Turns Out Steaming Bullshit Will Melt Ice, But You Need An Awful Lot Of It
FIRST off, we're indebted to alicublog commenter Freshly Squeezed Cynic for pointing out this bit of humor from the Michael Reagan Wiki page:
Okay, we're not sure who's lying--the smart money's on "Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan, whoever relayed the story, whoever posted it to Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and your ISP"--but there's this: the top marginal tax rate in 1952 was a nominal 92%; that was on income over $400,000. In 1953 Ronald Reagan was two years removed from making Bedtime for Bonzo; that is, he wasn't a movie star. He was what he always was: a contract player with a major Hollywood studio--Warner Brothers--which didn't make either of his two 1953 popcorn pitchers (Tropic Zone and Law and Order). He didn't make $200,000 per on those. He seems to've still been contracted to the Brothers Warner, but he'd "renegotiated" his contract around 1950 to allow him to take work outside the studio. It's difficult to find out what his contract might have paid him (I saw "$2500 a week" given as his peak somewhere, with no time frame specified; GE reportedly gave him $125,000 a year in 1954), tougher to decide what is believable, and impossible to figure why Warner would still be paying him in the Fifties when it didn't use him in any pictures. I doubt the Screen Actors Guild was making up the difference, though maybe HUAC had a generous per diem for friendly witnesses.
In short: it's unlikely Reagan was in the 90% bracket in 1953 (which had only been reestablished because in those days we made some attempt to pay for our wars as we waged them); it's simply not the case that he, nor anyone else, was "paying 90% of his income" to the government (perhaps 90% of their incomes over $400,000, in which case they needed to spend some of the net on better accountants); $1 a week seems pretty generous to me for an 8-year-old in '53 (a dozen years later I'd get 25¢ at ten); and if you show me the eight-year-old who's swayed by an appeal to marginal tax rates I'll show you a family of fucking liars. Reagan may have, and apparently did, gripe to High Heavens about the income tax. Maybe he really was more incensed about taxes than he was the fact that he was that his acting services were no longer required.
Many years later, Reagan would famously tell Don Regan, who in many ways was older than eight at the time, that he'd "lazed around" rather than make more movies because all the income would have gone to taxes. Have a look at what he "chose" to do in the period, and consider what he might've passed on. Consider that it was William French Smith and Ed Meese who engineered the California real estate deals which, in the early Sixties, made him wealthy enough to run for President for sixteen years. It forces you to admit it: a Festival of Confabulation is precisely the way we should celebrate The Gipper Centennial.
Meanwhile, it was a fun week in Indianapolis, which is all set to host Scab Bowl LXVI next February, or May, or maybe. To begin with, we sent all our elected officials, public school superintendents, and surplus news/sports/weather hairdos to Dallas, an act which managed to improve local conditions despite the fact that a foot of ice fell from the sky almost contemporaneously. At least it did until communications were reestablished.
The same storm that sent much of Indiana home for the week dumped on North Texas, which isn't prepared for it, and is too full of pussies to deal with anything that can't be shot or given a lethal injection. So beginning about Wednesday we were treated to gleeful accounts of how Big D wasn't ready for the Super Bowl, and how the bars were half-empty, and how This Couldn't Happen Here, which was sorta ignoring the point that we still couldn't get kids back to school four days later. By Thursday this could only have been described as "gloating". By the time the thing was over--after the Roof Avalanche Scandal, the Extra Seating Scandal, the Mouseketeer Forgets The Words To The National Anthem Scandal, and the The Blackeyed Peas Just Weren't All That Good* Scandal † --Mayor Gomer was reduced to publicly chalking the whole thing up to Bad Luck. Like he's got to explain Bad Luck to the city which has him as its Accidental Mayor.
And this was before it came out that some bozo Dallas councilman put on a sash and gave Mike Vick a Key to the City Saturday.
There has, in short, been enough whistling past the local graveyard to wake the dead. My favorite of the genre was the near-constant reminder that the Red State Small Government Powers-That-Be who've been swiping tax dollars since 1969 to pay for all this were wise enough to plan for covered walkways between all the venues they've bought with our money, so no out of town visitor will get his shoes slushed, so long as he stays at, and eats all his meals at, the new World's Largest Marriot, or one of the other fine hotels and gravy centers downtown, and doesn't venture outside to get a look at the local culture. Which I personally don't recommend anyway.
This was really capped off by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell assuring the locals that there really, really would be a Super Bowl LXVI, cross his heart, swear on a stack of Paul Tagliabue's last speech to Indianapolis, the one where he swore the NFL absolutely had to have a franchise in Los Angeles, unless we ponied up for a new football barn. One that would bring us a Super Bowl. Promise.
___________________
* Okay, let's just mention here that like the BCS College Football Championships and the Second Iraq War, the agitators for a More Hip Hopful Super Bowl halftime got exactly what they demanded, and where are we now? Nothing survives being thought of, and even if it did, nothing survives being thought of by a committee. As with those two earlier examples of the power of modern American thinking, people were jumping ship before the damn thing was ten minutes old, and rightly so; the question is how they ever convinced themselves any different, and why the rest of us don't know better than to listen to people who think this sort of thing amounts to a problem dying for a solution, which they or their committee just happens to have. It's the motherfucking half-time show of a motherfucking football game. It's time to go to the can, and hit the fridge. It does not need to appeal to a "younger" audience. It shouldn't appeal to anyone. Twelve minutes is exactly right. If America has to be entertained in the interim, let Snooki come out and fall down, or let Texas execute a prisoner.
† The aftermath of the Great Halftime Fiasco unleashed not only the sort of wholly unlettered, Snopes-worthy speculation which makes you despair of Democracy ("Who gets to chose the halftime entertainment--the NFL or the host city?" was a favorite query for the legal minds who inhabit the comments sections of local media sites), but encouraged some itinerant hairdo to elicit from Mayor Gomer the fact that he "hopes it isn't Lady Gaga".
"One childhood story he has told that introduced him to politics was how at the age of eight, he asked his father for a raise in his allowance. At the time, around 1953, his allowance was $1.00 a week. Ronald Reagan said that since he was paying 90 percent of his earnings to the federal government as income tax, he was not able to increase Michael's allowance. Mr. Reagan further said that when the President would give him a tax cut, then he could give his son an increase in his allowance. This, according to Michael, was how he was introduced to the subject of tax cuts and how that affected people."
Okay, we're not sure who's lying--the smart money's on "Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan, whoever relayed the story, whoever posted it to Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and your ISP"--but there's this: the top marginal tax rate in 1952 was a nominal 92%; that was on income over $400,000. In 1953 Ronald Reagan was two years removed from making Bedtime for Bonzo; that is, he wasn't a movie star. He was what he always was: a contract player with a major Hollywood studio--Warner Brothers--which didn't make either of his two 1953 popcorn pitchers (Tropic Zone and Law and Order). He didn't make $200,000 per on those. He seems to've still been contracted to the Brothers Warner, but he'd "renegotiated" his contract around 1950 to allow him to take work outside the studio. It's difficult to find out what his contract might have paid him (I saw "$2500 a week" given as his peak somewhere, with no time frame specified; GE reportedly gave him $125,000 a year in 1954), tougher to decide what is believable, and impossible to figure why Warner would still be paying him in the Fifties when it didn't use him in any pictures. I doubt the Screen Actors Guild was making up the difference, though maybe HUAC had a generous per diem for friendly witnesses.
In short: it's unlikely Reagan was in the 90% bracket in 1953 (which had only been reestablished because in those days we made some attempt to pay for our wars as we waged them); it's simply not the case that he, nor anyone else, was "paying 90% of his income" to the government (perhaps 90% of their incomes over $400,000, in which case they needed to spend some of the net on better accountants); $1 a week seems pretty generous to me for an 8-year-old in '53 (a dozen years later I'd get 25¢ at ten); and if you show me the eight-year-old who's swayed by an appeal to marginal tax rates I'll show you a family of fucking liars. Reagan may have, and apparently did, gripe to High Heavens about the income tax. Maybe he really was more incensed about taxes than he was the fact that he was that his acting services were no longer required.
Many years later, Reagan would famously tell Don Regan, who in many ways was older than eight at the time, that he'd "lazed around" rather than make more movies because all the income would have gone to taxes. Have a look at what he "chose" to do in the period, and consider what he might've passed on. Consider that it was William French Smith and Ed Meese who engineered the California real estate deals which, in the early Sixties, made him wealthy enough to run for President for sixteen years. It forces you to admit it: a Festival of Confabulation is precisely the way we should celebrate The Gipper Centennial.
Meanwhile, it was a fun week in Indianapolis, which is all set to host Scab Bowl LXVI next February, or May, or maybe. To begin with, we sent all our elected officials, public school superintendents, and surplus news/sports/weather hairdos to Dallas, an act which managed to improve local conditions despite the fact that a foot of ice fell from the sky almost contemporaneously. At least it did until communications were reestablished.
The same storm that sent much of Indiana home for the week dumped on North Texas, which isn't prepared for it, and is too full of pussies to deal with anything that can't be shot or given a lethal injection. So beginning about Wednesday we were treated to gleeful accounts of how Big D wasn't ready for the Super Bowl, and how the bars were half-empty, and how This Couldn't Happen Here, which was sorta ignoring the point that we still couldn't get kids back to school four days later. By Thursday this could only have been described as "gloating". By the time the thing was over--after the Roof Avalanche Scandal, the Extra Seating Scandal, the Mouseketeer Forgets The Words To The National Anthem Scandal, and the The Blackeyed Peas Just Weren't All That Good* Scandal † --Mayor Gomer was reduced to publicly chalking the whole thing up to Bad Luck. Like he's got to explain Bad Luck to the city which has him as its Accidental Mayor.
And this was before it came out that some bozo Dallas councilman put on a sash and gave Mike Vick a Key to the City Saturday.
There has, in short, been enough whistling past the local graveyard to wake the dead. My favorite of the genre was the near-constant reminder that the Red State Small Government Powers-That-Be who've been swiping tax dollars since 1969 to pay for all this were wise enough to plan for covered walkways between all the venues they've bought with our money, so no out of town visitor will get his shoes slushed, so long as he stays at, and eats all his meals at, the new World's Largest Marriot, or one of the other fine hotels and gravy centers downtown, and doesn't venture outside to get a look at the local culture. Which I personally don't recommend anyway.
This was really capped off by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell assuring the locals that there really, really would be a Super Bowl LXVI, cross his heart, swear on a stack of Paul Tagliabue's last speech to Indianapolis, the one where he swore the NFL absolutely had to have a franchise in Los Angeles, unless we ponied up for a new football barn. One that would bring us a Super Bowl. Promise.
___________________
* Okay, let's just mention here that like the BCS College Football Championships and the Second Iraq War, the agitators for a More Hip Hopful Super Bowl halftime got exactly what they demanded, and where are we now? Nothing survives being thought of, and even if it did, nothing survives being thought of by a committee. As with those two earlier examples of the power of modern American thinking, people were jumping ship before the damn thing was ten minutes old, and rightly so; the question is how they ever convinced themselves any different, and why the rest of us don't know better than to listen to people who think this sort of thing amounts to a problem dying for a solution, which they or their committee just happens to have. It's the motherfucking half-time show of a motherfucking football game. It's time to go to the can, and hit the fridge. It does not need to appeal to a "younger" audience. It shouldn't appeal to anyone. Twelve minutes is exactly right. If America has to be entertained in the interim, let Snooki come out and fall down, or let Texas execute a prisoner.
† The aftermath of the Great Halftime Fiasco unleashed not only the sort of wholly unlettered, Snopes-worthy speculation which makes you despair of Democracy ("Who gets to chose the halftime entertainment--the NFL or the host city?" was a favorite query for the legal minds who inhabit the comments sections of local media sites), but encouraged some itinerant hairdo to elicit from Mayor Gomer the fact that he "hopes it isn't Lady Gaga".
Monday, February 7
That's A Wrap. Right?
I PURPOSELY didn't tune in to the Super Bowl until the coin toss, to guarantee I'd miss the Reagan Fluffing; this morning I sought it out, just to make sure it had managed to be worse than I imagined, which is what I imagined. It was.
Make no mistake about it: much of my dislike of the man is visceral, and all of my visceral dislike is defensible. He was a liar, a nutjob, and a dolt. The patented Charm would have left me cold even if I ever saw evidence of it poking through the hate-filled right-wing politics, which I didn't: I saw Jayne Mansfield and Dagmar exhibit the same congenial ease among throngs of well-wishers, and neither of them should have been President, either. Reagan was a product of the studio system. If you didn't master that malarky you wound up like Frances Farmer, assuming you ever made it to the screen in the first place. You know what they said when he ran for Governor of California: Jimmy Stewart for Governor. Ronald Reagan for Best Friend. Wit? I'm still looking for the joke. "I paid for this microphone"? "We begin bombing in five minutes" ? The man spent too many years surrounded by too many fluffers. It's why Bob Hope made all those bad movies. Look, a wise man does not say "How many trees do you need to look at?" He does not say, in the late 20th century, that evolution is just a theory. A wise man does not claw his way to the middle of an overpaid, almost-wholly capricious trade built on flim-flam and flummery, then use his position to expound on the wisdom of that system and the opportunity it provides all men. Had Reagan used the Bully Pulpit to give every American a decent shot at success I might've at least believed he believed it; that he used it to enrich his handlers--at the expense of that Middle America he pretended to be a part of--says what about him, exactly?
And another thing: go, if you dare, and watch that God, We Need One More Hagiography and Mindless Military Celebration To Really Get This Super Bowl Off To A Great Start deal if you must. Listen to Reagan honor the Challenger astronauts. Don't ask what part he might've played in their demise. Listen to him eulogize the dead on Utah and Omaha beaches; don't ask about the time he sent the second greatest armada in the history of the world to save twelve med school students from 80 Cubans. Ask yourself why there's a goddam asterisk after everything these people claim he ever did. Ask yourself why someone needs a sappy, bombastic soundtrack and a Parson Weems narrative before they imagine they've convinced anyone. Ask yourself how the NFL could throw a flag on Green Bay for "excessive celebration" and keep a straight face.
Make no mistake about it: much of my dislike of the man is visceral, and all of my visceral dislike is defensible. He was a liar, a nutjob, and a dolt. The patented Charm would have left me cold even if I ever saw evidence of it poking through the hate-filled right-wing politics, which I didn't: I saw Jayne Mansfield and Dagmar exhibit the same congenial ease among throngs of well-wishers, and neither of them should have been President, either. Reagan was a product of the studio system. If you didn't master that malarky you wound up like Frances Farmer, assuming you ever made it to the screen in the first place. You know what they said when he ran for Governor of California: Jimmy Stewart for Governor. Ronald Reagan for Best Friend. Wit? I'm still looking for the joke. "I paid for this microphone"? "We begin bombing in five minutes" ? The man spent too many years surrounded by too many fluffers. It's why Bob Hope made all those bad movies. Look, a wise man does not say "How many trees do you need to look at?" He does not say, in the late 20th century, that evolution is just a theory. A wise man does not claw his way to the middle of an overpaid, almost-wholly capricious trade built on flim-flam and flummery, then use his position to expound on the wisdom of that system and the opportunity it provides all men. Had Reagan used the Bully Pulpit to give every American a decent shot at success I might've at least believed he believed it; that he used it to enrich his handlers--at the expense of that Middle America he pretended to be a part of--says what about him, exactly?
And another thing: go, if you dare, and watch that God, We Need One More Hagiography and Mindless Military Celebration To Really Get This Super Bowl Off To A Great Start deal if you must. Listen to Reagan honor the Challenger astronauts. Don't ask what part he might've played in their demise. Listen to him eulogize the dead on Utah and Omaha beaches; don't ask about the time he sent the second greatest armada in the history of the world to save twelve med school students from 80 Cubans. Ask yourself why there's a goddam asterisk after everything these people claim he ever did. Ask yourself why someone needs a sappy, bombastic soundtrack and a Parson Weems narrative before they imagine they've convinced anyone. Ask yourself how the NFL could throw a flag on Green Bay for "excessive celebration" and keep a straight face.
Friday, February 4
We Are All Centenarians
MARIA Schneider dies; William Grimes turns this into a Land O'Lakes commercial.
Really? The woman was assfucked, in a film, forty years ago, and that's all you can talk about? Twice? In an obituary? That wasn't just so you could say "anal intercourse" in the Times, was it? Or so you could pronounce audiences at the time "scandalized" by the behavior (whereas the modern audience would be fine with it, but troubled by the high fat content) instead of pointing out that the percentage of Philistines remains fairly constant, generation after generation?
Really? The woman was assfucked, in a film, forty years ago, and that's all you can talk about? Twice? In an obituary? That wasn't just so you could say "anal intercourse" in the Times, was it? Or so you could pronounce audiences at the time "scandalized" by the behavior (whereas the modern audience would be fine with it, but troubled by the high fat content) instead of pointing out that the percentage of Philistines remains fairly constant, generation after generation?
Sheesh. And the poor woman was typecast, you say? However could that have happened?
Thursday, February 3
Great. Something Else To Look Forward To.
Jennifer Medina, "Lavish Centennial Plans Testify to the Strength of Reagan’s Influence". February 2
IF posting is light, if anyone cares, it's not because of winter-related traffic snarls, the demands of ice clearing on a man my age, nor even the notable, uh, physical effect unexpected school vacations have on my Poor Wife. The simple answer is that for some reason, possibly weather induced, I tried to read Maureen Dowd's column on Egypt yesterday.
Oddly, the effect was not unlike an early spring: horrible misshapen fleshy things of an unnatural pallor sticking up where they don't belong, and the water company flushing the lines so that what comes out might be technically fit for human consumption, but not for any human technically fit to make his own decisions. I'm still trying to get the taste out of my mouth.
[Preteritio alert: This post is not going to say anything at all about "Iran-Contra", "South American Death Squads," or "Senseless, preventable deaths of 241 American military personnel as a direct result of this country's Middle East policy being turned over to the wishes of a mythical 2000-year-old carpenter, variously mis-translated and indifferently studied". Because you can make the fucking case against Ronald Reagan without those.]
So, first: the odds are long that Ms Medina writes her own headlines, which means, at long last, it's time for headline writers to get a byline so we know who to hurl rancid government cheese at for this one. Lavish Centennial Plans testify to nothing more than two generations of Reaganauts having no better argument than mindless hero worship, no progress to mark since his second inaugural, and not enough sense to distinguish between kitschy public display and actual achievement. Which, come to think of it, was how he got elected in the first place.
No, if you need a testament to his Lasting Influence, it's this. As in this, the fact that the New York Times is apparently afraid not to join in the general hagiographyin':
Still alive? Being brain-dead didn't stop him before.
Here's my favorite thing about incontinent Reagan Tributizin', which, younger readers may not realize, has been going on non-stop since Election Night 1980, when he single-handedly saved the Republic by defeating Jimmy Carter: the way it never fails achieve Unintended Self-Parody in the first ten seconds. (While we're at it, a Special Thanks to the NFL for taking time out of its busy schedule of holding cities and states hostage for the price of the stadiums it needs to salute the Father of Modern Private Enterprise in such a fitting manner.)
Bear that in mind, when you're planning your own lavish memorial: the Wealthy throw bigger bashes.
Ladies and gentlemen, Your Country in a Nutshell. Where it belongs.
What? Your modern Republican is precisely distinguishable from the average Former Jonas Brothers Fan in that his crushes last forever. My god, these are the people who thought "Miss Me Yet?" with a picture of The Worst President in the History of the Republic was a milestone in the annals of political humor. David Brooks will publicly blow the corpse of anyone who opposed the French Fucking Revolution, fer chrissakes. Repeatedly.
In other words, it took Grover Norquist only thirty years before he figured out he needed to add "besides the Bible" if he wanted to get any honest essay answers--in house, remember--from young seminarians about The Book Which Most Influenced My Life. Big deal. For twenty-five years no Republican would have dared say anything else.
Either John Heubusch doesn't know the meaning of "incredible", or there's at least one Republican who enjoys a good public leg pull.
And we're still in doubt on that language question, since Mr. Heubusch didn't specify what sort of transformation.
Because if there was one thing President Reagan was known for it was minimizing the pomp and circumstance surrounding the office.
Jesus Christ, does anybody buy this shit? I mean for free, let alone at $30.00 for an six-ounce commemorative bag?
That's Professor Gingrich to you. Case closed.
Fifteen paragraphs and we get to…Paul Begala? Who is more-or-less correct in his assessment of the Republican bench, though he might've added that they can't use Lincoln since he opposed the ideal minimum wage, but that's beside the point. The story of the Reagan presidency is precisely the phony PR rep that was built up around it and calcified faster'n the Presidential Brain. It's the reason Reagan's noted pop historian has this to say:
Higher than Many! a qualifier now used because Bill Clinton left office even more popular, and without the 24-hour lionization service. Reagan left office popular, not exactly like an old whore or an ugly building, but because there was a collective Oh Shit! moment in American politics when both the worst of his shenanigans and the real-world effect of his disconnected leadership came to light, and people decided they'd rather not be called to account for voting for him in overwhelming numbers despite ample evidence which argued against it, and decided to fall back on a sort of instant nostalgia for the trumped-up economic accomplishments of the middle of his reign. Of course that one's inoperative now, too, in light (never did a man's lasting influence depend so much on changing the rules every so often in order to keep him in the best light), again, of Bill Clinton's better numbers. Not to mention our clearer view of the effects of thirty-years worth of increasing income disparity and WWIII levels of Defense spending. So we fudge that now, and show another round of Berlin Wall clips. Horseshit. Ronald Reagan was the paid spokesmodel of a few wealthy Goldwaterites, and he managed to stick around long enough to get elected when the sea happened to change. He promised to eliminate the National Debt and nearly quadrupled it. He spoke about Middle American values, and handed the keys to the country to piratical mercantilists. He cured our post-Vietnam military defeatism by signing a blank check for every high-tech gadget the Pentagon pushed his way, reducing our nuts-and-bolts readiness in the process; Ronald Reagan is a major reason why we could have blown Sadam Hussein and the rest of the Middle East to Allah five-hundred times over, but couldn't successfully occupy a country with no air force and a tenth-rate military already defeated. Make no mistake about this. The Soviet Union was bankrupt before Ronald Reagan ever took office, and the United States government had known this for a decade. Th' fuck do you think we spent all our time studying in those days? Ronald Reagan chose to spend us near to bankruptcy alongside it. Take your pick of reasons; none of them involves "reality". His was the morality of the small-town cop: determine how much graft is acceptable, how much sticking your nose into other people's business you can get away with by calling it "surveillance", and when you're finally found out protest loudly that things would've been much worse if Stalin had been in charge. A tacky Rose Bowl parade float is a fitting tribute for the real Reagan. Assuming it had a vacuum attachment that sucked money from honest people along the route.
IF posting is light, if anyone cares, it's not because of winter-related traffic snarls, the demands of ice clearing on a man my age, nor even the notable, uh, physical effect unexpected school vacations have on my Poor Wife. The simple answer is that for some reason, possibly weather induced, I tried to read Maureen Dowd's column on Egypt yesterday.
Oddly, the effect was not unlike an early spring: horrible misshapen fleshy things of an unnatural pallor sticking up where they don't belong, and the water company flushing the lines so that what comes out might be technically fit for human consumption, but not for any human technically fit to make his own decisions. I'm still trying to get the taste out of my mouth.
[Preteritio alert: This post is not going to say anything at all about "Iran-Contra", "South American Death Squads," or "Senseless, preventable deaths of 241 American military personnel as a direct result of this country's Middle East policy being turned over to the wishes of a mythical 2000-year-old carpenter, variously mis-translated and indifferently studied". Because you can make the fucking case against Ronald Reagan without those.]
So, first: the odds are long that Ms Medina writes her own headlines, which means, at long last, it's time for headline writers to get a byline so we know who to hurl rancid government cheese at for this one. Lavish Centennial Plans testify to nothing more than two generations of Reaganauts having no better argument than mindless hero worship, no progress to mark since his second inaugural, and not enough sense to distinguish between kitschy public display and actual achievement. Which, come to think of it, was how he got elected in the first place.
No, if you need a testament to his Lasting Influence, it's this. As in this, the fact that the New York Times is apparently afraid not to join in the general hagiographyin':
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Ronald Reagan would have turned 100 this Sunday, and nearly seven years after his death, one might think he were still alive and leading the Republican Party.
Still alive? Being brain-dead didn't stop him before.
Along with the requisite speeches and academic panels, the festivities include: a Rose Parade float, a six-foot-high cake, commemorative stamps and jelly beans, a Beach Boys concert, a tribute from the Jonas Brothers and a video homage at the Super Bowl, which is also on Sunday. The memorials, including a 21-gun salute and a graveside wreath-laying by Nancy Reagan, are expected to draw hundreds of former aides and supporters.
Here's my favorite thing about incontinent Reagan Tributizin', which, younger readers may not realize, has been going on non-stop since Election Night 1980, when he single-handedly saved the Republic by defeating Jimmy Carter: the way it never fails achieve Unintended Self-Parody in the first ten seconds. (While we're at it, a Special Thanks to the NFL for taking time out of its busy schedule of holding cities and states hostage for the price of the stadiums it needs to salute the Father of Modern Private Enterprise in such a fitting manner.)
Reagan is not the first former president to enjoy the honor of a centennial celebration, but it is hard to remember any that were quite so lavish, speaking to his enduring role in American politics. (This weekend’s festivities at the Reagan Library here, the highlight of a year’s worth of events around the country, will cost roughly $5 million; by contrast, the cost of Lyndon Johnson’s centennial in 2008 was a mere $500,000.)
Bear that in mind, when you're planning your own lavish memorial: the Wealthy throw bigger bashes.
And a number of the prospective 2012 presidential candidates will be on hand to offer their praise during the revelry, among them Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, who has just written a book about Reagan and, in an interview, called him the “most successful president at actually achieving his specific and articulated goals.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Your Country in a Nutshell. Where it belongs.
The accolades illustrate the unusual durability — at least among Republicans —
What? Your modern Republican is precisely distinguishable from the average Former Jonas Brothers Fan in that his crushes last forever. My god, these are the people who thought "Miss Me Yet?" with a picture of The Worst President in the History of the Republic was a milestone in the annals of political humor. David Brooks will publicly blow the corpse of anyone who opposed the French Fucking Revolution, fer chrissakes. Repeatedly.
of the Reagan legacy, which has endured even as so many institutions have been under attack. Reagan’s near-idol status in the G.O.P. is so ingrained that when potential party chairmen were asked last month to name their political hero, the moderator hastened to add “aside from President Reagan.”
In other words, it took Grover Norquist only thirty years before he figured out he needed to add "besides the Bible" if he wanted to get any honest essay answers--in house, remember--from young seminarians about The Book Which Most Influenced My Life. Big deal. For twenty-five years no Republican would have dared say anything else.
If the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation has any say, that qualifier will be repeated for decades.
“Our job is to promote the legacy of his words and work, which were simply incredible,” said John Heubusch, the executive director of the foundation and a former Congressional aide, who said that Reagan inspired him to enter politics.
Either John Heubusch doesn't know the meaning of "incredible", or there's at least one Republican who enjoys a good public leg pull.
“I’d go toe-to-toe to debate with anyone who said he was not a transformational president. He certainly was.”
And we're still in doubt on that language question, since Mr. Heubusch didn't specify what sort of transformation.
Staff members at the foundation are careful to point out that the money for the events and for the museum’s $15 million renovation came entirely from private fund-raising. “President Reagan would not have wanted Congress to spend any money on this,” said Stewart McLaurin, the director of the centennial events, who also went to work for Reagan in 1984.
Because if there was one thing President Reagan was known for it was minimizing the pomp and circumstance surrounding the office.
What about the presidential Jelly Belly jelly beans? Reagan was a famous fan, so it is certainly possible that he would look kindly on spending $24.95 for the special edition Reagan Centennial box. Along with 50 flavors of jelly beans, the box comes with a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a brief history of Reagan’s life and several of his quotes.
The Reaganisms include the lofty: “I can assure you that personal faith and conviction are strengthened, not weakened, in adversity.” And then there’s his philosophy on jelly beans: “You can tell a lot about a fella’s character by whether he picks out all of one color or just grabs a handful.”
Jesus Christ, does anybody buy this shit? I mean for free, let alone at $30.00 for an six-ounce commemorative bag?
Perhaps it is hardly surprising for Reagan, who was known as the Great Communicator, to be quoted so extensively.
“He’s referred to all the time because he’s extraordinarily quotable and inspiring, as much as Lincoln and more than anyone else in the 20th century,” Mr. Gingrich said.
That's Professor Gingrich to you. Case closed.
The love for Reagan is not universal, of course, and liberals do not hold him in such high esteem.
“Reagan holds unique status today because the Republicans don’t have anyone else,” said Paul Begala, a former Clinton aide and a political strategist. “They can’t lionize Eisenhower because, by today’s standards, he was a liberal. They can’t lionize Nixon because he was a criminal. Who have they got left?”
Fifteen paragraphs and we get to…Paul Begala? Who is more-or-less correct in his assessment of the Republican bench, though he might've added that they can't use Lincoln since he opposed the ideal minimum wage, but that's beside the point. The story of the Reagan presidency is precisely the phony PR rep that was built up around it and calcified faster'n the Presidential Brain. It's the reason Reagan's noted pop historian has this to say:
Mr. Cannon said that the popular view of Reagan had only improved with time, although his approval ratings were higher than many other presidents when he left office.
“There’s always a certain nostalgia,” Mr. Cannon said. “But the reality is he really did help end the cold war. The world now ain’t a walk in Central Park, but it’s certainly a much safer place than when Reagan took office. And he convinced Americans to believe in themselves.”
Higher than Many! a qualifier now used because Bill Clinton left office even more popular, and without the 24-hour lionization service. Reagan left office popular, not exactly like an old whore or an ugly building, but because there was a collective Oh Shit! moment in American politics when both the worst of his shenanigans and the real-world effect of his disconnected leadership came to light, and people decided they'd rather not be called to account for voting for him in overwhelming numbers despite ample evidence which argued against it, and decided to fall back on a sort of instant nostalgia for the trumped-up economic accomplishments of the middle of his reign. Of course that one's inoperative now, too, in light (never did a man's lasting influence depend so much on changing the rules every so often in order to keep him in the best light), again, of Bill Clinton's better numbers. Not to mention our clearer view of the effects of thirty-years worth of increasing income disparity and WWIII levels of Defense spending. So we fudge that now, and show another round of Berlin Wall clips. Horseshit. Ronald Reagan was the paid spokesmodel of a few wealthy Goldwaterites, and he managed to stick around long enough to get elected when the sea happened to change. He promised to eliminate the National Debt and nearly quadrupled it. He spoke about Middle American values, and handed the keys to the country to piratical mercantilists. He cured our post-Vietnam military defeatism by signing a blank check for every high-tech gadget the Pentagon pushed his way, reducing our nuts-and-bolts readiness in the process; Ronald Reagan is a major reason why we could have blown Sadam Hussein and the rest of the Middle East to Allah five-hundred times over, but couldn't successfully occupy a country with no air force and a tenth-rate military already defeated. Make no mistake about this. The Soviet Union was bankrupt before Ronald Reagan ever took office, and the United States government had known this for a decade. Th' fuck do you think we spent all our time studying in those days? Ronald Reagan chose to spend us near to bankruptcy alongside it. Take your pick of reasons; none of them involves "reality". His was the morality of the small-town cop: determine how much graft is acceptable, how much sticking your nose into other people's business you can get away with by calling it "surveillance", and when you're finally found out protest loudly that things would've been much worse if Stalin had been in charge. A tacky Rose Bowl parade float is a fitting tribute for the real Reagan. Assuming it had a vacuum attachment that sucked money from honest people along the route.
Tuesday, February 1
The C Word
Geoffrey Wawro, "How the US Will Lose Egypt". January 31
THEY tell me that if I turn off Wi-Fi, graphics, and all other CPU-intensive applications I can get my our used blackbook to run on battery power for six hours, and we can huddle around the LED screen for our last moments of warmth.
Y'see, there's an ice storm on the way, following last night's ice storm, and if you've ever wondered just what it would take to get your fellow citizens to resort to cannibalism, buy yourself a teevee station and broadcast two days of warnings about "the biggest ice storm in twenty years".
I always get caught flat-footed by this stuff. I went on a typical shopping trip yesterday afternoon, carefree, and it took me to the meat case before it dawned on me why they were out of everything. Everything. I suppose it's debatable whether this represents the true, libertarian, kill-your-neighbor-for-the-last-box-of-Cap'n Crunch soul of modern America, or it's just a sample of why we've been manufacturing mass-market fear since 1945, but it's undeniable. Blind lust for anything on Your Grocer's Shelves and the existential dread of being locked up with oneself for up to 48 hours. Keep this in mind the next time someone within your hearing is blathering about The Founders: modern America would be reduced to a nation of panicked five-year-olds by the prospect of two days without indoor plumbing. Five to one says the Chinese are well on their way to perfecting the Toilet Clogging Ray, right alongside the Internet Porn Disruptor.
It's not a pretty picture. One of the local channels had a camera in the hardware store up the block, and a woman was proudly--proudly--buying every emergency candle they had in stock, apparently unconcerned at just how well-armed her fellow citizens are. The owner of the joint seemed mazed by it all, and, believe me, this is a man it takes a lot to maze when his cash registers are operating at capacity. People had bought him out of ice scrapers. Who waits until a major ice storm to buy an ice scraper? The same guy whose idea of emergency preparedness is to get to the store ten minutes ahead of the emergency, and five minutes ahead of his neighbor, and buy up everything in sight. No wonder this country freaks out when some guy sets his underwear on fire.
Which I guess brings us to Egypt:
Okay, Professor, you lost me at Hello, as the kids say nowadays; I've never been quite clear as to why, when the chips start flying, America's pundit class suddenly gets all warm n' fuzzy over Diplomatic Language, which it can't wait to ridicule at all other times. Egypt's had thirty years of repression on our ticket, and now we're worried about it? Wait, forgive me for taking things at face value. What you mean is that the most important task for any American administration in times of Middle East Crises, however defined, is to make enough anti-Arab references to keep Israel happy, right?
Both involve brown people, and Mooslems, and exhale carbon dioxide.
Here's the funny thing about that: the aggregate discovery of Some Guy Who Said Something Which Later Proved Prescient has yet to give us the slightest notion of how to identify him ahead of time, or what to do if we did. The fact that Churchill warned us about Hitler does not mean his idea of tramping across Scandinavia in 1939 to aid the Finns was a good one. The fact that he warned the world about Stalin does not seem to've kept him from making secret deals with, uh, Stalin. Somehow we keep finding in History precisely the lesson we were looking for in the first place. I've got no problem with people pointing out errors, or the reason for them--do it all the time myself--but treating the past as though it should have been as keen-sighted as the present is just horseshoe. (I typed "horseshit"; my spell checker didn't like it. But I find I like "horseshoe".)
Carter's CIA? C'mon. The CIA has clearly been a right-wing kookathon since its inception. The CIA recruited William Effing Buckley, fer chrissakes. What kind of an organization thought Bill Buckley would make an effective spy? Or an effective anything, other than headmaster of an exclusive boys' school? What sort of organization employed James Jesus Angleton for a lifetime? Presidents don't own the CIA. They may or may not share its major preoccupations and pathologies, is all.
So the Carter administration was startled by the Iranian revolution. So we're startled by Tunisia and Egypt today. So fucking what? What does that amount to compared to the Really Good Reasons we've had for supporting oppressive regimes in the region? The Shah was a bulwark against the Commies? You'll notice that they fell some time after he did. Saddam Hussein was a force for moderation in the region too. Defined, of course, as "not so ideologically anti-Israel as to be incorruptible". So Jimmy Carter wasn't quite sure what to do about the Shah. Too bad that wasn't true of Eisenhower. Too bad we haven't had more Presidents lacking apodictic certainty. Too bad Carter didn't wish away the Shah, Pinochet, and Marcos. Too bad the US can't do so, even if it ever finds the moral courage necessary. It's not the fucking way things work. Either we excuse the questionable ethics required to operate this sort of "real world" diplomacy, and we take the lumps when it goes wrong, or we speak out forcefully for international justice. Playing both sides is strictly for domestic consumption. For the “poorly educated and highly ignorant.”
Supposing it was simply a matter of Carter giving the nod to the Iranian army. What is that supposed to have accomplished? Thirty-five years of universal brotherhood? Bullshit. In the postwar period, when it had something approaching the half-global economic and military hegemony it has come to hallucinate as its birthright, the United States installed that sadistic inbred on the Appropriate Peacock Throne for the sake of Standard Oil, and out of nostalgia for what was left of the Great Game. That was a fucking mistake. The fact that it went on, somehow, for twenty-five years is not Jimmy Carter's fault.
Supposing that Jimmy Carter didn't know just what to do? What he didn't do is send the Marines, the way his five immediate predecessors did. Funny how History remains so silent about the efficacy of that little program, when she's got so many bad examples to choose from.
THEY tell me that if I turn off Wi-Fi, graphics, and all other CPU-intensive applications I can get my our used blackbook to run on battery power for six hours, and we can huddle around the LED screen for our last moments of warmth.
Y'see, there's an ice storm on the way, following last night's ice storm, and if you've ever wondered just what it would take to get your fellow citizens to resort to cannibalism, buy yourself a teevee station and broadcast two days of warnings about "the biggest ice storm in twenty years".
I always get caught flat-footed by this stuff. I went on a typical shopping trip yesterday afternoon, carefree, and it took me to the meat case before it dawned on me why they were out of everything. Everything. I suppose it's debatable whether this represents the true, libertarian, kill-your-neighbor-for-the-last-box-of-Cap'n Crunch soul of modern America, or it's just a sample of why we've been manufacturing mass-market fear since 1945, but it's undeniable. Blind lust for anything on Your Grocer's Shelves and the existential dread of being locked up with oneself for up to 48 hours. Keep this in mind the next time someone within your hearing is blathering about The Founders: modern America would be reduced to a nation of panicked five-year-olds by the prospect of two days without indoor plumbing. Five to one says the Chinese are well on their way to perfecting the Toilet Clogging Ray, right alongside the Internet Porn Disruptor.
It's not a pretty picture. One of the local channels had a camera in the hardware store up the block, and a woman was proudly--proudly--buying every emergency candle they had in stock, apparently unconcerned at just how well-armed her fellow citizens are. The owner of the joint seemed mazed by it all, and, believe me, this is a man it takes a lot to maze when his cash registers are operating at capacity. People had bought him out of ice scrapers. Who waits until a major ice storm to buy an ice scraper? The same guy whose idea of emergency preparedness is to get to the store ten minutes ahead of the emergency, and five minutes ahead of his neighbor, and buy up everything in sight. No wonder this country freaks out when some guy sets his underwear on fire.
Which I guess brings us to Egypt:
So far the Obama administration seems to be getting it right on Egypt. The president has called for an “orderly transition,” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned there must not be “a takeover that would lead to oppression,” a clear reference to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
More than just the right words will be needed. The Obama team should be looking closely at Washington’s awful mismanagement of the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 to make sure they do not repeat the errors of the Carter administration.
Okay, Professor, you lost me at Hello, as the kids say nowadays; I've never been quite clear as to why, when the chips start flying, America's pundit class suddenly gets all warm n' fuzzy over Diplomatic Language, which it can't wait to ridicule at all other times. Egypt's had thirty years of repression on our ticket, and now we're worried about it? Wait, forgive me for taking things at face value. What you mean is that the most important task for any American administration in times of Middle East Crises, however defined, is to make enough anti-Arab references to keep Israel happy, right?
The revolutions in Cairo and Tehran have much in common. Both simmered under the rule of corrupt strongmen who had held power for three decades. Both were triggered by new media—audiocassettes in Iran, Twitter and Facebook in Egypt—and both exploded in major regional states, with big populations, strong internal security services and powerful, U.S.-supplied militaries. Both dynasts, Hosni Mubarak and Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi, were regarded in Washington as “family friends,” to borrow Hillary Clinton’s phrase. Both had complex societies, with big swollen cities like Cairo and Tehran containing both the most and least educated people in the country: a relatively narrow educated elite and a broad mass of slum-dwellers. The strategic threat of that—then and now—was outlined by the U.S. ambassador in Tehran in 1970, when he predicted, with astonishing accuracy, just how Iranian demographics would shape the coming upheaval. Since most Iranians were “poorly educated and highly ignorant,” any truly democratic movement would “be in a reactionary obscurantist direction under the clergy.”
Both involve brown people, and Mooslems, and exhale carbon dioxide.
Here's the funny thing about that: the aggregate discovery of Some Guy Who Said Something Which Later Proved Prescient has yet to give us the slightest notion of how to identify him ahead of time, or what to do if we did. The fact that Churchill warned us about Hitler does not mean his idea of tramping across Scandinavia in 1939 to aid the Finns was a good one. The fact that he warned the world about Stalin does not seem to've kept him from making secret deals with, uh, Stalin. Somehow we keep finding in History precisely the lesson we were looking for in the first place. I've got no problem with people pointing out errors, or the reason for them--do it all the time myself--but treating the past as though it should have been as keen-sighted as the present is just horseshoe. (I typed "horseshit"; my spell checker didn't like it. But I find I like "horseshoe".)
The Carter administration was as startled by the revolution in Tehran as Obama was by the wave of revolutions from Tunis to Cairo. Just before the regime began to totter in 1978, Carter’s CIA had predicted that nothing much would change in Iran through 1985: “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation.” As Carter reacted to events in Iran, rifts in the U.S. government confused and demoralized him, and prevented Washington from acting swiftly and decisively to steer the Iranian revolution in a moderate direction.
Carter's CIA? C'mon. The CIA has clearly been a right-wing kookathon since its inception. The CIA recruited William Effing Buckley, fer chrissakes. What kind of an organization thought Bill Buckley would make an effective spy? Or an effective anything, other than headmaster of an exclusive boys' school? What sort of organization employed James Jesus Angleton for a lifetime? Presidents don't own the CIA. They may or may not share its major preoccupations and pathologies, is all.
So the Carter administration was startled by the Iranian revolution. So we're startled by Tunisia and Egypt today. So fucking what? What does that amount to compared to the Really Good Reasons we've had for supporting oppressive regimes in the region? The Shah was a bulwark against the Commies? You'll notice that they fell some time after he did. Saddam Hussein was a force for moderation in the region too. Defined, of course, as "not so ideologically anti-Israel as to be incorruptible". So Jimmy Carter wasn't quite sure what to do about the Shah. Too bad that wasn't true of Eisenhower. Too bad we haven't had more Presidents lacking apodictic certainty. Too bad Carter didn't wish away the Shah, Pinochet, and Marcos. Too bad the US can't do so, even if it ever finds the moral courage necessary. It's not the fucking way things work. Either we excuse the questionable ethics required to operate this sort of "real world" diplomacy, and we take the lumps when it goes wrong, or we speak out forcefully for international justice. Playing both sides is strictly for domestic consumption. For the “poorly educated and highly ignorant.”
Supposing it was simply a matter of Carter giving the nod to the Iranian army. What is that supposed to have accomplished? Thirty-five years of universal brotherhood? Bullshit. In the postwar period, when it had something approaching the half-global economic and military hegemony it has come to hallucinate as its birthright, the United States installed that sadistic inbred on the Appropriate Peacock Throne for the sake of Standard Oil, and out of nostalgia for what was left of the Great Game. That was a fucking mistake. The fact that it went on, somehow, for twenty-five years is not Jimmy Carter's fault.
Supposing that Jimmy Carter didn't know just what to do? What he didn't do is send the Marines, the way his five immediate predecessors did. Funny how History remains so silent about the efficacy of that little program, when she's got so many bad examples to choose from.
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