The Banality Of Banality

David Brooks, "The New Normal". February 28

We’re going to be doing a lot of deficit cutting over the next several years.

Who's this We, Kimo Sabe?

The country’s future greatness will be shaped by whether we cut wisely or stupidly.

And by whether we keep listening to the Official Spokesmen for Once and Future Greatness.

So we should probably come up with a few sensible principles to guide us as we cut.

Gee, Dave, you happen to know anyone who has some?

The first one, as I tried to argue last week, is: Make Everybody Hurt. The sacrifice should be spread widely and fairly.

Which is it going to be: Universal, or Fair? Can't be both. Fair is "The top 2%, who gobble up 3/4 of the pie, and who've had their taxes slashed relative to the general population for thirty years now, resulting in the current deficit, but not in that rising tide that was supposed to float everyone's boat, pay for what they've caused, with an assist from all the folks who insist we keep a five-ocean Navy, ground forces sufficient to invade every two-bit dictator we didn't install, and half of those we did, plus sufficient nuclear stockpiles and the underperforming supra-techno bombers to take 'em anywhere our sabers point". Widely, on the other hand, is what you want.

A second austerity principle is this: Trim from the old to invest in the young. We should adjust pension promises and reduce the amount of money spent on health care during the last months of life so we can preserve programs for those who are growing and learning the most.

Republican Death Panels.® The Ones That Make Good Economic Sense.™

(Funny, too, how dependent we become on public education when it's time to use it as an excuse to screw everybody else.)

So far, this principle is being trampled.

So far, you haven't expressed one. Just an excuse to do exponentially more of what you've wanted to do, and tried to do, in good economic times and bad, since that day you touched the hem of Milton Friedman's garment. While preserving income inequality, of course.

Seniors vote. Taxpayers revolt. Public employees occupy capitol buildings to protect their bargaining power for future benefits negotiations. As a result, seniors are being protected while children are getting pummeled.

Says, once again, the party which insists that Money is Speech. And that Money is the perfect arbiter.

If you look across the country, you see education financing getting sliced — often in the most thoughtless and destructive ways. The future has no union.

Teachers do. And it's doing them about as much good as it's doing the future.

In Washington, the Republicans who designed the cuts for this fiscal year seemed to have done no serious policy evaluation. They excused the elderly and directed cuts at anything else they could easily reach. Under their budget, financing for early-childhood programs would fall off a cliff. Tens of thousands of kids, maybe hundreds of thousands, would have their slots eliminated midyear.

Says, once again, the party which has been fighting such programs for forty-five years.

Out in the states, the situation is scarcely better. Many governors of both parties are diverting money from schools in thoughtless and self-destructive ways. Hawaii decided to cut the number of days in the school year. Of all the ways to cut education, why on earth would you reduce student time in the classroom?

Says, once again, the man who urged Mitch Daniels to run for President because he's been so "successful" at Procrustean Budget "Balancing".

As for Hawaii, since you bring it up, there's a couple of interesting points we might make. First, that it's always been an article of faith in the Republican war on public education that schools could do more with less. Is there some reason that shouldn't include "less hours" like it does "less money"? Second, doesn't Hawaii setting its own standards fit right in with the whole anti-regulation/nullification thing? You guys used to want to eliminate the Department of Education; now you want its standards, not local standards enforced? And Hawaii's students are improving, according to their version of High Stakes Testing. Isn't that the one and only criterion?

Texas is taking the meat cleaver approach.

So's Mitch Daniels. I guess a lot depends on whose meat is being cleaved.

Which leads to the third austerity principle: Never cut without an evaluation process. Before legislators and governors chop a section of the budget, they should make a list of all the relevant programs. They should grade each option and then start paying for them from the top down.

Oh, sorry, I guess I didn't realize this was a comedy editorial.

Here's an idea. In fact, you can call it a principle if you like: if you don't want simple-minded, politically expedient, penny-wise and pound-foolish legislation, maybe you should stop championing simple-minded, politically expedient, penny-wise and pound-foolish candidates every goddam election.

In education, many administrators are quick to cut athletics, band, cheerleading, art and music because they have the vague impression that those are luxuries. In fact, they are exactly the programs that keep kids in school and build character.

Look, my Poor Wife's an art teacher, so we're way ahead of you on the value of the non-core curriculum. But eat what your dawg treed, or quit huntin'. You're the ones who want to judge public education on student performance on academic tests (essentially math, science, and language, meaning, of course, English), and to tie teacher salaries, even teacher employment, to those scores. Then you want to complain that administrators slash their Republican-reduced budgets by cutting everything else, after we've spent forty years turning education administrators into the handmaidens of crackpottery (and reality teevee stars)? I guess that's the attraction of libertarianism: the farther you go, the easier it gets.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan gave a superb speech in November called the New Normal. He observed that this era of austerity should be an occasion to increase productivity and cut the things that are ineffective. Duncan is a fountain of ideas to make more with less.

Well, that ought to be reflected in his salary, then.

For example, he says, if we have to increase class sizes, we should put more kids in with the best teachers and then we should pay those teachers more to compensate for the extra load. Most of us parents would rather see our kids in a class of 30 with a great teacher than a class of 25 with an average one.

Sure, because 30 sets of parents will always absolutely agree on who qualifies as a Great Teacher.

Jesus, this is American educational policy over the past fifty years in the proverbially appropriate nutshell. There's the notion that Doing Whatever Fucking Jumps Into Our Heads Is Bound To Accomplish Something, Assuming We Can Make It Sound Like It Will, and Assuming We're Doing It To Public Schools. As well as Flying In The Face Of The Goddam Sense God Gives Most Three Year Olds. Here's an appropriately golden-hued fountain of innovation: let's have Arne Duncan try to teach five classes of thirty high schoolers each. For one week. After which he can resign to become the Secretary of the White Guy Basketball League.

Thin the talent pool! Great idea. I guess you're going to compensate those Great Teachers enough that they won't mind missing all those performance bonuses, huh? The same sort of selflessness that drives American industry.

And look, I was educated in the last century, but I still vaguely remember some of it. I had a different teacher every year, then a different teacher every period, then a different teacher every period and every semester. Some I liked, some I didn't like, a couple completely lost control of things. None of 'em particularly inspired me to do anything. A couple of 'em I remember as really nice people, and a couple as real assholes. It was the subjects which either inspired interest or indifference, though not much of the latter: I didn't like wrestling, or gymnastics, and Health wasted my time; I was put in a Physics class I hadn't had the requisite math for, and just sorta goofed around. I can't imagine anything short of a promise of unlimited indecent liberties with Marsha McDonald which would've changed that. Certainly not some rah-rah teacher with an insurance salesman's spiel and a car dealer's televised disposition. If I'd'a had to listen to some wannabe Life Coach spend the whole of my third grade encouraging the plank-dense Johnny Masters to achieve his times tables I'd have made it a point of order to learn less.

Was it different with you? Is this some libertarian version of Everybody's Special, except it's Everybody's Special if he or she gets to rub up against Howard Rourk? Shit. My parents expected me to get good grades. I liked academics. Had the programs been more advanced I would've learned more. Had the teachers been more interesting I would have learned the same shit from more interesting teachers. Had the administrators been semi-competent I wouldn't have been in that Physics class before I had Calculus.

And there aren't enough Great anything to go around, anyway. If your child's education depends on having a first-rate teacher, go get Aristotle. Otherwise, encourage little Mason or Masonette to learn, and to learn more outside the classroom.

Look, can we at least be realistic somewhere in American political life? Just for fun? Okay, then, the real question about education "reform" is not what we should or should not do with our resources. It's "how long after a complete Republican takeover of the public schools will David Brooks be writing his 'high stakes testing doesn't give an accurate picture of educational performance' and 'it's not the schools, or the teachers, it's the parents' column? Over/under is four months.

Koch Bites

Charles G. Koch, "Why Koch Industries Is Speaking Out". March 1

BECAUSE there might be a nickel in it. The end.

Let's return to a couple of our favorite themes as though we have more than one. First, When does this shit finally get recognized as both the driving force and the proximate cause of the collapse of the system, and not its perpetual "untried" solution? and, second, When are we going to exclude from the debate over Education people who can't put together a competent argument, let alone an honest one?

Last evening I turned on the local news at the top of the hour, just in time for the carny spiel, and 13's blond hairdo said this: "A major sneat will undergo renovation." She meant "street". Now, we all make mistakes, certainly. But there was nothing, nothing whatsoever to give the impression she'd meant to say anything but "major sneat". Not in her eyes, her body language, the pasted-on width of her smile, nothing. Now perhaps you imagine this as the announcer's art, the product of long training and years of experience, to recognize what is important in the context--not what the words mean, but how you look reading them, or something like them--but to me it emphasizes the fact that 1) the only important thing in the whole charade is getting to the advertisements on time, and 2) I seriously suspect that a good portion of the people paid to do so do not actually care what the words they use mean, if anything. The best example of that lately--and the one thing I literally applauded during coverage of the Democratic walk-out--was when the NEA president, asked by the Doyenne of Indianapolis Teleprompter Misreaders, Debby Knox, why teachers were opposed to the Education Reform package, told her that to begin with the thing had nothing to do with Reform. This struck Debby about the way Jaques' soliloquy would go over in a chicken coop. One hoped for the required wit for Debby to reply, "But that's what our graphic says."

There was no recognition, none, that the man had made a point, an especially wounding one at that, and that she'd been guilty of confusing an argument with a description. Not her job, what words mean. Besides, the mob has spoken.

We begin with the subhead:

Crony capitalism and bloated government prevent entrepreneurs from producing the products and services that make people's lives better.

"Crony capitalism" is a nice touch, isn't it? Don Charles is concerned about abuses on both sides. What's ahead is no rote defense of Big Business, no sir. It's a rote defense of the right of Even Bigger Business to gobble Big Business up and cough up an owl pellet.

Years of tremendous overspending by federal, state and local governments have brought us face-to-face with an economic crisis. Federal spending will total at least $3.8 trillion this year—double what it was 10 years ago. And unlike in 2001, when there was a small federal surplus, this year's projected budget deficit is more than $1.6 trillion.

Send entries to "My Favorite Koch Brother Public Denunciation of Reagan-era Defense Spending" to Doghouse Riley, ℅ this blog.

And look, for the record, I have no doubt that the Wichita Sun Kings' concern over budget deficits is genuine. Why wouldn't it be? Reader, if you had enough money for 10,000 lifetimes you might be tempted ask why the gubment should pass out bootstraps. If your inherited stake in the pillage and rapine of natural resources had set you up before you pooped your first diaper, unfettered capitalism might look like God's Own Plan of Salvation to you, too. It might even explain--but it doesn't excuse--conflating budget deficits with "government spending" and not "incontinent, largely Republican-libertarian tax eliminating", nor economic crisis with government actions, but not the libertarian government inaction which turned a terrible Bush administration economic record into a really terrible Bush administration economic record.

And you might also confuse "spewing uncounted millions to bumlicking message toadies" with "speaking out".

Several trillions more in debt have been accumulated by state and local governments. States are looking at a combined total of more than $130 billion in budget shortfalls this year. Next year, they will be in even worse shape as most so-called stimulus payments end.

So-called stimulus. Don't you just love it when the end of the American political spectrum which brought you Defense Department, revenue enhancement, and Death Tax decides to quibble over the precise use of words? (And I guess the fact that it must've been stimulating something if the states'll be worse off without it must've escaped Baron Koch's notice.)

For many years, I, my family and our company have contributed to a variety of intellectual and political causes working to solve these problems. Because of our activism, we've been vilified by various groups. Despite this criticism, we're determined to keep contributing and standing up for those politicians, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who are taking these challenges seriously.

Vilified? Merciful heavens. Did you try buying them off?

Both Democrats and Republicans have done a poor job of managing our finances. They've raised debt ceilings, floated bond issues, and delayed tough decisions.

Which is why you're a Republican.

In spite of looming bankruptcy, President Obama and many in Congress have tiptoed around the issue of overspending by suggesting relatively minor cuts in mostly discretionary items. There have been few serious proposals for necessary cuts in military and entitlement programs, even though these account for about three-fourths of all federal spending.

See note at "crony capitalism", above. Let's say something about easy Libertarianism, shall we? The Pharaoh of the Plains here knows full well that government spending which benefits him is unlikely to feel the axe while all around him are felled. We're going to have to go a long fucking way down that road before there's any meaningful defense cuts, and "meaningful" is still a long, long way from "justified", a level at which the Sultan of Teabagging would find himself with few friends on the Right, assuming he was still an assiduous budget cutter. At any rate, it's awful easy to say "defense cuts" when you don't spell any out, ain't it? Meanwhile, the gubment ain't gonna stop trying to land planes safely, or scrap the interstate system Koch Spoils, Inc., depends on; it's not going to stop enforcing contract law, prosecuting theft or fraud, guaranteeing bank deposits, or operating satellite communications, and it'll keep leasing gas and oil and mineral rights for pennies, so you get to sound both draconian and fair at no personal risk. In other words, you're a libertarian.

Federal data indicate how urgently we need reform: The unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid already exceed $106 trillion. That's well over $300,000 for every man, woman and child in America (and exceeds the combined value of every U.S. bank account, stock certificate, building and piece of personal or public property).

First, there are no unfunded liabilities of Social Security; Social Security is just thrown in there because you'd like to flush it down the crapper with the rest of the social safety net. Second, "We can't afford it," is actually only one possible solution, and not much of one at that. (And funny, by the way, how it takes just one paragraph to go from "military 'and' entitlement programs" to, uh, half that.)

The Congressional Budget Office has warned that the interest on our federal debt is "poised to skyrocket." Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is sounding alarms. Yet the White House insists that substantial spending cuts would hurt the economy and increase unemployment.

With all due respect, Your Worshipfulness, there are actual arguments on the other side. See, government doesn't operate like an inherited prairie principality; the peons get to talk back.

Plenty of compelling examples indicate just the opposite. When Canada recently reduced its federal spending to 11.3% of GDP from 17.5% eight years earlier, the economy rebounded and unemployment dropped. By comparison, our federal spending is 25% of GDP.

I never realized it was so simple. Remember, that "Best Koch Brothers Op-Ed Excoriating the Reagan and Bush Deficits" deadline is midnight Friday.

Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many businesses have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations or tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay.

While the number of businesses successfully lobbying for special favors and treatment in the deregulation of their business, or the abrogation of government responsibility to protect the welfare of its citizens, is just about right.

Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.

Listen, Sir Charles, we're all grateful for you bankrolling the lawsuit over Cheney's Energy Task Force. Keep fightin' the good fight.

The purpose of business is to efficiently convert resources into products and services that make people's lives better. Businesses that fail to do so should be allowed to go bankrupt rather than be bailed out.

Okay, here's everything I know about economics. So you'll have to excuse my saying that at least one recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics has disagreed with you. An awful lot of people seem to think we couldn't let the global financial market collapse , and a lot of 'em think GM and Chrysler were too big to fail, even a lot of people who despise that circumstance. So it does seem to me that if you don't like Too Big To Fail it's the Too Big part which needs reforming, and I don't see anything about that in the Teabagging literature (maybe I did the search wrong). Given that the idea exists, given that, when the chips were down, it was a Free-Market-spoutin' Republican President who rode to the rescue, given that the people who control such enterprises are free to spread the same sort of largesse you're busy defending so they can get their way, perhaps it's time to recognize, at least, that political reality is sometimes going to trump your personal metaphysical certainty, much as actual reality so frequently does.

But what about jobs that are lost when businesses go under? It's important to remember that not all jobs are the same. In business, real jobs profitably produce goods and services that people value more highly than their alternatives. Subsidizing inefficient jobs is costly, wastes resources, and weakens our economy.

Beggin' your Lordship's pardon, but are there plenty of compelling examples, like Canada, to indicate that regularly tossing thousands, even hundreds of thousands, out of work, with no safety net, is the key to a successful economy? And if there are, do they show their work?

Because every other company in a given industry is accepting market-distorting programs, Koch companies have had little option but to do so as well, simply to remain competitive and help sustain our 50,000 U.S.-based jobs. However, even when such policies benefit us, we only support the policies that enhance true economic freedom.

As usual, the reformer is exempted from the reforms. In Canada this is known as "hypocrisy".

Let's just say this, Chuck: no one here would ever expect you to behave any differently.

Could We At Least Get Better Liars?

MY Poor Wife (resting comfortably for now, thanks) had the NBC Nightly News As Performed By Brian Williams on last night, a signal for me to withdraw to my office, but my mood was such that I didn't reach for the earplugs, and enjoyed instead listening to the Pants Crapping Opening Monologue about Libya. US and NATO weigh military options! Where's Irving Berlin when you really need him?

At some point someone actually found a guy who knew what he was talking about, and who said, basically, "Th' fuck's a No-Fly zone supposed to do?" while adding a little grace note about what it would cost in these budget-conscious times. I believe they refer to this in the mass-market news biz as "comic relief".

The highlight for me, though--okay, there's the fact that things are so bad in the country that in an international "crisis" we turn to Andrea Mitchell for an explanation, but I'm not quite cynical enough to call that a "highlight"--was Susan Rice calling Gaddafi "delusional". Having the United States Ambassador to the UN call your public political pronouncements "delusional" is like having the French Minister of Manners call you "rude".

For the love of Voltaire, how often do people need to be reminded that all our enemies are idiots? Can one in three Americans even point to Libya on a map? (Can 2 in 3 point out Africa?) It's like the Red Menace was that bad boy boyfriend we broke up with after high school, but still fantasize about during those monthly three-minute sessions with the actuary with the combover we wound up with.

And I don't know about you, but I don't speak Arabic, or Farsi. I do know just enough about languages to have some sense of the pitfalls in translating even modern French, Middle German, or Old Frisian into English. Yet every word attributed to Gaddafi or Ahmadinejad is a spotless window into his craziness. Weren't Brian Williams and Jon Stewart just yukkin' it up last week about this? "He said 'goat burger', heh heh heh." I mean, there are at least six levels on which that could be wrong before people who lie about such things for a living got a hold of it, and you just swallow it whole? Was Mubarak really all that grounded an individual? Why is it that "sanity" equates with "taking what money we're willing to give you and shutting th' fuck up?" Are these people schoolteachers? Gaddafi's a goddam junta-leading Colonel. Sanity? His sanity has been moot since back when we spelled it "Kadaffi"; hell, it was seriously in question back when we decided he could be trusted to run the place. That was Nixon and Kissinger. Who's fucking crazy, again? I could care less what you say about Ahmadinejad, provided you don't use it as an excuse to nuke Iran. Okay? Like pretty much everything else in Life, crazy is a continuum.

Speaking of combovers, I think I failed to consider whether despising Mitch Daniels was a good enough reason to actually follow what Mitch Daniels is doing on an almost daily basis. Not that I really have much choice, since the local news follows him around now like he's Erik Estrada. Two weekend teleprompter readers mentioned that he'd "escaped the political turmoil in Indiana" to go make speeches in DC; both said "escaped" (on different channels) as though the poor man was forced to flee the pounding jungle rhythms favored by his teenagers for the sanctity of his garage workshop. Obviously, neither could even be bothered to rewrite a quip from Daniels' own people, nor wonder if it was fair, let alone ask why he's off making campaign speeches when he's not a candidate when he's got plenty of the people's business at home he could be tending. (This was just a couple days after Short n' Smirky joked about sending the Democrats the bill for the Special Sessions he's planning to call until he gets his way.)

Yesterday's Star gave us a thoughtful recap, and Mitch the opportunity to say this:

"The less I do, the louder it [the national 'buzz' about his 'candidacy'] gets,"

"I dunno how the fire got out of control, Your Honor. All I was doing was stoking it."

Lessee. Apparently the CPAC Ronald Reagan Dinner speaking slot--much more prestigious than the Reagan Breakfast, Reagan Brunch, or Reagan Lite Snack n' Nap slots--reached out an' snagged him; then this weekend he was required to go on the News Hour, NPR, and FOX. I guess "doing less" must mean he didn't have the final edit on Sunday's Bi-weekly Wall Street Journal fluffing.

"It's not my matinee idol looks or charisma," he added, referring to the obligatory references in profiles such as The Wall Street Journal's to his 5-foot-7 stature and lack of pizzazz.

Did you GET THAT? HE LACKS CHARISMA! I guess if he ever decides to run he'll have to address that, somehow. Maybe try to make a running gag of it, or somethin'.

The best part, though--Mitch had a better weekend than I did, but then I have to try to get rid of bilge--was when last week's twelve hour statesman pose, back when he said this about skedaddling Democrats:

“The activities of today are perfectly legitimate part of the process,” he said. “Even the smallest minority, and that’s what we’ve heard from in the last couple days, has every right to express the strength of its views and I salute those who did.”

reared up an' bit him like the one-year tax increase he advocated for fifteen minutes.

Daniels was pressed [on FOX] about whether he initially expressed support for Democratic legislators' right to walk out, something he got hammered for by conservative bloggers and that could be a problem for him in a GOP primary should he decide to run for president. Daniels said he had been referring to the right of union members to express their objection to legislation, not lawmakers' right to walk out to prevent the quorum needed to debate bills.

Yes, the Governor of Indiana called the first of three press conferences last week, which literally doubled the number he's called in his second term, just to announce that he supported the right to peaceable assembly. Apparently there was some question as to whether Indiana was planning to nullify the First Amendment once it got rolling. Not that that would hurt him on the campaign trail.

Now will you fuckers just leave the poor man alone?

Funny How Quickly Public Schools Go From "Urban Warfare Hellhole" To "Sounds Like A Really Sweet Place To Work Part-Time". Ain't It?

THINGS I cannot recommend trying, at least not all in one weekend:

1) Your Poor Wife getting a strangulated hernia down in Ladytown *, necessitating a journey through the Suburban Saturday Driver's Education Zone known as "the northside of Indianapolis", particularly 86th Street, "The Avenue of the Morons", during which she felt every bump along the potholed route with a sort of mescaline intensity that made me wince. I will spare the Reader a complete recap of the ensuing ten gruesome hours ** (and that's just from my perspective), except to note that every visit there reveals a healthcare system strangulated under its own weight and sense of market share; that nowhere is this more on display than in Emergency, which is taking on the unmistakable aura of Large Corporation forced to do something less than optimally profitable as a sop towards an earlier, less mercenary, and more Christian time (and this is a Catholic hospital) until it can get the law changed; that the nurses outpost just outside our door was apparently the spot where lunch breaks and snack choices were negotiated without ceasing; that this might have been the reason why, on the four occasions they had to unhook my Poor Wife from the IV so she could use the facilities, no one ever managed to come back in and hook her back up until I'd gone out there to remind them.

The biggest treat of the day, though, was the woman behind the bulletproof sneeze guard at the Emergency admitting desk who told my Obviously In Pain missus that she'd be with her just as soon as she'd finished the paperwork she was carefully completing. (Later--see #4--my neighbor, herself a medical professional, would explain to me that "I'm having chest pains!" will get everyone within a half-block off his or her duff tout de suite. Just for the record.)

2) Going to the supermarket at 5:45 AM of a Sunday after a day and a night of medical terrorism. Seriously, there is something about the sad evidence of America's Vertiginous Downward Spiral as told by Her Ever-Cheapened Parade of Parti-Colored Consumer Bits which is magnified a hundred fold when you and the store have just passed a sleepless Saturday night. And I do not mean this in the familiar (to some of us, I suppose) sense of a skid-row lurch into such a place as the Buzz is starting to wear off, or just get old, in search of ill-considered consumable on your way to an unchaste bed, but pushing yourself up off a deathless mattress in stone sober search of necessities while your Poor Wife catches a bit of sleep. Seriously. Just go without. It's like the funhouse phantasmagoria of Dante's Inferno. The movie, I mean. The movie with Spencer Tracy, I mean, not the one where Pierce Brosnan drives through a lava flow, and probably runs through one, too, not that you can single out just one moment of scientific idiocy from that thing for admiration, and not that it wasn't called Dante's Peak, now that I think about it.

3) Turning on NASCAR as though this would provide a calming mindless provender. If you ever decide that you will "turn on NASCAR in the other room, because it's the only thing on" here is what you will get: a) a bunched pack of cars going fast; b) a bunched pack of cars going slow; c) a bunched pack of cars going sideways; d) a line of cars, stopped, while they clean up after (c). And I like motorsports, though it must be admitted that anyone who likes motorsports, and who watches NASCAR as one of two or more, realizes that NASCAR is by far the inferior regardless of whatever else he watches. Just make a fucking mix tape; you won't know any different. NASCAR is, assuming you refuse to go into near-empty grocery stores at ungodly hours, your best demonstration of what's gone wrong in this country over the past four decades, and just how far. It's the utimate example of what happens when you buy into this phony USA! Zeitgeist crap just because it looks to be profitable, knowing full well that you and it are full of shit. It's no coincidence that the popular imagination--as well as the powers that run the scam--link the thing to red meat Republicanism. NASCAR went from regional semi-obscurity to national fetish object on the strength of early cable teevee. Not hard work, imagination, or a superior product, just Lucky Shit Product Placement and a New Low (for the time) in Lowest Common Denominator. It was, though we didn't realize it until it was too late, the three-headed, ten-limbed mutant amphibian harbinger of our Reality Teevee future. Since it got there it has betrayed a cluelessness about how to proceed bordering on epic, in large measure due to the demands of upholding the phony Jes Moonshiners cover story the way Teabaggers pretend to be the descendants of Tom Paine. And it did so despite the fact that by the time cable fame found it it was already two decades beyond the racing of actual stock cars. You have, in NASCAR, a billion-dollar operation which wants to--that is, must--protect its capital and advertiser value to the fullest extent of science, but wants to act like it's Officially Anti-PC so its theoretical Yahoo base (or its onetime Big Tobacco bankrollers) won't take offense. This is sorta like creating a real professional wrestling league, but making it look phony, and requiring all the protective headgear be transparent.

NASCAR tried to keep the excitement generated by the accidental discovery of drafting, and the resulting split-second finishes, by artificial means. And, as a result, it certainly was powerful enough to brush aside the Iraqi army, but it had no clue how to prevent looting. It is now the longest, dullest, spectacle in sport, and it has no fucking idea how to get back to honest racing now, because there's too much money riding on every little decision for honesty to ever be a part of it again.

And, y'know, there are thousands, hundreds of thousands like me who remember what it was, and who must remember the difference between real chocolate and whatever they smother Milky Ways in these days, or who remember what a steak tasted like before the Reagan administration. NASCAR's a family business, and allowed to fuck itself in the ass all it wants, but America isn't, and isn't supposed to.

4) Discovering, as your lovely risen potato bread awaits baking, that your oven has decided not to go above 100º F for the foreseeable future, necessitating a frantic trip to the neighbors, who are nice enough to let you use theirs, while you are embarrassed enough to give them half your production.

5) Waking up at 5 AM to find the overnight torrential rain onto ground only that morning soaked to supersaturation by the melting snowfall of the previous two weeks has, as expected, created a Category 5 flood in the basement. And yes, we have Categories, and "Five" means "lapping at the decrepit carpet at the foot of the stairs" meaning I will stand in 45º water for the next two days alternately convincing myself that the Ridgid Tools† wet vac is making a noise it shouldn't be, and that the sump pump is not making a noise it should. I am, in fact, typing this thing in shifts while warming my half-frozen feet on microwaved tube socks filled with rice. ‡

6) Reading this goddamn Victor Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus Davis ("Oh, that Vic Hanson!") Hanson piece of shit which tries to pretend that a) working on your family's farm, a gig they gave you probably to cheer you up for missing that Nam opportunity, qualifies as "working for a living", the way Tucker Carlson dropping personal insurance qualified as "going without", because you once broke a sweat; that b) this then somehow reminds us that teachers really have it pretty good compared to the average 14th century serf, and so shouldn't be allowed to have unions; meanwhile trying to c) convince his readership that said farm was "failing", its continued existence dependent on his very sinews and not the combined incomes of his (college administrator) father and (attorney) mother; while d) various farmworkers lazed around, stole shit, and threatened him with knives for catching them. Read it if you have to. Hanson can't even bother keeping the voice consistent; he just sorta turns from noble and death-defying son of the soil who might not actually make any money, to bedeviled straw boss of an instant. And, of course, he never mentions it's his family's farm; heirs never do. The teacher half travels an opposite arc: ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Wisconsin teachers aren't teaching Applied Right Wing Kinesiology at Fresno State, and don't "t[each] about 16 weeks a semester, counting finals and introductory orientation, or 32 of 52 weeks a year." Then he suddenly seems to remember that he's supposed to be emphasizing the nobility of the lowly public-school teacher, lest anyone get the idea that he and his cronies just have a hard-on for union busting, and blurts:

My purpose in relating the divide is not to suggest that the brutality of farming bears much resemblance to the private-sector office or that a university professorship is at all comparable to the much more arduous duties of an inner-city middle- or high-school teacher.

Oh, okay. I knew there was some reason you'd done just that for the two previous pages. Good to know it wasn't the wrong one.

My favorite, though was this:

Research was supposed to matter a great deal; but often it strangely did not for purposes of tenure and retention.

Says the author of War and Other Simple Morality Tales for Children, and The History Channel's go-to guy on the fine art of defecating during a homoerotic recreation of the Battle of Thermopylae.

________________

* What my Poor Wife suffered was not, actually, "a strangulated hernia in Ladytown"; she merely had the misfortune to marry someone who thinks "Ladytown" is so hysterically funny that he'd say this about her just to break himself up, even though it's not the condition which rushed her to the hospital.

**Preteritio, albeit unintended.

† Which, unlike "Ladytown" I say not for cheap laughs, but because it's the best one on the market, dollar for dollar.

‡ Buy whatever th' fuck you want.

I Rest My Case

David Brooks, "Run Mitch, Run". February 24

THE good news: Free 12-Course Banquet! The bad news: Every course is cold Vienna sausages luxuriating in ketchup.

Alternately, I suppose, caloric monstrosities (it's Indiana). That, by the way, is a Brooks quote, describing the Bill of Fare at some whistle-stop diner where Daniels and his camera crew dropped in (in clodhopper mufti) to play Jes' Folks with the locals during one of his campaigns. I think it tells you all you really need to know about Brooks that he's still using long-distance food metaphors. (Since I figure you already knew he really has nothing but contempt for the people who keep voting his party into power.)

Okay, since every argument eventually winds up as an epistemology debate, let's start begin with this: if someone tells you that Beethoven was a greater composer than Bach you know he, or someone else, could stake out some piece of defensible territory, but you're justified in wondering why he'd bother in the first place. If someone tells you Tschakovsky is a greater composer than Bach, you're also justified in believing, apodictically, that any such defense would be overrun in a matter of seconds. If he says Schoenberg was greater than Bach, he has an agenda, and if it's polished you'd best be prepared to weather a sort of Nimzo-Larsen Attack. And if he tells you that John Williams is a greater composer than Bach, call your local newspaper. They may have an editorial writer loose.

But check for your wallet first.

In case you've missed the pattern of these Daniels hagiographies, let's recap: He's an economic miracle worker, because Indiana's budget is balanced! He's slashed spending! But at the same time he made programs more efficient, and provided innovative new services to the poorest Hoosiers. Plus he's personally so a) humble; b) unprepossessing; and c) charisma-free that he'd be the perfect antidote to flashy, PR-driven Presidents.

Now, while you're checking that wallet, recall that this Anti-Charisma Fever is coming from the same people who idolize Ronald Fucking Reagan and couldn't get enough of George Bush's flight suit.

The brief response here--I know you're probably exhausted already--is that 1) Indiana's budget is "balanced" only if we ignore the $2 billion it owes the Feds in loan repayment, plus interest and penalties (ignoring it is the same thing we're hoping the Feds do) and don't ask too many questions about what's been sloughed off on local governments; 2) slashing spending is an argument, not a miracle process he invented, and it's easy to do if both houses of your legislature are dominated by the tax-and-program-cutting extremists of your own party; 3) the program record doesn't bear scrutiny any better than the budget, and the arguments for his accomplishments depend, for one thing, on ignoring the billion-dollar FSSA Pooch Fuck, largest boondoggle in Indiana since the Michigan Road, perpetrated personally by Mitchell Elias Daniels and Cronies, and based on his Randian super-knowledge.

Okay, Mr. Brooks, you have the floor.

On Feb. 11, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana met with a group of college students. According to The Yale Daily News, he told them that there is an “excellent chance” he will not run for president. Then he mounted the podium at the Conservative Political Action Conference and delivered one of the best Republican speeches in recent decades.

For the speech, well, having Only One Idea puts you one up on the field over there, assuming the judge is David Brooks, and not the Republican rank-and-file, which prefers Obama=Socialism.

The country also needs a substantive debate about the role of government. That’s exactly what an Obama-Daniels contest would provide. Yet because Daniels is a normal person who doesn’t have an insatiable desire for higher office, he’s thinking about not running.

Well, Dave, we've been having a debate about the role of government for thirty years now. If it doesn't always qualify as "substantive" you may take your pick of reasons, but I'll mention one: your side refuses to lose, because your side isn't really interested in the size of government--write a column urging a reduction of Defense spending to actual defense, and see how your party takes it--it's interesting in not paying for any. It's willing to oversee the destruction of the American middle class just so its ideology wins. A debate on the subject would include just what the consequences are of leaving the masses at the mercy of robber barons and financial pirates with no legal recourse whatsoever. You don't want that debate. You certainly don't get that debate from Mitch Daniels. You get a theological certainty that consolidating all money and power in the hands of the top 2% is a positive Good. And that argument has already lost.

Daniels’s Conservative Political Action Conference speech had a serious and weighty tone. He spoke for those who believe the country’s runaway debt is the central moral challenge of our time.

You mean "who now believe…"

He spoke of the program he started that provides health insurance for low-income residents, and the education program that will give scholarships to students in failing schools so they can choose another.

Yeah, in his first term Daniels actually addressed health care, with a program allowing low-income families to buy low-cost insurance. Good luck getting into it now; good luck expecting Daniels to mention "government health care" on the campaign trail, except in the negative.

Oh, and vouchers are vouchers. Slashing public education while giving a few poor students a chance to win the Lottery isn't competence. It is, in fact, the same old failed "education reform" of the past thirty years, except there's not a huge bankroll behind saying so, the way there is behind pretending dismantling public schools is the way to "save" them.

“Our first thought,” he said, “is always for those on life’s first rung, and how we might increase their chances of climbing.”

And our first and only answer is "Eliminate the minimum wage!"

He also spoke of expanding the party’s reach. In a passage that rankled some in the audience and beyond, he argued that “purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers.”

Frankly, Dave, I think this sorta thing seems a whole lot more impressive if you fancy yourself a Republican insider too intelligent for the likes of Limbaugh. From the outside it looks like a simple political calculation from a man who's going to get clobbered on the Right in Republican primaries, and whose only hope is to convince enough people to vote against Sarah Palin. And from a certain Hoosier perspective it's more of the same from a guy who finds the worst Republican yahoos distasteful, but is happy to count their votes, and whose party, for all his moderatableness is, at the moment, busy turning the Indiana General Assembly into Arizona North.

Daniels’s speeches are backed up by his record. Since 2004, the 49 other states in the nation increased their debt levels by an average of 40 percent. Indiana has paid down its debt by 40 percent. Indiana received its first Triple-A bond rating in 2008, and now it is one of only nine states to have the highest rating from all three rating agencies.

This is what I know about bond markets: 1) they're run by wealthy people primarily for the benefit of extremely wealthy people; and 2) the biggest rating increase last year went to Califuckingfornia. So let's try to use this as a measure of what it is: bond safety, not underlying economic genius. As for our public debt, I don't know the particulars. I know we're still in the middle of the pack, America-wise, and I know the Daniels administration, so I suspect there's some accounting procedures in the mix. Call me cynical. I know the general: we've slashed away at state spending. Announcing this as a Win seems premature, sorta like announcing the guy who bought the cheapest car won without looking at operating costs and reliability.

At the same time, the business climate has improved significantly.

That's like saying the sexual climate would improve significantly if hookers started giving it away.

Infrastructure spending is at record levels.

We sold the fucking Toll Road, Dave. Oh, and we swallowed our pride and accepted Obama Stimulus Bucks.

And what we're doing with it is build Indiana's section of the NAFTA highway, I-69, which is wiping out forests, wetlands, family farms and residential areas so you can get from Evansville to Indianapolis a half-hour quicker. We fought over this shit for fifty years before Daniels and his 2005 Republican majorities solved it for all future generations. The first leg's running $700 million over budget, which prompted Daniels to explain that when he said the Toll Road sell-off was going to pay for it he had his fingers crossed.

The state has added jobs at twice the national average.

Jesus Christ, tell it to the unemployed, will ya? They were 5.2% of the population when Daniels took office; they're 9.5% of it now. That's 35th worst in the nation.

Indiana's 40th in the nation in per capita income. Since 2005, household income has risen 0.92%, Since Mitch is so fond of comparing us to surrounding states, that's equal to the increase in Kentucky and Ohio, and less than Illinois and Michigan. Only Kentucky's household income is lower. So, yeah, I can see why people are flocking to the Indiana Miracle:

For the first time in four decades, more people are moving in than moving out.

Click to enlarge:

Daniels is famously a font of metrics, statistics and management stories. During his term, wait times at the Indiana motor vehicles bureau dropped from 40 minutes to under 10 minutes while customer satisfaction levels skyrocketed.

Okay, as we've noted here before: the increased efficiency at the BMV is due to the new computer system, purchased by the last Democratic administration, which knew how to operate a competitive bidding process and write specifications, and it was rushed into operation by a Daniels administration clown, resulting in a year of total chaos--and the eventual loss of his job--which Hoosiers now apparently have forgotten due to the highly caloric monstrosity diet. The wait times, well, again, call me cynical. They're better than they were, for certain; but I don't know where that "40 minutes" figure comes from. What I do know is that the Daniels administration initiated a Welcome Desk, a sort of Triage for your BMV visit, and the time spent waiting in line there doesn't count toward your total. It's faster now, for sure; so, too, are my credit card transactions compared to a decade ago. There's a reason why "overegging the custard" is a hallmark of a successful advertising gull, but not a successful, well, custard.

In manner, Daniels is not classically presidential. Some say he is short (though others do not regard 5 feet 7 inches as freakishly diminutive).

Then again, Dave, some of us don't regard a man who needs a one-foot platform to see over a standard lectern as 5 foot 7. And some of us wonder about why so simple and unassuming a public servant as Governor Combover has to tack inches on his stat sheet like an undersized NBA point guard.

Nice talkin' with ya. Drop in for some Hoosier home cookin', why doncha?

Well, That Didn't Take Long

MITCH Daniels' Solomonic metamorphosis lasted no more than twenty-four hours. What turned him back into a toad--nightfall, the Democrats staying away to kill odious Republican legislation that Mitch was in favor of, or someone shutting off the teevee lights--is not clear. At any rate, what on Tuesday was the sacred right of a minority to walk out (and show its ass!) became, by Wednesday, attempted bullying and blackmail. Good to have the Old Mitch back.

The one remarkable thing was that Wednesday's performance added terminally-ill Lt. Governor Becky "GED" Skillman to the podium, taking valuable time away from her medical treatments and her supervision of the twelve-month-long celebration of the six times Ronald Reagan changed planes at Weir Cook airport. This marks her second public appearance since being shoved aside so Mike "Choirboy" Pence wouldn't run for President, bringing her six-year total to four, or two if you don't count the gas-station Ethanol ribbon-cutting gigs they gave her in '05. Becks was apparently there to put a human face on the crushing of thousands of working-class lives and dismantling free education for the poor. This prompted one protesting union worker to remark, "If someone as nice as Becky Skillman is willing to stand silently to support this, I may need to rethink my position." Another added, "Hey, I think that woman's in my night-school Hygiene class!"

The real Republican response, though, was left to Then-Deputy Indiana Attorney General and Comedy Blogger Jeff Cox, who twittered a Mother Jones reporter over the weekend that the Wisconsin state police ought to clear the square with "live ammunition", then retwitterated, "you're damned right I advocate deadly force".

Cox lost his job, but raised his national prospects. He told local Channel 6 last night that his comments were "satire", that he regretted his "lousy choice of words", but that he was the victim of a "double standard".

Cox's blog is now down, so we mostly have to take his reputation as a keen sports observer on faith; however, we might note his violation of the cardinal rule of football above: Don't try to run three plays at once.

And, of course, the internets live forever, or until Scott Walker discovers the off switch, so we did manage to salvage this little bit of Swiftian satiricalism:

The Teenage Black Thug in question was one Brandon Johnson, the fifteen-year-old who deservedly looked like this:

after some curb service from three or four IMPD officers. Brandon was initially charged with resisting arrest, interfering with a police officer, and felonious assault with his face bones. Satirically, those charges were dropped.

Cox says his blogging was known to his superiors. And I have to say that I agree that he should not have been fired, though I base this on the slightly different grounds that we really shouldn't have hired his crazy ass in the first place.

Actually, one good thing did come out of all this: no one's going to be able to find Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller for a week.

This left the mule work to House Speaker and longtime Republican leader Brian Bosma, who is probably best thought of as Bill Murray without the talent. If Mike Pence is The Choirboy, thanks to his cosseting in the nation's capital, Bosma is the venal and colluded preacher in the company town. The phrase "smirking pious hypocrite" was actually invented for him. Really, I'd like to avoid being judgmental, but consider that while Jesus surrounded himself with thieves and prostitutes, He would almost certainly have drawn the line at lobbyists, and unquestionably at the Indiana General Assembly. Consider how He treated that other herd of swine.

Bosma's the guy who, during his last stint as Speaker, just couldn't keep the "nondenominational" monotheist invocation at the beginning of each session from turing into Saviorfest '05, to the extent that he was sued by a Jewish lawmaker, lost, and tried to fight the thing--at state expense, of course--all the way to the Supreme Court. Employing a crony law firm. Y'know, What Jesus Would Have Done.

Well, Bosma's been standing there with his gavel in his hand and no one to pronounce an auto-da-fé on, so yesterday he took it out on the gallery (filled with union folk and other non-believers), claiming they'd tried to "intimidate" and "spit on" legislators, before finally clearing the seats, taking his cross, and going home. Bosma also announced that, should Democrats return, he just might change the House rules and vote on the legislation they'd killed anyway. Because even a bankrupt state has plenty of loose change lying around to defend court challenges to every piece of legislation it enacted.

Mitch, meanwhile, is now threatening to hold Special Sessions "until New Years" if necessary, to get his promised soils divvying legislative agenda voted on, and to give the bill to the Democrats. Which I think they should pay. Right after Mitch reimburses us for last year's Special Session, the one he forced at the eleventh hour by torpedoing a bi-partisan spending bill that didn't meet his Presidential campaign propaganda needs.

Jon Stewart Should Take A Lesson From Mitch Daniels. Seriously.

HELL, let's just start with it: yesterday Mitch Daniels practically scoffed at the idea he'd send the Indiana State Police to round up skedaddling House Democrats, and said this:

“The activities of today are perfectly legitimate part of the process,” he said. “Even the smallest minority, and that’s what we’ve heard from in the last couple days, has every right to express the strength of its views and I salute those who did.”

Now, okay, this is the same guy who called skedaddling 2005 Democrats "car bombers". And there's no doubt that he thought those little backhand swipes were a subtle masterpiece of rhetorical art, like anything that cracks 'em up at the Cato Institute is Certified Dr. Swift. Plus it's the same Non-Presidential Candidate who wishes the rabid curs he helped elect last November would shut up and not give him headaches right before the Prom. He didn't want the Right to Work bill the Democrats blocked. He'd made that clear.

What the Bantam Menace might've done had this been a cherished part of his campaign makeover is moot. For those of us who've watched him grow up (man, I tickle myself sometimes) it's a remarkable accomplishment; it was like the day the terrier next door stopped yapping for five minutes.

So, sure, a politically-motivated talk that cost him nothing, but, still: he defended a principle he might need some day, though with any luck that won't be a political need. In the Land of the Blind, the guy who can actually see into next Tuesday is a philosopher.

I'm sure I've yelled Fuck you at The Daily Show once or twice, depending on how much Dennis Miller I watched before I skipped ahead to Colbert. I don't recall ever adding Jon Stewart! before.

I've complimented Mitch Daniels before, too, though the last time was probably the second week of his administration.

I know I've never done both in one 24-hour period.

You might recall that at Chez Riley we watch TDS/TCR the next evening, beginning when we've both had a bellyful of the locals, or, roughly, ten minutes in. And due to weekend overload, last Friday's show fell forward to the Monday dinner hour.

Yeah, it's a comedy (even if it's one which increasingly of late seems to rely on the time-honored pillar of the genre that any mention of "oomph loompa" or donning of a fake porn 'stash is Pure Gold). So, too, was Dennis Miller's "Ooooh, the global temperatures going up two whole degrees! I'll buy sunscreen!" routine comedy. That's an excuse when one of those remotes crosses the line between funny and boorish. It might be an absolute excuse, but for the line that was crossed by that rally last fall. It's not Jon Stewart's fault that he's the Most Trusted Name in News. That's not a fault at all, it's a default. But that needs to be taken into consideration, especially when he dedicated a segment of his program last fall to replying to--and denying--charges of a false equivalence.

Look: FOX News is a crusade; MSNBC is a counter-programming gambit from the network which shitcanned Phil Fucking Donohue for being too liberal. FOX is eight hours of Super Bowl pregame; MSNBC is a men's figure skating exhibition. When FOX calls the Teabagger Revolution it bought astroturf for "Freedom Fighters" that's Grade-Z propaganda. When it turns around and calls Wisconsin protesters un-American thugs and goons, that's Grade-Z propaganda and first-class hypocrisy. When some guy on MSNBC says that Teabaggers are Looney Toons, it's commentary. I know, I know: it sounds like I'm making a joke. But I'm serious. It may not be the sort of commentary Jon Stewart wants on the air, but he'd be back working clubs without it. It may not be 100% accurate, or 50% smart, but it is commentary; further, it--I say obviously, you may say "arguendo" if you'd rather--uses hyperbole. When that same guy--it's Ed Schultz, by the way, just try to contain him!--voices support for the Wisconsin protesters, that's not hypocrisy. It's called opinion. Hypocrisy is what FOX did: term the one a popular upwelling of Free Speech and the other a dangerous example of mob justice.

Now, maybe Ed Shultz--the man's a comet!--did exactly the same thing. He sure didn't do so in the clip you showed. And I'll gladly allow for a difference of opinion on such things. I'm a partisan. I'm not a partisan who feels he's represented by MSNBC, nor one who wants to be represented by MSNBC, but I understand why some people want a network that does for their viewpoint what FOX does for Roger Ailes'. What I think I'm arguing for here, though, is simple, and obvious, acceptance of what words mean. Calling an idea "bullshit" is not the same as calling an idea "treasonous". Lighting a fire in your fireplace in the middle of a scorching summer is looney; setting fire to your neighbor's house on a chilly evening is criminal. We enshrine the difference, legally, rhetorically, every which way.

There is, I'm sorry to say, always this sense in someone of my age, hat size, and general demeanor, the feeling that so many of you people in your forties betray a satisfied laziness about your own politics, a sort of watery libertarianism which mistook the Reagan-era backlash of your young adulthood for the Great Ridgepole of American centrism, and which loudly proclaims its willingness to split the difference as the apex of acuity and middle-aged common sense. Honestly, I've been waiting since my own forties for some sign that this might be fleshed out, and so far I'm still waiting. It's as though because you wouldn't have been caught dead driving around campus in 1982 in a van with shag carpeting and a unicorn mural, you obtained some insight into the foolish excesses of 60s social movements. It isn't that these matters are settled; it's that you're So Over them. The destruction of the right of collective bargaining for you is somehow metaphysically balanced by the gaucherie of people carrying signs and chanting. It's like you divide the country into two groups: those who have porn 'staches, and those who don't.

Colbert has Eugene Jarecki on to plug his new documentary dispelling Reagan Myths. Jarecki's an intelligent man; he certainly didn't enter the project a Reagan apologist. And what Myths does he uncover? Well, turns out the Gipper raised taxes. On the other hand, he wasn't an amiable dunce.

And, y'know, I'd be happy to debate the latter, or the aside that painted Jimmy Carter as History's Greatest Liberal Firebrand. But here's the fucking deal: on the one hand there's the thirty-year, politically-motivated Soviet Realist painting of the Gipper, and the fabricated record ("Reagan never cut taxes" is not a myth. It's a goddamned lie), while on the other, Clark Clifford once said something sorta nasty about him. Have you been laboring under a great weight because of that all these years? Really, isn't there some point when you say, y'know, somehow, those things don't really seem all that equal?

Consider That Now When Your Message-In-A-Bottle Hits The Beach It's Going To Be One Piece Of Trash Among Eight Hundred Thousand

Verne G. Kopytoff, "Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter". February 20

Roni Caryn Rabin, "Behavior: Videos of Self-Injury Find an Audience". February 21

Stanley Fish, "What Did Watson the Computer Do?" February 21

I DON'T know if I can go on; should this prove to be my final olde style "blogging" missive, I trust the Reader will remember me warmly, if at all, and not look for me on Facebook. Maybe--should I decide to go out in a blaze of glory--on YouTube, where I will, with luck, usher in the new sub-category craze, "Disgruntled Old Guy beating a random 15-year-old Twitterer with a VHS machine the size of a dorm refrigerator". Assuming I can figure out how to work the video on that execrable inch-square thing lax (or non-existent) American advertising laws allow Target to call a "camera".

Okay, so I wouldn't really dream of doing that. Fucking print on the camera instructions is too small. And the young are considerate enough to keep my Poor Wife entertained, though not often amused. Let's just say that while my belief in the Brotherhood of Man remains strong, old age has at least given me a fuller perspective on the elderly's historical willingness to use the young as cannon fodder at the least provocation.

And my interest, and today's opprobrium, is not specifically directed at 12-17 year-olds who are refusing to visit my blog out of some misguided sense of fashion, but, rather, the people who write about them as though they were not simply the latest in a long line of inexperienced, unlettered, easily-replaced and hormonally-mazed sub-adults with a disturbing amount of sexual vigor.

Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.

Now, yet again we might note that somehow to the mass-market media Our Children are remarkably prescient--harbingers of that better future Mitch Daniels is forced by his philosophy of naked greed to insist is right around every corner--provided their activities are sufficiently consumerist, enormously profitable, at least potentially, and don't involve synthetic marihuana. Compare, for example, the huge "social networks" revolving around the decidedly middle-aged fondness for scrapbooking and flea markets: not exactly awarded a lot of space in your newly-Middle-American-friendly Times, are they? You wanna know about either you have to tune to HGTV, where the former will be on at 5 AM, and the latter a place where young trendoids go to refill their remodeled houses after the annoying, screechy decorator woman throws all their old stuff out. Are these things less trenderific than Whatever Internet Thing Teenagers Are Doing This Month? No, they're just done by people print editors and teevee producers are less likely to secretly dream of fucking. Are they somehow less important economically? No, it's just that compared to computer software and websites, they're less amenable to a global takeover by some Harvard dropout asshole who steals other people's ideas. And so, less attractive to print editors and teevee producers who dream of being those assholes.

Thus the possibility of, say, Kobalt box cutters or Wilkinson Sword Blades getting behind the cutting-video craze won't change matters; such behaviors are supposed to elicit concern that Our Youth may be too self-destructive, too high, or too otherwise occupied to get with the latest consumer trends like they're supposed to, and before they become too old to hook. Or fuck. The distinction is easy to make; the article in question will either quote someone from a research group which stands to make a lot of money off it (Good trend):

Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.

or an Assistant or Associate Professor of Psychosociology from some made-up school in some made-up country who stands to make a lot of money "curing" it (Bad trend):

Stephen P. Lewis, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Guelph in Ontario and the paper’s lead author, calls the YouTube depictions of self-harm “an alarming new trend,” especially considering how popular Internet use is among the population that engages most in self-injury already: teenagers and young adults.

Y'know, just a couple generations ago any teenage craze was cause for alarm. Sure, the influence of religious nuts, overt racists, and sexually-frustrated grammarians has waned since then, but, like the deposed Freud, who used to keep diapered infantilists too embarrassed to run for reelection, we were ill-served to toss them out on deserved ear without considering a proper replacement. It's not that I fear for Twittering's effect on literacy: there is no literacy left to be affected. It's the fact that information naziism can now employ as foot soldiers brigades of twenty-somethings with unchecked cases of galloping nostalgia for high school.

I suppose that at the time it was thought that normal adult humans could and would keep this sort of thing in check. In fairness, we used to have a much bigger supply.

For the life of me I don't understand the resilience of optimism. It's impossible for me not to wonder how someone can operate under the assumption that technology will, in every instance, come up with some means of cosseting them in old age the same way it has perpetuated their adolescence. Then again, like the man said, it's schools, not bookies and psychics, that hold bake sales. I'm still trying to figure out who green-lighted the "Watson" business on Jeopardy! ? Was it Trebek? Hey, I root for the man to go on forever, but he's got these fainting spells, and he's no programmer, assuming all the excitement he conjures up for all those "special" Jeopardy! weeks isn't shammed. I don't wanna watch Kid's Jeopardy! Isn't Nickelodeon still a network? Tell you what: I'll watch, if you ask them regular Jeopardy! questions, so that the whole thing consists of 22 minutes of smart-ass kids shutting up.* Put the little rat-bastards in their place. Teens I don't want to watch do anything. No, really, I mean anything. Twenty years ago a woman I knew asked me what celebrity I'd most like to fuck. My protestations that I didn't know the names of any, and didn't think that way wouldn't deter her, so I finally said, "Salma Hayek". And she said, "What would you do once you had to talk to her?" It is the rare one-liner which influences a lifetime's choice of pornography.

Ms Hayek, of course, has proven herself a genuine talent and a smart cookie, and we could well ask what she could possibly find to talk to me about, after the full five-minute version of The Riley Technique. But this is not the point. I'm sure my inquisitor had that one-liner ready regardless of my answer, and I wish now I'd said "Tracey Ullman," but I was aggravated. I was always more drawn to brains, and I don't say that just to earn Brownie points. It's because smart girls could appreciate a good attempt at pathos when they heard it.

Anyway, Jesus, guys, Paint Still Dries. Compelling fucking television, assuming you couldn't work the remote to turn it off. A complete waste of Brad Rutter and Ken "My Poor Wife's Dream Date" Jennings. Somebody call 1978 and see if it gives a fuck. The four-year-old computer I'm typing on can kick my ass at Scrabble once I set it to "Smart", and that's about halfway up the scale. So can the eleven-year-old computer it replaced. So could the eighteen-year-old that one replaced. You could come up with a pitching machine that could out-duel Sandy Koufax and Nolan Ryan in their primes, and it wouldn't take the millions IBM dropped on advertising this one to do it. And so what?

We had the thing on because there's no way my Poor Wife would pass up Ken Jennings doing anything. I fell asleep twice, and wished I had the third time. I kept rooting for one of the Two Greatest Jeopardy! Champions of All-Time to reach over and pour a glass of water on the thing.

And I don't know which was worse: the home-town crowd of IBM engineers whooping it up like Steeler fans, or the perpetual use of the Single Explanation for Why This All Means Something: Medicine. "Doctors will be able to use Watson to aid in diagnoses." I heard that eight times before I stopped counting. Like Doctors rank just above Grandmas on the computer literacy scale: "My diagnosis box doesn't speak English!" Maybe next time you can take a team of engineers, ten years, and 127 supercomputers and figure out how I'm supposed to pay the guy. Or make my fucking television smarter. Or come up with one that can say something useful in 140 characters.

______________

* Except it wouldn't; if there's one thing we learn from the local, televised high school quiz bowl thing we watch every week in the hope that one day an urban school is gonna kick the ass of the rich private school fucks, it's that, given a question they have no hope of answering and don't believe should qualify as a question, such as the incontinent Boomer culture references**, or some piece of arcana your average teenaged "brain" considers the exclusive province of the Super-Brainiac†, someone will come up with a bit of self-conscious dumbassery that only his fellow juveniles--including, here, the guffawing Channel 13 weatherman who moderates the thing--would find amusing.

**And in fairness, they're right.

† Since there's generally someone on every team who can handle entry-level college math, this usually, and instructively, consists of history, geography, or current events question involving some area of the globe which is not the United States, or some fact about the United States which predates 1998.

Olio: Even Homer And Jethro Nod Edition

• The Times checks in on this weekend's Jeff Davis inaugural celebration in Montgomery:

Though the swearing-in was a re-enactment down to the antique buttons, there were contemporary political overtones. More than one speaker, insisting that “the South was indeed right,” extolled the Confederacy as an example of limited government that should be followed now, and said vaguely that the Southern cause was vindicated by a glance at the headlines every day.

But even the politics on Saturday were tied up in a larger sense of grievance, a feeling of being marginalized and willfully misunderstood. Expressions of this feeling led to some rather unexpected analogies, like when Kelley Barrow, a teacher from Georgia, declared that people of Confederate heritage “have been forced to go to the back of the bus.”

The participants know, however, that they will have to live with such frustrations over the four years of the war’s sesquicentennial.

“I really wish we didn’t have to defend what we do,” Chuck Rand, an engineer from Monroe, La., who is the adjutant in chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said in an interview on Friday night. “This doesn’t have to be a fight.”

Y'know, Colonel Rand, my Poor Wife and I fight over how to load the fucking dishwasher. And we like each other.

I wouldn't tolerate you sticking your nose in that one; likewise, if you wanna keep this shit in your own kitchen you'll never hear a word from me. But you don't. Somehow there just can't be a Sons of the Confederacy without the attendant denial that the Late Unpleasantness was over The Peculiar Institution.

Go ahead, Colonel: play dress up soldier all you want; hire a nice elderly couple to run around your home playing Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima--you're gonna have to pay 'em this time--and plant cotton to your heart's content. No one's gonna bother you. Hell, what's left of the American economy depends on walking hallucinations, so most of us are at least inured. We don't give a flip how much you lie to yourselves--that is, after all, your heritage, too--but we don't have to listen to you lie to everyone else and be nice about it. When you come into the public square people get to yell back. This is the difference between wearing a Stars n' Bars t-shirt, and hoisting one up the flagpole at the state capitol building.

And it may well be a minor concern when people are actively writing out the enormity of human chattel and the most destructive conflict this country has seen, fought over its perpetration, but, Colonel, the antebellum Southern contingent didn't favor "small government" any more than its namesake firebrands and pretend patriots do today. Like them, it favored self-aggrandizement and government controls on everyone else to its own benefit. Again, lying about this stuff is as old as the creation of Confederate nostalgia itself, so I don't really expect better. But the sort of peace you mean--where everyone else agrees you may say any odious thing that crosses your mind, and use the courthouse square to do so--might fly a little further if you were willing to do the same in return.

Oh, by the way: kudos to Campbell Robertson for the end of the piece, for finding a fifth-grade teacher and his class touring the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church while the march was going on outside:

But there was a lot more to discuss. So, Mr. Schmitt said as he left Dr. King’s old basement office, he was still thinking of ways to talk to his students about history, about the reasons for commemoration, about causes that were lost and causes that were won.

• Meanwhile, Frank Rich writes a pretty good column, though it may owe a lot of its effectiveness to the fact that no one else wants to speak about the Elephant in the room when it's the Republican elephant, and the utter lack of "conservative" "ideas". But there was a fainting spell right in the middle:

There was one serious speech at CPAC — an economic colloquy delivered that night by Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor much beloved by what remains of mainstream conservative punditry

Listen, first, if by "what's left of mainstream conservative punditry" one means "David Brooks and George Eff Will, plus assorted wingnut publications which need to maintain a toe in every Republican camp lest they lose access" and by "serious" you mean "didn't call the President a Socialist more than once, and waited until near the end to reference rap music", then, okay, I suppose.

You've got much to atone for, Frank, and repeating what the headlines tell you ain't gonna do it.

Let's try this: "The single attempt at a serious speech the entire weekend came from Indiana's Mitch Daniels, who, after reminding the audience that at 5'4", James Madison, our shortest President, was only three inches taller than Daniels, launched into a denunciation of the generationally-crippling effects of Federal deficits run up since his own tenure at OMB."

It's a fucking pose, Frank, though one you may have to step past the headlines to figure out. And Mr. "Culture War on the Back Burner" will, thanks to the Republican majorities he helped elect last year in Indiana, get to run for President with Arizona's Stop and Shoot Immigration Law and some of the most hallucinatory un-Constitutional abortion laws on his resumé, in addition to the generationally-crippling effects of gutting every state program average people rely on just so he won't have another massive deficit on his watch to explain away.

Can I just mention something here? This whole notion that "families have to spend within their means, so governments should too", in addition to being a haphazard argument disguised as common sense, based on real-life observation of something that rarely if ever happens (the average American family, faced with a financial shortfall borrows more money: the wealthy American family in the same situation just rigs a market or two), and which, when it does, frequently results in the opposite (part-time job for Mom or Dad), and practically never in the "third-grade math" Daniels likes to pretend he's the Master of, namely, unthinking budget slashing of a set percentage across the board. The average family which decides to face a financial shortage strictly by cutting expenses will, say, make do with an older car, or just one, or skip a vacation; it will not decide to drive 75% of a car, or get little Wylie 3/4 of the braces he or she needs. Daniels didn't "cut public employment 18%" because he thought it was the correct course of action; he did so because he could, and because that was what he needed to do to walk out of here and run for President with an arguable budget surplus. The only tough-minded decision Mitch Daniels made as Governor was the decision to run that one-year tax increase on top earners to pay down the "deficit". That one lasted all of about twelve hours. It's time to stop calling this shit "serious".

• I guess it's time for another MITCH WATCH watch, where we note what the former newspaper known as the Indianapolis Star said about the man just so it can excuse putting his picture on every Sunday's political column. This week: nothing.

Okay, that's not entirely true; it's actually less than nothing. Rush Limbaugh took offense to Daniels' CPAC speech, leading to the rather remarkable display of the Star correcting something Rush said; Jeb Bush, so inept a politician and human being he was passed over for the Republican presidential nomination in favor of his younger brother, George W. Bush, said something nice about Mitch, but also mentioned his height (and teleprompters for fuck's sake. Would someone please explain that to me?); and Mitch getting crushed in a New Hampshire poll by 1) Mitt Romney; 2) everyone else; and 3) no preference. Romney's lead was explained by the proximate distance to Massachusetts. You're free to buy that if you like, but what explains Mitt Romney?

I ♥ The Internets

Back Home Again

I DON'T believe I can adequately describe the current Indiana General Assembly. Okay, I could, but I think I get enough traffic already from people searching for "shit eating motherfuckers".

In addition to Definitively Defining Marriage For All Time As Between One Man and One Woman, In Case Anybody Can't Read The Law Already on the Books, and No Tag Backs, eradicating the menace of public education, enacting a clone of the sure-fire Arizona immigration and suspiciously brown people act (just in time for the fucking Super Bowl) and requiring doctors to inform potential pregnancy terminators that You're killing a human baby, you whore! in their best DeForrest Kelly voice, the two-chamber Republican majority is seeking to arm every law-abiding and substantially law-abiding citizen in the state at all times. Actually, this is the one part of their agenda which makes sense to me, since it might be useful in mediating the total fucking chaos they're in such a rush to provoke. You know what they say about blind pigs and acorns.

I used to watch local Channel 8 "news" in the evenings; in part this was because 8 once had a decent news staff--true, this is like watching Katie Couric because of Edward R. Murrow--headed by an Indianapolis-born anchor, and produced, for a time, by a Hoosier with a social conscience. They're a half-generation gone, now, and the survivors of that time are like a police line-up of what's happened to journalism over the course of their careers. There's the doyenne of local female teleprompter readers, appended to the anchor desk back in the heady days of The Mary Tyler Moore Show is Already Off the Air and the ERA has Already been Obstructed, who took to reading whatever was in front of her--news report, unfounded rumor, or promo copy for Survivor--the way a duck takes to crapping on your lawn; the Dean (Broder) of local political reporters, whose sing-song delivery can be used to trace the last quarter-century movement in the Overton Window, by analyzing the Doppler shift; the…

Oh, just a minute. Jim "Dean Broder" Shella has found it increasingly difficult to hide his middle-class fat cat Republican fetishism in the Mitch Daniels era; he's the guy I heard on the blaring radio one day when I was rehabbing my knee, yukking it up with his pal and GOP hatchet man Fat Mike McDaniel over Hillary Clinton ordering a Crown Royal shot in that Northern Indiana bar. This was maybe two weeks after the event, and thus 13 days and 23 hours after it had been explained that it was the bartender who gave her Crown Royal, the Cadillac of blue-collar bourbon scholarship. Can't let that sort of thing get in the way of perpetrating a joke that was already ten-days past what sell-by date if might have had, if it hadn't been a factory reject from the start. Anyway, Shella's the long-time moderator (the word has no actual meaning) of something called Indiana Week in Review, a sort of cornpone conflation of The McLaughlin Group and Washington Week on the local PBS affiliate. The panel used to consist of a Republican representative, a Democratic-Republican representative (it's Indiana; what choice do they have?), and two political reporters from Hoosier newspapers. It now consists of the same goddam four people, every week: Fat Mike, former (say twenty years ago) Democratic-Republican insider Ann Delaney, and two guys who used to be on the show a lot as reporters, but now work as mouthpieces for industry groups, yet are still on the show. It's like watching somebody's weekly poker game. Nobody at the PBS station seems to've noticed, or dares to say, that replacing Reporters with Guys Who Used To Be Reporters sorta sabotages the whole concept. The resulting discussions are so wide-ranging, so inclusive of differing viewpoints, that it occasionally threatens to veer into the center lane. If you missed your opportunity to hear someone describe Barack Obama's Indiana electoral victory as "historic", this was your place to come, provided that was all the analysis you needed.

And the point here is this: I wish ill on no Hoosier without first knowing whether he voted for Mitch Daniels. So let's just say that, should Shella actually depend on the income generated by this thing to send his children to college, or operate his boat, the irony that the Republican party is about to remove its funding would not be lost on me.

…there's the Jeff Greenfield guy, the one who started at 8 as a mustachioed young liberal go-getter, and now is a mustachioed, middle-aged burgher and promoter of regular home maintenance; and the aging (quite well, actually) pretty boy who seems to have enough on the ball to read a teleprompter and not fuck up a good-paying gig. In other words, he's the one whose skills best translated into the modern era.

When these people were young Channel 8 was the #1 rated, and #1 considered, local news broadcast, but it's now mired in mediocrity. Upstart Channel 13 was better positioned in the 70s to take advantage of the Galloping Stupidity of Happy Talk News, especially as it was then the local ABC affiliate, and could get plenty of pointers from Roone Arledge, Barbara Walters, and Good Morning America. Now, I don't know about you, but for me, personally, if someone smiles incessantly in my presence there'd better be a confirmed neuropathology behind it. Fuckers at 13, if you turn the sound off you'd swear they were trying to sell you a car. Hell, half the time they are, and they couldn't be more pleased about it.

So 8's been losing to The Osmonds now for a couple decades, yet all these people still have jobs, possibly because they demonstrate the sort of flexibility which would give you pause in dumping a mistress. The news direction has obviously slanted right at an escalating pace in recent years, either because there's a wingnut at the helm, or because the FOX template happened to float by while they were gulping seawater. At any rate, these are not masterminds at work, and they aren't really covering "news" anyway, so what you get is a sort of unqualified Daniels boosterism combined with the natural unlettered libertarianism (gotta stop repeating myself!) of the SUV-piloting regional marketing director.

I had more-or-less given up on 8 in disgust after it let disgraced former Marion County Prosecutor Carl "Face Time" Brizzi back on the air--two nights in a row!--to comment on his successor's handling of the Drunken Cop Kills and Maims Stopped Motocyclists case he had conveniently botched, but last night I had it on for some reason, or no reason. And one of the many Let's Arm The Citizenry To The Teeth bills moving from Bad Idea to Even Worse Law, SB 0202, this one sponsored by State Senator Jim Tomes (R-New Phallusburg), "prohibits, with certain exceptions, a political subdivision from regulating any matter pertaining to firearms, ammunition, and firearm accessories," those exceptions, as widely reported, being schools and courthouses. It also provides for that favored accessory of the total lunatic, the ability of the inconvenienced far-arm enthusiast to sue whatever comma-nist political subdivision pried the guns, ammo, and accessories out of his still warm fingers.

Now, about a week or so ago, Jim Irsay, the inheritor of the Indianapolis Colts (thanks to an activist divorce-court judge), and the inheritor of millions of dollars of Indianapolis taxpayer largess (thanks to the local officials who get to eat free on game day), tweeted, fer chrissakes, his semi (I'm feeling charitable this morning)-literate opposition to the bill:

Someones got a bill n Ind.State Legislature making it illegal 4 CIB 2 stop some1 from bringing a gun into Luc Oil,I'm against it,so should u

Now, for the record, "CIB" is the Capital Improvement Board, the unelected tax-seizers who operate "Luc Oil", among other scams, the Football Barn we built Irsay when he outgrew the old one. Why this would be a Tweet, well, you're asking the wrong man. Why Channel 8 would pick it up a week later, I suppose incompetence has its own internal rhythms. Shut up and dance.

So the goddam thing is a big deal last night: Jim Irsay opposes bill! He's going to have a press conference, and we'll bring it to you live! And 8's two male halves (it's f'ball) are squeezing the air out of the thing for ten minutes prior. And a big part of that is how Senator Jim Tomes says Irsay's misreading the bill. This was not presented as the usual he said/guy with equipment problem said. No. It was "Hey, the Senator who wrote the bill says it doesn't mean that. So Irsay's just getting all het up about something that doesn't mean anything, and, besides, guns are really no risk at all, and nobody would carry one into a Colts game anyway." Except, of course, guns were mentioned as little as possible, lest someone in the audience start to get the picture.

Except, of course, that's not how the law works, and if you don't believe that you can look at the Indiana General Assembly and its history of passing dumb-ass shit that blows up in everyone's face while taxpayers pay the court costs. Then, as this is still unfolding, we get a second story from the Senator: the law wouldn't apply to the Football Barn (Home of the It Might Happen Super Bowl LXVI) because people who buy tickets are entering into a contract.

Now, as to why every "political subdivision" seeking to keep crazed killers and 18th century musketeers out of public buildings wouldn't make every library, public park, and stadium in its jurisdiction a contract deal is unclear. As is the reason why guns are so safe in those spots, but not courtrooms or classrooms.

Although it's wasn't exactly a mystery as to what does the talking here; the NFL trumps sacred Constitutional rights. The legislature is reported to be writing Luc Oil into the exemption list. Which, of course, means the Senator was quite possibly full of shit, and the two anchormen, with almost sixty years combined experience, couldn't find the handle on the story with four hands.

Oh, and Mr. Irsay? Why don't you buy your own fucking stadium?

Maybe If The Adults Weren't Such Liars The Juveniles Wouldn't Know They Can Get Away With It

THIS, from an editorial from The Newspaper of Record on how irresponsible the House Republicans are. (Yeah, there's a shocker):

If the Republicans got their way, it would wreak havoc on Americans’ lives and national security. This blood sport also has nothing to do with the programs that are driving up the long-term deficit: Medicare, Medicaid and, to a lesser extent, Social Security.

On second thought, okay, assuming by "to a lesser extent" you mean "not at all".

Social Security is a trust, not part of the Federal budget. Social Security is solvent. If John Boehner finds the Magic Elixir of Stupid tomorrow, and eliminates Social Security in its entirety, the Horrible Federal Deficit will not be altered one iota.

Actually, that's not true: what would happen is that the HFD would increase, because thanks to the Joint Financial Trickery of the Johnson and Reagan years, the Social Security surplus now camouflages the Federal Deficit for purposes of fooling the Rubes as to what Reagan was really up to public reporting. Eliminating it would also deprive the Congress and the Executive branch of something to borrow from surreptitiously.

This, by the way--as if you aren't ahead of me--is the actual crux of the actual issue of "fixing" Social Security. And the argument is now forty years old. If the fucking New York Times can't get this right--and Jesus Christ, Wikipedia does--what possible hope is there that The Crazy Party will be detoured by "facts"?

Of course it's actually worse than that: the Timesmen can't avoid adopting the Right's Inhuman Resources Program as fact: Medicare and Medicaid bust the budget, but the 55% (conservative, but not "conservative" estimate) of the Federal budget which goes to military operations is as invisible as we pretend a Stealth bomber is.

Y'know, at every goddam turn there's another excuse for our incontinent militarization, for continuing to spend at WWII levels, whether the threat is the Soviets being sorta close to us in megatonnage (see Missile Gap, The) or some guy lighting his underwear on fire in Canada. We're the fucking Windows™ of hard power: we insist on never actually obsoleting the junk we sold the Rubes two generations ago, like they might remember, so we're continually defending the Fulda Gap, preparing to storm Quemoy and Matsu, weaponizing Space, touching up Mutually Assured Destruction, preparing to best the Kaiser at Jutland, and shopping for video-game weapons systems, all at once, and all with no sense of fitting anything together. And meanwhile, in case no one happened to notice, getting bogged down for decades inside countries which didn't even have armies when we invaded.

Hairlessingaza was good enough to send me a link to this report just released by the Straus Military Reform Project. Let's pull up two tiny points:

[R]eal air-to-air combat is separated by a chasm from the technologist’s dangerously beguiling dream of beyond-visual-range (BVR) combat: push a button, launch a missile at a blip on the scope at 25 miles, then watch the blip disappear without ever having laid eyes on the target. That concept of combat, oblivious to the inconvenient details of real air-to-air fights8, leads to huge, cumbersome fighters loaded down with tons and tons of heavy stealth skins, massive radars and missiles, and failure-ridden electronics of unmanageable complexity. The most recent fighter built in pursuit of the BVR combat delusion, the F-22, has a $355 million sticker price and costs $47,000 per hour to fly, making it impossible to fly the hours necessary to train pilots adequately (people first!) and impossible to buy enough fighters to influence any seriously contested air war.

[I]n its carrier reincarnation, the battleship is still soaking up the lion’s share of the U.S. Navy budget to this day. The preoccupation with $14 billion carriers escorted by $1 to $3 billion destroyers has led to virtually complete Navy neglect of strategically essential coast control capabilities like $175 million minesweepers, $60 million coastal patrol ships, $35 million fast missile-torpedo boats and $4 million riverine-estuarine warfare boats. In the 1991 Gulf War, the Navy’s perennially inadequate minesweeping forces made it too dangerous to launch a 17,000 Marine amphibious assault that General Schwarzkopf had planned.6 Recently, in the Indian Ocean, the U.S. Navy’s utter lack of coastal patrol and fast attack boats left our merchant ships mostly unprotected against pirates in rubber skiffs. As a result, we witnessed the ludicrous scene of using a $1 billion destroyer to subdue four rifle-armed pirates in a 25-foot inflatable.

Of course, there is no seriously contested air war in our future; maybe a couple of anxious hours if we decide for some reason to declare war on Israel. Similarly, we're building a twelve-carrier fleet, an extension of the Spend-Incontinently-on-Everything-but-Manpower doctrine of the Reagan years, which has served us so well; when the Navy requested a temporary reduction in the number of carriers in 2008, to adjust for decommissioning and major overhaul schedules, the Heritage Foundation screamed bloody murder. Fourteen Essex-class carriers saw action in WWII--this a time when they were in danger of being sunk by an enemy--and half of those were commissioned in 1944. We had plans to build twenty-two. Why we need twelve now is anyone's guess. There are eleven other carriers in service in the rest of the world's navies combined. Italy, Spain, and the UK have two each. Russia has one. In an actual conventional naval combat situation a carrier would have to drop 100% of its offensive capabilities and spend all its energies defending itself. We would, however, compensate for this by going ballistic the moment any other country on the planet decided to build some, and, if nothing else, start building more.

The only military mission of today's supercarrier is the intimidation of countries with no air force. If we wind up in six such situations simultaneously you may well ask yourself where we're finding the ground forces to go in and finish the job.

Look, President Daniels may talk about "Defense" spending being on the table, but that means little beyond the drop-in-the-bucket cancellation of one or two showy development programs whose selection will mostly be left up to the same bureaucrats who approved the thing in the first place. No one even mentions a sensible military program for the 21st century guiding a massive, and perfectly reasonable reduction in Defense spending. Nobody dares to. And the New York Times ain't gonna make 'em, apparently.