The Commentariat -- Dec. 23, 2012
An early holiday gift:
Paul Krugman: a citation in a Wall Street Journal story makes it appear "the president still believe[s] that failure to reach a Grand Bargain will cause an attack by the invisible bond vigilantes, and that this is the reason we should fear the fiscal cliff." Oh, dear. CW: it has been obvious for a long time that Obama listens to the Very Serious People. He is not good at choosing advisors. Tim Geithner. ...
... Brad DeLong: "If it is indeed the case that Obama does not understand the basics of the economic situation he is trying to manage, how likely is it that he can make good decisions? If, as Bob Woodward claims, Tim Geithner really is in there analogizing the U.S. to Greece, things are not good at all…" ...
When You Have a Bad Hand, Play It Badly. Ezra Klein: "... if Boehner had taken the White House's deal in 2011, he could've stopped the tax increase at $800 billion. If he took their most recent deal, he could stop it at $1.2 trillion. But if he insists on adding another round to the negotiations -- one that will likely come after the White House pockets $700 billion in tax increases -- then any deal in which gets the entitlement cuts he wants is going to mean a deal in which he accepts even more tax increases than the White House is currently demanding. Today, Boehner wishes he'd taken the deal the president offered him in 2011. A year from now, he might wish he'd taken the deal the president offered him in 2012." CW: poor people, seniors & anyone else who may rely on government safety-net programs should be mighty glad Boehner is such a poor poker player.
Sometimes Tom Friedman Is Right: "But if Republicans continue to be led around by, and live in fear of, a base that denies global warming after Hurricane Sandy and refuses to ban assault weapons after Sandy Hook -- a base that would rather see every American's taxes rise rather than increase taxes on millionaires -- the party has no future. It can't win with a base that is at war with math, physics, human biology, economics and common-sense gun laws all at the same time." (Italics original.) But Usually He Is Wrong: "... we could have had a grand bargain that would put the country on a sounder fiscal trajectory and signal to the markets, the world and ourselves that we can still do big hard things together."
Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times: "How [the] Party of Budget Restraint Shifted to 'No New Taxes,' Ever."
CW:contributor James S. recommends this excellent 20/20 segment which demonstrates how & why armed citizens are ineffective lines of defense against armed intruders.
Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post: "Thousands of criminal cases at the state and local level may have relied on exaggerated testimony or false forensic evidence to convict defendants of murder, rape and other felonies. The forensic experts in these cases were trained by the same elite FBI team whose members gave misleading court testimony about hair matches and later taught the local examiners to follow the same suspect practices, according to interviews and documents." CW: another reason the death penalty is morally criminal.
Molly Worthen, in a New York Times essay on the history of religious practice: "Rates of church attendance have never been as sterling as the Christian Right's fable of national decline suggests. Before the Civil War, regular attendance probably never exceeded 30 percent, rising to a high of 40 percent around 1965 and declining to under 30 percent in recent years -- even as 77 percent still identify as Christians and 69 percent say they are 'very' or 'moderately' religious, according to a 2012 Gallup survey."
News Lede
Al Jazeera: "Italy's president has dissolved parliament following Prime Minister Mario Monti's resignation. President Giorgio Napolitano signed the decree on Saturday after consulting with political leaders. The move formally sets the stage for general elections, now confirmed for February 24-25, in which Monti's participation remains unclear. The date of the election, widely expected to be February 24, will be decided by Monti's cabinet, which remains in office in a caretaker capacity."
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The effect of prospective gun control legislation
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/
Thank you for the gift. I've sent it to the board members of the Community String Project in the Bristol/Warren school district in RI. We need to have expressions of hope and joy right now. dedeq
The video is inspiring. My younger son makes playable string instruments from castoff materials, and when I first saw the 3-minute "teaser" version of "Landfill Harmonic" a few days ago, I sent him the YouTube link and told him he was part of a noble calling. To see his handiwork, go to www.folkherosandwich.com and click on "instrument photos."
"We believe that people shouldn't strive for material things, they should strive for knowledge." (Landfill Harmonic video, 8:50)
This particular quote resonated with me because I had just finished reading the front page NYT article entitled, "For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html?hp&_r=0
Kids - people - need opportunity, and it behooves us as individuals and as a nation to figure out how we can provide the possibility for all of our citizens to reach their fullest potential, i.e. the pursuit of happiness and all that.
The Landfill Harmonics has several powerful messages, one that @Janice articulated and another, I think, of giving children a purpose in life (as well as the adults who are guiding them). Children in the United States also need a purpose other than having the latest smartphone, checking their Facebook page every other second or following all the 'celebrity' gossip (to name a few).
Marie, thank you for giving us this early holiday gift ~ I am sharing it with every person I can ~ and, Happy Season of Light!
Re: Joy to the world; I just watched both videos back to back. One gave off such a feeling of hope and love for life. Our souls speak in music. The other such a sense of loss and termination. Practicing to shoot another human. Thanks Marie.
This Joy to the World reminds me of something a conductor of young musicians from Michigan who got to perform Mahler's Fifth Symphony at Carnegie Hall remarked some years back. A symphony orchestra, he said, is an exercise in collaboration, in bringing diverse tools and talents to bear on a common purpose. The worst of times might give way to the best, the winter will at last give way to Spring, that out of all the noise and nonsense, blather and racket we might make song and poetry and music. He also said that when listening to the Mahler he felt like a heartsick Aschenbach, fresh from the barbers, vexed by the grime and dismal in the midst of hope and beauty. Oh, how we hold on to that hope and beauty.
Ah, CorrecttheChristmasRightmas, a version of our national holiday. Yawn!
People ask me if Christmas is a civic or religious holiday. I say, "Yes." That's all the investment in this pressing issue I'm willing to make.
In church this morning, our minister went a tad overboard with the meaning of the Joseph and Mary story, as if it were some all-purpose narrative. And, yes, she called it a story. Not bad, as sermons go. It had form and substance.
I did piano and organ duty, both, and discovered, yet again, that my glasses work great for the former and not so good for the latter. Christmas morning, I'll play my standard hymn for that day--Christians, Awake, Salute the Happy Morn, one of the great lost carols/hymns/songs of the season. I used to play for a smaller, more down home church, and I could get away with Frosty and Rudolph for the holidays. Not here.
I personally categorize Christmas songs into three camps: carols, hymns, and pop songs, but of course the crossover is considerable. 1839's Joy to the World, of course, is from the great middlebrow movement of Thomas Hastings and Lowell Mason, when the "incorrect" anthems of Billings, et al., were giving way to things derived from Handel, German folk tunes, etc. Proper stuff (ahem). Mason didn't approve of the home-grown hymns and campmeeting spirituals that historians now regard as priceless treasures.
Dr. Krugman's piece reminds me of the title of Nate Silver's book, "The Signal and the Noise." The signal keeps coming from Krugman, Brad DeLong, Stiglitz, and other economists whose prescriptions are geared to easing the current stresses on the national and world economies. The noise is generated by those from Glenn Hubbard to the Chicago School to whoever is housed in Pete Peterson's stables these days to pundits like Brooks and Friedman whose message never changes because it's less a specific prescription than it is the medieval dictum that bleeding the patient heals all ills. It would be good if the President could block out the noise just for a moment and listen to the signal.