Goodbye June ... so soon?

Wash her Pretty Face...

Dry her eyes and then,
God Bless America...
... Again.

Strawberries.

'Tis the season, and I've been putting the chest freezer to good use this weekend.

In political news, Mr. Ezra Klein's analysis in the Washington Post was interesting yesterday -- a concession of sorts. He'd been plugging the Affordable Care Act, offering not only economic analysis, but political and legal takes too.

Turns out, it might just be that Individual Mandate will be found unconstitutional afterall, but the overall law can still survive. Now if only we could find a neutral wonk with economic expertise to analyze how the underwriting reforms can be kept as promised, if non-consumers of the health insurance industry maintain their right to opt out. Would the numbers still add up? (not that that means anything to the legal analysis...)

Posted at 4:31 PM ET, 06/28/2010
Conservative legal case against the Affordable Care Act suffers a setback
One of the things that has confused me about the attack on the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality is that it's so limited. The Affordable Care Act isn't under attack, actually. Only the individual mandate is. And though the individual mandate is important to have, it could be replaced with some sort of automatic enrollment scheme, or some sort of modified penalty in which failure to purchase insurance locked you out of the bill's protections for a certain number of years. The strategy seemed like trying to destroy a car by convincing a mechanic that the carburetor doesn't fit and needs to be modified and replaced.

Avik Roy's post on today's Sarbanes-Oxley ruling helps the story make more sense: Conservatives were hoping that the absence of a specific "severability clause" -- language stating the law could stand even if a part was removed -- meant that if a part of the law was struck down, all of the law would be struck down. That doesn't make much sense to me, and it turns out that the Supreme Court agrees: As Roy notes, a part of Sarbanes-Oxley was struck down today, and there was no severability clause, and the court kept the rest of the law standing.

So long as the Individual Mandate isn't foisted upon all (non consuming) medical consumers and individuals are all allowed to pursue other options, without faking a quick religious conversion or some other legal opt-out -- that meet their own economic and healthcare needs, I personally don't care if the Act lives or not.

No skin in the game, and all that.

----------------------

FWIW:

Remains of the Day.

National Past Time.

Namekagon.

Pretty much all you need to do...

is smile wider and wave at them.
...
Kid who refused to stand for the Pledge will lead the Northwest Arkansas Gay Pride Parade in Fayetteville:

He will be the parade's youngest grand marshal ever, but he said age shouldn't make a difference.

"Because I'm a person, I may be 10, but I'm a person," said Will Phillips.

Should he have refused the invitation, for fear of linking homosexuals with child abuse, as some worry ?

Or do you see this more as a kid advanced for his age, making a point that 10-year-olds are going to be living in this future world too, and aren't afraid so much what other people think?

I don't go for the stereotypes affirmed in the video at the link (note to photojournalists: drag queens at Pride pics are old -- and not the whole scene), but the kid seems genuine enough to me.

It's worth listening just to hear him say: "Pretty much all you need to do is smile wider and wave at them."

That made me smile here, and no, there's nothing funny about that.

Ch-ch-ch-ch ... changes.

Senatorial hopefuls -- in Florida even -- start to discuss unpopular options for saving Social Security:

After creeping around the issue of Social Security as if it were a coiled snake, the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate finally acknowledged during Tuesday's debate at The Palm Beach Post that Congress must make changes that could involve the payroll tax that finances the program, benefits or the retirement age.

Jeff Greene and U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Miami, both wanted to defer any specifics until the report from President Obama's 18-member, bipartisan budget panel. But last month, a report by the Senate Select Committee on Aging laid out what everyone in Washington knows about Social Security: The program will be fine for the next 75 years if Congress makes small adjustments to how it is financed and what it pays out.

Currently, the 6.2 percent individual payroll tax applies only to the first $107,000 of a person's income. Raising that tax or removing the cap could fix the problem. Americans can start collecting Social Security at age 62, and can collect full benefits at 66. For those born after 1960, the age is raising gradually to 67. One big reason the program has begun to pay out more than it takes in is that unexpectedly high numbers of Americans between 62 and 66 have retired rather than keep looking for work. And, of course, with more people out of work, fewer people are contributing. Among all Senate candidates, only Republican Marco Rubio has been gutsy enough publicly to consider raising the retirement age.
...
Aside from stabilizing the program on which 60 million Americans depend to varying degees, whoever becomes Florida's next senator will have to be gutsy enough to fix Social Security because if Congress can't do that, Congress can't fix the nation's finances.

Entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid - defense and veterans spending and interest on the national debt make up more than two-thirds of President Obama's proposed 2011 budget of $3.69 trillion. The budget has broken down that way for years. Though Social Security and defense are the most expensive items, the biggest long-term problem is Medicare. Compared with that problem, fixing Social Security is easy.

At Least One Option Left Open...

or, It's All in How You Count to Three.

Brooks and Collins are part of the Boomer group who can't offer much to future generations, but the absence of a comma today leaves me hopeful for at least a slightly open ending to their fantastic story: Imagine what you could do with that unallocated 3rd wish!

Choose your own adventure...

Gail Collins: So I’m envisioning a young conservative Washington think-tanker named Aladdin, sitting in a coffee shop in despair over Obama big-government when the barista, who happens to be a genie, asks if he would like to exchange his soul for three wishes, plus an iced café Americano and free Wi-Fi.

I won’t tell you the end, but boy, were the voters ticked off.

David Brooks: The end is that he means-tests Medicare and Social Security and imposes some sort of flat tax. And you’re right. The voters were really ticked off, but mostly the old ones, and he also asked the genie for some sneakers to outrun them.

Dylan to play Sturgis, August 10.

Live bloggin' anyone?.

Performance issues?

Marlins fire Gonzalez; Obama relieves McChrystal.

Nobody much expects a game changer in either action.

You wonder too what the Tillman family is thinking tonight. Not about Gonzalez.

I can see you're out of Aces.

For a taste of your whiskey,
I'll give you some advice...

~ Kenny.
ADDED:
Love the way Dolly helps him sell this one too:

Islands in the Stream...

Neighborhood garden.

Four Corners.

Church garden:



Room to Run ...

A chicken race ... with tractors?

Well how hard could it be, right?

Don't mess with the Buckets.

I'm trying to tell you...

...

...

...

it will if you don't even try !

DOUBLESHOT:

"But if you'd try some time...

you might find...

you get what you need."

On those two relief wells...

Why is it assumed two is better? Think about it.

Wouldn't focusing on one -- and making sure you get it right? -- beat (or equal) two as far as relieving the pressure goes? Once you stop the spew, one is as good as two.

Plus, by concentrating all your efforts and energy on one ... delicate operation, well I can see why the engineers leading the BP team might first have proposed to go for one and get it right.

Whether the Obama administration made the right call, voiced by an intense Rahm Emanuel this weekend pulling PR duties explaining how the administration is in charge -- (paraphrasing) We insisted on two relief wells when initially they only wanted one...

Let's just hope his intensity doesn't overpower intelligence.

Over-rated people sometimes "win" big like that -- and make no mistake, the libs won big last week in their typical manner of tossing money at a problem and thinking it's over. But how much fun can it be to be the biggest winner ... on a losing team?Superstar yourself, while the team as a whole falters.

I dunno. Don't think it would be much enjoyable myself... but that's me.

15 hours, 36 minutes of daylight...

Spend it wisely, friends...

and Welcome Summer! (yee haw)

"You're some kid ! "

Graeme McDowell's father to his son, who won today's U.S. Open.

In my Father's house are many rooms.

If it were not so, I would have told you.
~ John 14.1-6

"Come on and go with me, to my Father's house..."
Listen to the whole thing.

UPDATED:
If that doesn't work for you, try this modern version by Audio Adrenaline... "It's a big big house - with lots and lots of room -- a big big table -- with lots and lots of food -- a big big yard -- where we can play football -- a big big house ... it's my Father's house."

Come and go with me.

Ice CREAM in the urinals ?

Nevermind provincial Madison Wisconsin:
In the fancier Ohio hotels, I hear they put $11/pint ice CREAM in the johns...

(Ask your husband before Googling.)

And make it a great Sunday, for the fathers out there, and the men who have chosen different paths in life but who continue to shape the world with their daily work. We salute you!

Who paid Rahm Emanuel's D.C. rent again?

Frank Rich:

...
While Obama ended his speech with an exhortation for prayer, hope for divine intervention is no substitute for his own intercession. He could start running his administration with a 9/11 sense of urgency. And he could explain to the country exactly what the other side is offering as an alternative to his governance — non-governance that gives even more clout to irresponsible corporate giants like BP. As our most popular national politician, Obama still has power, within his White House and with the public, to effect change — should he exercise it.

Some exposure to the voluminous investigative reporting incited by this crisis might move him to step up his game. After all, the muckraking of McClure’s magazine a century ago, some of it aimed at Standard Oil, helped fuel Teddy Roosevelt’s activism. T.R. called it “torrential journalism,” and a particularly torrential contemporary example is a scathing account of Obama’s own Interior Department by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone, a publication often friendly to this president. Dickinson’s findings will liberate Obama from any illusions that the systemic failure to crack down on BP was the unavoidable legacy of the derelict Minerals Management Service he inherited from Bush-Cheney.

In Rolling Stone’s account, the current interior secretary, Ken Salazar, left too many “long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge” at M.M.S. even as he added to their responsibilities by raising offshore drilling to record levels. One of those Bush holdovers was tainted by a scandal that will cost taxpayers as much as $53 billion in uncollected drilling fees from the oil giants — or more than twice what Obama has extracted from BP for its sins so far.

Dickinson reports that Salazar and M.M.S. continued to give BP free rein well after Obama took office — despite the company’s horrific record of having been “implicated in each of the worst oil disasters in American history, dating back to the Exxon Valdez in 1989.” Even as the interior secretary hyped himself as “a new sheriff in town,” BP was given a green light to drill in the gulf without a comprehensive environmental review.

Obama has said he would have fired Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, but his own managers have not been held so accountable. The new director of M.M.S. installed by Salazar 10 months ago has now walked the plank, but she doesn’t appear to have been a major player in lapses that were all but ordained by policy imperatives from above. The president has still neither explained nor apologized for his own assertion in early April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills” — a statement that is simply impossible to square with Salazar’s claim that the administration’s new offshore drilling policy, supposedly the product of a year’s study, was “based on sound information and sound science.”

The president must come clean and clean house not just because it’s right. He must rebuild confidence in his government for that inevitable day when the next crisis hits the fan. That would be Afghanistan, and the day is rapidly arriving.

Or Iran / Israel.

If this president can speak lucidly of race to America* , he can certainly explain how the antigovernment crusaders are often the paid toadies of bad actors like BP. Such big corporations are only too glad to replace big government with governance of their own, by their own, and for their own profit — while the “small people” are left to eat cake at their tea parties.

Rich goes partisan here, but maybe in his urging to "clean house" and commit better investigative journalism, somebody at the NYT can find out who cleaned Rahm Emanuel's BP-paid apartment for years in tony D.C.

I wonder if Mr. Rich's cleaning style involves sweeping what you don't want to see under the rug...
----------------------------


* ????? Lucid is not how I remember the cloaked disavowal of Rev. Wright.

If That's your best ...

A lil Dee Snider to kick off our Saturday twilight here in Rice Lake, where the local races are coming through the open windows, and the Aquafest bands will be taking the stage all night...

We've got the right to choose it
there ain't no way we'll lose it
this is our life, this is our song
We'll fight the powers that be just
don't pick our destiny 'cause
you don't know us; you don't belong.

Oh you're so condescending
your gall is never ending
we don't want nothin', not a thing from you
your life is trite and jaded
boring and confuscated...

... your best Won't Do.

Friday Paddle.

We stopped at the Subway off of 53 yesterday -- it seems like everybody and his brother is towing a boat to northern Wisconsin this weekend.

Early (enough), we had the small kayaks out on the Red Cedar River, that runs out of Rice Lake. I recall writing posts here previously, about spotting a magnificent bald eagle on the river and the magical spell it held.

Am I getting jaded? Or just more reluctant to share?

Yesterday, I was in the lead -- not that anybody was racing, took a tight corner, and came face to face with a young buck, about 100 - 150 yards downstream -- his antler nubs just poking up an inch, his body frozen about 5 or 10 yards from shore.

I drifted closer, he chose to run for the opposite bank; we were at a spot where the river is only 55 yards wide, approximately, and two or three feet deep with a stony bottom, I later paddle-measured as I passed.

Boy can they leap! I've seen a black bear amble on all fours, myself safely unnoticed on an opposite river bank. And I've come upon deer standing midstream eating the green riverweed before, but they've always gone to the closest cover.

What a mighty creature in the crossing this one was; how big they're built and yet more delicate than a horse...

The bank was rather steep, but he took it no hesitation up to the soyfields that line the river. Magical. Almost made me forget the mighty bald eagle that flew from a log downriver right before I took that turn.

Don't you ... forget about me.

Peggy Noonan reminds us she's out there, and offers some speechwriter's tips in her column today* :

No reason to join the pile on, but some small points. Two growing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others "experts in academia" on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the "small people" in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.

And when speaking of why proper precautions and safety measures were not in place, the president sternly declared, "I want to know why." But two months in he should know. And he should be telling us. Such empty sternness is . . . empty.

Throughout the speech the president gestured showily, distractingly, with his hands. Politicians do this now because they're told by media specialists that it helps them look natural. They don't look natural, they look like Ann Bancroft gesticulating to Patty Duke in "The Miracle Worker."

The president could move his hands because he was not holding a hard copy of his speech. Normally presidents have had a printed copy of the speech in their hands or on the desk, in case the teleprompter freezes or fails. Mr. Obama's desk was shiny and empty. A White House aide says the director of Oval Office operations had a hard copy just off camera, and was following along as the president spoke so that if the prompter broke he'd be able to give it to the president at the spot he left off.

But that would look a little startling, an arm suddenly darting into the frame to hand the president a script. And the pages could fall. If one were in the mood for a cheap metaphor one would say this is an example of the White House's tendency not to anticipate trouble.

* Just in case the influx of BP flush money doesn't solve all the administration's troubles in the Gulf region, and the crude is still spewing post-August. (Not to put a damper on this week's celebratory attitudes and all ... )

Mississippi River can't keep us apart...

There's too much love in this Mississippi heart...
Too much love in this Louisiana heart...

If you leave a man alone to fish...

he will feed himself and master his needs. Maybe teach his kids to wet a line too.

If you take away his fishing grounds, and pay him handsomely for the privilege of not fishing ... he really hasn't hit the jackpot.

It's a shame to pretend whoever gets some of that $20 billion largess -- to be distributed in a notably corrupt political environment -- is a winner.

I think we should make a point to track every penny of the payouts -- which we didn't bother to do both in Iraq, or with the TARP monies. (Look and plan ahead, not behind.)

Let's see who exactly is getting what -- down to the penny -- to try and avoid some of the fraud we saw after the hurricanes. We've got that "it would be a shame to let a national emergency go to political waste" mindset on the loose already down there...

Ask the Indians what happens when you pay a man not to fish.

Tight-fittin' Jeans.

Here's a Conway Twitty classic to remind all us Americans that despite our growing class differences, we're not the Brits yet!* Crossover is still possible, and remember folks -- nekkid, it's another set of assets that's valued:

She tried to hide it by the faded denim clothes she wore
But I knew she'd never been inside a bar before
And I felt like a peasant who just had met a queen
And she knew I saw right through her tight fittin' jeans

I ask her what's a woman like you doin' here
I see you're use to champagne but I'll buy you a beer
She said you've got me figured out but I'm not what I seem
And for a dance I'll tell you 'bout these tight fittin' jeans...

* Locked into our permanent economic stations, and reduced to the huge organizational mentality that has us fighting in rigid formation rather than relying on the local landscape and taking cover behind trees, as more flexible fighters -- Minutemen -- instinctually knew to do...

The post where David Bernstein wins me over.

Copyright apologies to Volokh, but I'm lifting the whole thing:

That Explains It
David Bernstein • June 17, 2010 9:12 am

Washington Times:

Pornography normalizes sexual harm, Dr. Cooper said. It shows children a lack of any kind of emotional commitment or relationship between two consensual partners, shows unprotected sexual contact and visual examples often of violent rape.

“When a child sees this image of adult pornography, the mirror neurons that are in their brain will convince them that they are actually experiencing what they are seeing,” she said.

Children are very vulnerable as compared to adults because of the presence of mirror neurons in the brain, Dr. Cooper said. Mirror neurons are part of the brain that convince us that when we see something we are actually experiencing it.

I’ve wondered for years why, when I eight, I thought I lived on a lush island with a giant puppet with a huge head, an Australian boy with a talking flute, and a witch with a very strange nose. So now I know.


Categories: Junk Science and Quackspertise No Comments

Lol!

Another day.

Don't get me wrong: the money is good if it materializes as promised, is fairly distributed and not played as a short-term political slush fund that's all well and gone 20 years down the line when cancers from the environmental fallout might just be getting diagnosed.

Still, a lil part of me would loved to have seen a courtroom showdown between a homegrown Mississippi trial lawyer and an international team of oil company executive lawyers.

Cathartic justice, plus some down-home American showmanship and all...

"Show me the Money!! "

Why do I have this image of Rahm bouncing on the Oval Office furniture -- from couch to desktop and back again -- juicing up Obama to go into that meeting yesterday with BP execs to DEMAND justice be served?

"C'mon. That's all you got? History-making, Nobel-Prize winning president -- no cap that P = President! -- of the United States, and you give me a half-hearted request?"

"Um ... Show me the money! ... Better?"

"This is for all the marbles. The small people. The dying dreams. The generations losing a livelihood -- maybe never fish again..."

"Show me the Money!!"

"More, harder, this is your job on the line too, you know!"

"SHOW ME THE MONEY!!"

"Good. Now get in there and do some negotiating! Yes We Can!"

Gail Collins in the NYT approves, though her logic comparing this to the successful healthcare passage is a bit suspect (talk about money transferring, and too big to fail):

Obama held back on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, he and the BP chairman announced that the company — which is, in theory, only liable for $75 million in economic damage payments — was forgoing its dividend and setting up a $20 billion fund to compensate the workers and businesses who have been harmed by the spill.

In the negotiations, Obama said, he had stressed that for many of the small business owners, families and fishing crews “this is not a matter of dollars and cents, that a lot of these folks don’t have a cushion.” His brief remarks were more effective than his 18-minute effort the night before, particularly when coupled with all that cash.
...
As a political leader, Barack Obama seems to know what he’s doing. His unsatisfying call for a new energy policy sounded very much like the rhetoric on health care reform that used to drive Democrats nuts: open to all ideas, can’t afford inaction, if we can put a man on the moon. ... But at the end of that health care slog, he wound up with the groundbreaking law that had eluded his predecessors for decades. The process of wringing it out of Congress was so slow and oblique that even when it was over it was hard to appreciate what he’d won. But win he did.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Adler over at the Volokh blog agrees with the Univ. of Chicago's Richard Epstein that going forward, there should be no statutory liability limits effectively making a pay-as-you-go cost calculation accepted, as industries often do, as merely the price of doing business:

BP may have agreed to pay all legitimate claims, despite the Oil Pollution Act’s statutory limit on damages, but we should not assume future tortfeasors will act in a similar fashion. And while there are serious questions about the advisability and constitutionality of altering BP’s liability after-the-fact, there is no reason not to remove statutory limits on damages going forward. A more sensible — and strict — set of liability rules can do more to safeguard environmental values than muchprescriptive regulation.

Individuals, and Organizations.

Matt Bai in the NYT takes a look at the current political status quo, and America's increasing acceptance of mediocrity ... for the time being, at least:

Most Democrats, after all, persist in embracing populism as it existed in the early part of the last century — that is, strictly as a function of economic inequality. In this worldview, the oppressed are the poor, and the oppressors are the corporate interests who exploit them.

That made sense 75 years ago, when a relatively small number of corporations — oil and coal companies, steel producers, car makers — controlled a vast segment of the work force and when government was a comparatively anemic enterprise. In recent decades, however, as technology has reshaped the economy, more and more Americans have gone to work for smaller or more decentralized employers, or even for themselves, while government has exploded in size and influence. (It’s not incidental that the old manufacturing unions, like the autoworkers and steelworkers, have been eclipsed in membership and political influence by those that represent large numbers of government workers.)

Since this transformation took place, a succession of liberal politicians — Jesse Jackson, Jerry Brown, John Edwards — have tried to run for president on a traditionally populist, anticorporate platform, with little success. That is because today’s only viable brand of populism, the same strain that Ross Perot expertly tapped as an independent presidential candidate in 1992, is not principally about the struggling worker versus his corporate master. It is about the individual versus the institution — not only business, but also government and large media and elite universities, too.

You do not have to be working for the minimum wage, after all, to seethe about the effects of the Wall Street meltdown on your retirement savings or the spilled oil creeping toward your shores. You simply have to fear that large institutions generally exercise too much power and too little responsibility in society.

This new American populism is why the federal deficit has emerged as a chief concern for voters, as it did in Mr. Perot’s era — not because it presents an imminent crisis of its own, necessarily, but because it signifies a kind of institutional recklessness, a disconnectedness from the reality of daily life.

The same dynamic explains the current spate of questions over the composition of the Supreme Court, which may soon consist entirely of lawyers trained at Harvard and Yale. It does not seem to matter that virtually all of those justices advanced from the middle class, rather than through inheritance. The pervasive reach of exclusive educational institutions is unnerving to some Americans now, and it helps inspire the caustic brand of populism that Sarah Palin and others have made central to their political identities.

What this means for Mr. Obama is that an anxious populace is now less likely to see his clash with BP as an instance of government’s standing up to a venal corporation, but rather as an instance of both sprawling institutions having once again failed to protect them. In a poll conducted last month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, 63 percent of respondents rated BP’s handling of the oil leak as fair or poor. But the government fared only modestly better, with 54 percent giving it the same dismal marks.

In other words, voters perceive both business and government as part of an interdependent system, and it is hard for them to separate out the culpability of either. Mr. Obama acknowledged as much in his speech Tuesday, when he asserted — in his lone criticism of government’s role in the crisis — that the bureau in charge of monitoring the oil companies had effectively been colluding with them instead.

All of which leaves the old kind of anticorporate populism — “the people versus the powerful,” as Al Gore put it — a beat behind the times, sort of like “flower power” or the Laffer Curve. Mr. Obama and his party are probably right to presume that voters don’t trust BP or any of the powerful companies the president has taken to castigating on a regular basis. The problem is that they don’t trust Washington to stand up for them, either.

To everything, turn turn turn...

Personally, I still believe in the power of Hope and Change. This current crew though? Not fit to loosen sandal straps this summer...

His announcement was, "There is One coming after me mightier than I--One whose sandal-strap I am unworthy to stoop down and unfasten.

You'll be counting years, first 5 then 10...

growing old in a lonely hell...
Round the yard in a stinkin cell
from wall to wall, then back again.
~The Pogues Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham 6 mix, for your listening pleasure. (May the whores of the empire lie awake in their beds / And sweat as they count out the sins on their heads...)

Because it's not every day -- or two -- you see the Brits apologizing and taking responsibility for their actions. Reaping the whirlwind they've sown, and all that.

The best and the brightest?

or, Where have you gone, Peggy Noonan... ?

Lose the young speechwriter, Mr. Obama. Too much telling, not enough showing.

I'm sure Jon Favreau helped win the presidency -- he captured that youth voice needed to beat Hillary's experience. The "Hello tomorrow!" attitude that attracted the young people, and their wanna-be-with-it Boomer parents.

Trouble is, that youth voice is struggling mightily now. The inspiration is gone. Referencing the tanks, the moon shot ... it sounded like somebody flipping through wikipedia for inspiring moments.

Telling us "Hey, I have principles too" sounds too much like a direct response to criticism that this prez is just a schoolboy mouthing the words, with no idea at all how to lead, other than to assign others work and stand above them cracking a whip...

I think Mr. Favreau has run his course in the inspiration department: a smart young man, but essentially, a safely suburban-raised one, born 6/2/81. Now I'm not an ageist, but let's put this young man -- essentially the president's mouthpiece (or is that Gibbs?) -- in perspective: not the son of immigrants; no family economic struggle; a Catholic education and civil upbringing during the safe, late 20th century American heydays -- not that there's anything wrong with that...

It's just something's missing.

The magic that charmed in the campaign -- the boobie coddling of the political establishment, represented by Hillary; the understanding of Ronald Reagan only from a second-hand perspective, which we saw in all that "I got religion!" wrap-up last night -- it's not in the moment.

The moment -- is a somber one. It's working people out of jobs. It's educations not worth much without connections as far as making a dollar or two. It's the people being punished at the pumps for the failures of the well-paid managers and leadership class.

It's the corporations running the country.

Unless Mr. Favreau picks up a quick degree in fiction or creative writing, I think the president ought to look elsewhere for his next inspirational speech. I suspect we'll be hearing another -- perhaps with more longer-term foreign policy consequences -- before his term is up.

It'd be nice maybe if we could even fool ourselves into thinking it was the president's voice himself we were hearing -- his words put to paper, and then delivered to the nation. Because surely I'm not the only one voting no confidence in the beer-pong-playing boy who helped win in November, but falls short as the seasons progress...

Voice of maturity-- next time, go for that. Who knows? Maybe the president could even bring forth that voice from within himself, based on his own life experiences. Sure beats what a 29-year-old speechwriter has to offer in the way of inspiration, I suspect.

Puts a song in this heart of mine.

Puts a smile on my face every time...
Showers wash all my cares away.
I wake up to a ... sunny day.

ADDED: "Aww... raining again."

Complete lyrics.

I want you to know...

I believe in your song.

Rhythm and rhyme and harmony...

War Games.

This footage made me think of the 80s movie War Games:

Joshua: Shall we play a game?
David Lightman: Oh!
Jennifer: [giggles] I think it missed him.
David Lightman: Yeah. Weird isn't it?
Jennifer: Yeah.
David Lightman: [typing] Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?
Joshua: Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?
[Jennifer laughs]
David Lightman: [typing] Later. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War.
Joshua: Fine.
...
David Lightman: [typing] What is the primary goal?
Joshua: You should know, Professor. You programmed me.
David Lightman: Oh, come on.
David Lightman: [typing] What is the primary goal?
Joshua: To win the game.
...
David Lightman: [to Joshua] Come on. Learn, goddammit.

[after playing out all possible outcomes for Global Thermonuclear War]
Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

Make it easier for the younger ones coming up...

Here's an interesting question -- in light of my observation below of a Wisconsin law professor whose daughter was recently hired to teach there, that arises from a column by feminist Linda Hirshman:

Sarah Palin, the antiabortion conservative icon, has been proclaiming herself a feminist since the 2008 election. After all, didn't she figure out a way to "have it all"—a passel of children, a first dude, and a big job in the public sphere? Palin sure looks more like Betty Friedan than those liberal mommybloggers pushing their strollers around the Upper West Side all day. Palin recently used the F word again at a meeting of the antiabortion Republican women's activist group Susan B. Anthony List, extending the brand to the conservative women flooding into politics, both at the grassroots and candidate level. "Mama Grizzlies," she called the new conservative feminists, lured from the kitchen table where, unlike her, they apparently spend most of their time, to save the nation's unbalanced checkbook from women-threatening things like health care. Their desire to criminalize abortion is merely a way of showing respect for women who can easily combine unexpected pregnancies with any other life plans, she says.

When Palin went "feminist," the "feminist blogosphere" lit up like a scoreboard at a hockey mom game, as young bloggers struggled to reconcile their oath never to judge another woman's "choices" as unfeminist with Palin's application for sisterhood.
...
Fiorina and Palin's pitches reveal graphically how selfish their brand of feminism is. With the addition of a hefty dose of good luck, and, in Fiorina's case, the value of a privileged family background, they made it. So their public policy is not to make it any easier for any woman who comes after them with, say, control of her reproduction or health care separate from her husband's job. Somehow the brilliant light of their narcissism is supposed to blind voters to the fact that there's another response to making it. Here's what real—not grizzly—mothers do: Make it easier for the young ones coming along next.

What exactly does "making it easier for the younger ones coming along next" mean to modern-day feminists?

Merely a level playing field? Equal rights, meaning non-discrimination, under the law? Or does it mean legacy appointments for proper feminists? A good-ole-gals club, akin to the good-ole-boys club that discouraged female entrants for so many years?

No really -- I'd like to know.

Get on board...

The New York Times, via Timothy Egan, tries to capture the country's mood. Show that they too, who so often scorn smallness and simplicity, get it:

(C)onsider the consequence of a huge oil leak. If the crew of Apollo 13 had failed, they would have lost their lives. BP had only to look at Exxon. After the worst oil spill in American history, Exxon spent nearly two decades trying to game a legal system that should have brought them to within an inch of their corporate life.

In the end, Exxon prevailed. The Supreme Court of John Roberts, a compliant pet of the corporate world, ruled for Big Oil. The original jury award of $5 billion ended up being around $500 million — a few days’ earnings. Exxon flourished beyond its dreams, reporting in 2008 the largest annual profit for an American company in history.

Similarly, the Wall Street titans who crashed the American economy did not go to jail, or even give up their gilded cocoons. They were rewarded with federal bailouts, and by Christmas of last year, bonuses were back, as if nothing had happened.

It’s not too late to reverse this trend. Congress could pass the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Act, which would raise liability caps in a spill from the laughable level of $75 million to $10 billion. That would sting. There is a real possibility that BP could go bankrupt. That would set off alarms in every boardroom. And somebody on Wall Street might still see the inside of a prison.

What’s needed is the return of a basic law of nature, the one used by those Apollo heroes to get home: gravity.

Gravity. The gravity of a situation. That's a word akin to passion, showing you know how to set priorities and take the right tone in leading the way forward.

Because unlike earlier pundits who made light of the situation, how can you expect the corporate people to even try and do the right thing, if they know how easily we're willing to throw up our hands and give up? "Whoop -- nothing we can do. Just the natural consequences of mis-taken risks..."

Look where that kind of attitude has gotten us thus far. All of us, not the select few.

Putting it all together...

We see Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews, their play on the ice. We watch as goaltender Antti Niemi deflects, redirects or covers the puck -- whatever it takes -- to protect his team's lead.

But who put all these talents together? Who did the deals, giving each what he needed to commit, and in hockey especially -- grow his developing skills?

Who brought Coach Joel Quenneville in as a scout, and subsequently promoted him to head coach to lead the championship charge?

This guy. Dale Tallon, who spent 33 years with the Blackhawks as a player, broadcaster and team executive before he "reportedly mismanaged qualifying offers to the Blackhawks' restricted free agents" and left their employment last summer.

Where is he now? In South Florida, sportswriter Greg Stoda tells us today, hired on as general manager and hoping to work his restructuring magic in a southern market, stocked with northern transplants no doubt eager to form the fan base of a winning team:

Now, it's Tallon who gives the Panthers their best reason in many, many years to dream big dreams.

He declared nobody on the Florida roster to be an untouchable, and said he has his own blueprint to follow - the Blackhawks - when it comes to restructuring the Panthers.

"I'm not afraid to steal from what works," Tallon said.

He hopes to establish a "puck possession, up-tempo" aggressive style of play, which Panthers head coach Peter DeBoer called "preaching to the choir" as his kind of game.

"That's how I want to play," DeBoer said. "You have to be open to shuffling the deck. It's the identity we want."

The Panthers have lacked an identity of any kind other than patsy for quite some time. Florida went 32-50 last season for 77 points to rank near the bottom of the NHL in what DeBoer called "a step backward." Tallon, though, professed to be as undaunted now as he was when he took charge of the Blackhawks when they, too, were among the league dregs.

"It didn't take long," Tallon said.

The Blackhawks, in fact, made steady annual progress in Tallon's charge, and then accumulated 112 points this season to establish themselves among the league's elite teams.

Tallon won't attend today's championship gala in Chicago - "I don't like parades," he said - but might make an exception in another area.

"I told them when I signed a lot of them that I don't drink, but I'd drink out of the Stanley Cup with them," Tallon said.

Just think...

This young woman knows of Moses and Aaron, and has yet -- most likely -- to hear of the power of Mary's intercessions. Sometimes a rich faith tradition, grounded in religion or long-honored family rituals, nurtures the very material necessary to grow our next generations.

Then Adele read from the scroll and her clear voice, her young mind and those ancient desert-sprung sounds took everyone far from sound-bite squalor.

Her portion was about the Korah rebellion and God’s sweeping punishment of it.

In her subsequent speech, she said, “I think that God didn’t understand that not everyone was behind this rebellion, only Korah and his followers, because He isn’t human. He doesn’t understand how the human race works, and Moses and Aaron do because they are humans. In my opinion that is the main reason that God has Moses and Aaron, to help Him understand the human race and help fix conflicts in a calm and rational way.”

Calling God’s harsh reaction “a hasty decision,” she suggested that “Judaism begins to teach us that God and humans together can be partners in keeping each other calm and rational.”

Garden photos...

tomorrow. The plants and cover look best damp, in the morning.

Ignorance in action.

What is it about Ireland that encourages otherwise intelligent people to "climb over one gate" and trespass amongst curious farm animals? (Would you pull the same stunt in Wisconsin?) Nevermind not being able to distinguish between a bull and a herd of dairy cows...

You'd think an intelligent traveller might read up on her destination, and know a wee bit o' history before spoutin' expertise:

No, thank you, I just want the house.

It’s for sale now. A republican owns it, you know. I ponder the meaning of this comment: is the former presence of Great Britain here still on the minds of some? Ireland is a young republic (becoming formally an independent republic after World War II). An older man may still have feelings about the division between the north and south.

I think she must be confusing Ireland with Israel: The Irish Republic came into being after the 1918 Easter Uprising, which followed WWI, not the Second War.

When you can't tell a cow from a bull, and you stumble on such basic history, I'm beginning to wonder the accuracy of the rest of Nina's European travels...

But do tell me: how the heck do you get your kid right out of Yale undergrad and law school, with maybe a year or two practicing privately, hired on as a law professor at Wisconsin, where we value "Law in Action" knowledge...

On Friday we disperse. But I’m okay with that. My girls are coming back to Madison this summer: the littlest one will be waiting for her Chicago job to begin in January, and the older one will begin her own teaching career at our Law School.

I'm still amazed.

And some day, we'll all learn how to spin a passport oversight into American citizenship. Such luck, indeed!

Gone to the dogs.

Mitt Romney* in USA Today:

...
So far, it has been the CEO of BP who has been managing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The president surely can't rely on BP — its track record is suspect at best: Its management of this crisis has been characterized by obfuscation and lack of preparation. And BP's responsibilities to its shareholders conflict with the greater responsibility to the nation and to the planet.

The president must personally lead the effort to solve the crisis. He cannot delegate this quintessential responsibility of his presidency in the way he delegated the stimulus bill, the cap-and-trade bill and the health care bill. It may be an instance of learning on the job, but it is a job only he can do.

The first rule of turnarounds is to focus time, energy and resources on what matters most. The president simply cannot treat this crisis like another of his many problems. The oil disaster could hurt millions of families, slam the regional economy, kill untold numbers of non-human lives and irreparably damage the planet. Among other things, he must not hold more rock concerts at the White House...

Finding fault is easier than finding answers. And worse, it paralyzes many of the very people who may be needed to solve a crisis. When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast states, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco went on the attack; Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour went to work. His state's recovery is textbook; hers is not.

President Obama's instigation of criminal investigations of BP at this juncture is classic diversion politics — and worse, it will engender bunker mentality at a time when collaboration and openness are most critical. BP's actions and inactions are reprehensible; it must be made to pay the billions upon billions of dollars that this spill will ultimately cost. But call out the phalanx of lawyers later — solve the crisis today.

The president can learn a good deal from the crisis leadership of men and women in government and in business. Giuliani is a notable example, but so too are Washington, Adams, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan and Kennedy. In a time of national crisis, we look to our president to acknowledge, as Harry Truman did, that it is at his desk where the buck stops.

And even at Day 52, it's better late than never.

* Remember Mitt? He'd been brought up in political circles, learning it as the family business, even had a bit of executive experience under his belt leading a liberal state and salvaging the Salt Lake City Olympics business plan.

Why'd we discount him again? Oh yeah. Bad pet parenting practices 30 years ago, when he put the dog carrier atop the car because there was no room in the station wagon on the family vacation...

Wonder why all those columnists who became so protective, in retrospect, at the treatment of Seamus the Irish setter, weren't screeching too, in retrospect, that he dared take that vacation with all those boys unbuckled in the back. Where is the sense, retrospectively, of safety norms? Good thing Seamus -- and the boys -- survived such a cruel, cruel family vacation planned by das kruel father leader, eh?

Hawkey's #1.

Congrats to the San Jose Sharks and the Philadelphia Flyers, who had a great season and an amazing playoff run respectively, but who were bested this year by a young team a step faster who really wanted this win and went out and got it.

I love that tradition for the players of bringing the Cup ... home.

Although Roseau, Minnesota has had its share of hockey champs, only Neal Broten has won the Stanley and chose elsewhere when he had his day with the hardware. But Dustin Byfuglien surely will deliver and the little town too will get its hands on the thing. Success has many fathers.

Kismet.

If these two ever split up, I'm gonna be bummed...

Because, I believe in love.

What I learned at Joe Biden's SuperSoaker party...

By the chief political consultant to CBS news, who was excited to be invited with the children to Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel's watergun party at the White House.

(You think I make this stuff up...)

What bemuses insiders is the idea that Obama is somehow a stoic. That's laughable. There's a healthy amount of dopamine in the president. In private, the president can be witheringly sarcastic and profane. He can also be light, playful; he is rarely sad, occasionally angry, and always upbeat. This Spock has emotions. What he does not do -- and what he is poor at doing -- is fake an emotion simply for the sake of appearing to display an emotion.
...
When Obama is angry, when he is frustrated, he begins to take stock of arguments; his anger shifts him into law professor mode. He struggles to pack facts into his pre-frontal cortex. He wants to get the decision right. Now, sometimes, he gets paralyzed by analysis ... but even here, we make the mistake of separating rationality from emotion. Unless the man's brain is wired differently, even the process of weighing evidence is washed by the emotional processors of his limbic system.

And they say Maureen Dowd looks silly and needs a Daddy figure. Based on this kind of insider access and, ahem, prefrontal cortex packing ...

Is it any wonder this fella works for the same journalistic organization that employs Andrew Sullivan?? The new journalism, indeed.

Do you think David Halberstam would have played water sports with Rahm Emanuel and then proudly giggled about it afterward on his Twitter feed?

Well, do ya punk?

Spanking the Dog ?

I'm not exactly sure what Brooks was thinking of when he wrote of the dangers of "The Big Shaggy", but I thought of this:

Still, I thought it was Collins, and not Brooks, assigned to the NYT sex-scandal beat?

Inspiring the young people.

Maybe the "up from single parenthood" theme goes better with the oldsters than the youngsters in the audience. Maybe instead of this speech all about him, the president might have talked to the young Michigan man behind him for five minutes about what's going on his life, and had a greater impact.

Keepin' it real.

Lauer urges Obama to get kickin'.

Interestingly, if you watched that Today interview, it looks like the president was fed the kick-ass line by Lauer, who suggested that people were growing impatient and perhaps looking for the president to "kick some butt".

A few questions and sentences later came the president's explanation that he's not just conducting a college seminar, but meeting with experts to decide whose ass to kick.

ps: Interestin', isn't it, how the president takes to droppin' his g's when he's tryin' to relate to the common people? "Livelihoods bein' smothered"... "We've got to keep on movin', keep on pushin'"...

Very Sarah Palin, eh?

Dear God...

Professor Obama is on my t.v., opining to Lauer on whether baseball, like football and basketball, should adopt the instant replay.

Below your pay grade, Mr. President. Below your pay grade...

On Helen Thomas.

It's a bit like bringing down a dotty professor emeritas, isn't it? The victory celebrations are a bit out of proportion to Helen's "threat", dontchathink?

Pretending Helen Thomas' honorary status and the courtesy deferences she was given in anyway made her a powerful player... well, that's a bit like pretending she was advocating "ethnic cleansing" with her ill-chosen words.

Funny, but I've heard of Jews visiting Poland and Germany these days, even living there, and nobody put them on trains or turned them into lampshades or bars of soap.

Let's stop living in the 1930s and 40s, and keep these types of "threats" in perspective. Crying wolf and overestimating the danger represented by 89-year-old Lebanese women serves no one.

She resigned already; let's not too juiced at the victory that we lose sight of more important things happening in the region, which will demand our full attention and wise policy-making soon enough...

(and yeah: 89-year-old women generally are past their "pretty" days. Concentrating on her appearance over her words just goes to show the general lack of substance on topic. And apparently, a lack of other worthy issues to generate copy on.)

Bleeding Red.

Some people -- the conservative young kids, especially -- have been led to believe that Ronald Reagan's charisma and leadership ended the Cold War, bringing about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Well, partly...

Reagan led by identifying core principles, and sticking to them. Playing toughball with the Soviets, if it was only a war of words* and escalating defense budgets.

Truth be told, the Soviets beat themselves. Spent more than they had. Overextended themselves in Afghanistan while trying to compete with American defense spending, and neglecting their basic population needs at home.

Eventually, it all added up (or didn't) and the regime crumbled from within, with Gorbachev and Glasnost opening doors to a new way of life for the people. Or maybe the doors weren't opened so much, but effectively kicked down...

Today marks 104 months for American troops in Afghanistan. Mission "Like Us" doesn't have clearly defined goals so much, just a vague strategy of clearing out Taliban fighters, and primarily -- befriending the local populations, in the hopes that our construction and bringing of goodies like schools and wells to the Afghan people will help them accept our way of life and reject the Taliban baddies, long after American troops are gone.

I saw on 60 Minutes, I think it was, a poor 24-year-old troop leader, communicating through interpreters to tell elder tribesmen that if they work with the Americans, they will be safe and protected. If you were them, would you have faith in such promises?

Didn't we promise long ago -- conservatives and dems -- that there would be no military forces committed to "nation building"? 1,000 American troops dead in Afghanistan, compared to the 28,000 the Soviets lost fighting there. And still bleeding red fiscally. Gives a patriot pause for concern...

Bob Herbert is right. It's time to recalculate America's priorities, and focus on our own economy and cleanup war in the gulf. The Gulf of Mexico. We can't be the world's policeman when we should be playing defense here at home. The best way to get others to emulate our lifestyles and reject extremism at home is to offer up a worthy example.

America 2010 -- this ain't it.

Unemployment is crushing families and stifling the prospects of young people. Given that reality, President Obama’s take on the May numbers seemed oddly out of touch. “This report,” he said, “is a sign that our economy is getting stronger by the day.”

The economy is sick, and all efforts to revive it that do not directly confront the staggering levels of joblessness are doomed. Even the meager job growth in the private sector last month was composed mostly of temporary work. Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, had the right take when he said, “These new data do not present a picture of a healthy private sector and offer nothing even closely resembling the job growth we need to dig us out of a very deep hole.”
...
It’s impossible to overstate the threat that this crisis of unemployment poses to the well-being of the United States. With so many people out of work and so much of the rest of the population deeply in debt, where is the spending going to come from to power a true economic recovery?
...
Policy makers have acted as if they are unaware of the magnitude of this crisis. They have behaved as though somehow, through some economic magic perhaps, or the power of prayer, this ocean of joblessness will just disappear. That’s a pipe dream.

Even if we somehow experienced a sudden, extraordinary surge in job growth (which no one is expecting), it would take a very long time just to get back to the level of employment that we had when the recession started in late-2007.
...
For all the money that has been spent so far, the Obama administration and Congress have not made the kinds of investments that would put large numbers of Americans back to work and lead to robust economic growth. What is needed are the same things that have been needed all along: a vast program of infrastructure repair and renewal; an enormous national investment in clean energy aimed at transforming the way we develop and use energy in this country; and a transformation of the public schools to guarantee every child a first-rate education in a first-rate facility.

This would be a staggeringly expensive and difficult undertaking and would entail a great deal of shared sacrifice. (It would also require an end to our insane waste of resources on mindless and endless warfare.) The benefits over the long term would be enormous.

Bold and effective leadership would have put us on this road to a sustainable future. Instead, we’re approaching a dead end.

------------------------

*Say what you will about Ronald Reagan's policies and his acting skills: you never for a second believed the man was just mouthing the words. He passionately believed in what he was selling, and the people too bought in.

What's the good of having Barack Obama's charismatic skills, if he's still delegating/debating/compromising on the vision -- as we saw in the sausage-making process that gave us an unconstitutional healthcare law that does little to address the systematic problems it set out to cure?

Grading on the Curve.

"I was down there a month ago, before most of these talking heads were even paying attention to the Gulf," Obama told NBC's "Today" show in an interview scheduled to air Tuesday.

"A month ago I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be."

Isn't there any middle ground between promises of "kicking ass" while partying with celebs, and keeping your administration's nose to the grindstone and working through these troubles day by day by boring day?

Sure the presidency is a prize, plus it's summertime and the livin' is easy...

But rolling up the blouse sleeves for the cameras, and standing in the rain for some photo-ops? Talking tough w/Matt Lauer? Sheer showmanship. It might win a campaign, but it won't turn the country around.

Can't the administration gauge the American people's mood this summer, and show they're part of the team too? Tone it down for Summer 2010 -- lots of work still to do and perceptions matter.

A variety of critics have accused Obama of being too cerebral in his reaction to the undersea gusher now fouling the Gulf of Mexico, of failing to put the full force of the administration and of putting too much trust in oil company BP. But Obama told NBC his deliberations have been more than academic.

"I don't sit around talking to experts because this is a college seminar," Obama continued. "We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."

The disaster was uncorked by an explosion aboard the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon on April 20 that killed 11 workers. The rig sank two days later, and estimates of the amount of oil pouring into the gulf from the undersea blowout grew rapidly in the following week.

Obama made a May 2 visit to the Coast Guard command center in Venice, Louisiana, warning during a rain-spattered news conference that the problem may take "many days" to solve.

Ouch !

Or ... Yes We Can.

It's not about the anger, stupid.

It's about the passion.

Frank Rich, of whose work I'm usually not a fan -- I've tried, but he seems to deliberately insult those not in partisan lockstep with him -- absolutely spanks it out of the park today:

It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him.

Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.

BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy.

BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
...
If Obama is to have a truly transformative presidency, there could be no better catalyst than oil. Standard Oil jump-started Progressive Era trust-busting. Sinclair Oil’s kickback-induced leases of Wyoming’s Teapot Dome oilfields in the 1920s led to the first conviction and imprisonment of a presidential cabinet member (Harding’s interior secretary) for a crime committed while in the cabinet. The Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s and the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 sped the conservation movement and search for alternative fuels. The Enron scandal prompted accounting reforms and (short-lived) scrutiny of corporate Ponzi schemes.

This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot-point for Obama, who shares many of that president’s moral and intellectual convictions. But Obama can’t embrace his inner T.R. as long as he’s too in thrall to the supposed wisdom of the nation’s meritocracy, too willing to settle for incremental pragmatism as a goal, and too inhibited by the fine points of Washington policy debates to embrace bold words and bold action. If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.

You see, unless I'm reading the country wrong, it doesn't matter whether you're red state or blue state, a recently rooted American or if the streets in town were named after your people: we want a stronger and more independent America. We want to fight back, not get in bed with these people.

The corporate values currently leading the country, this "too big to fail" mentality, is choking off any hopes of incremental growth for those Americans willing to seize opportunities, sacrifice, and mix time with their talents while patiently building results and living within their means. But dreams die when we're all called to account paying off the bills of the big boys who risked big and lost, and were unable to cover their bets.

Some people put their faith in candidate Obama's promises of change this past election. Some people bought into the "outsider coming to clean house" narrative that dates back to overturning tables in the temples. Some saw what they wanted: a skinny black John Wayne, say, combining brains with a brashness uniquely American.

Our oldsters as well as our youngsters knew something different had to be done: the second Bush presidency, and our foreign and financial entanglements, exposed the myths of superpower dominancy and our own "too big to fail" entitlement mentality that the Boom generation has been raised on.

Yet here we are: no more averting our eyes to the results of our risk taking. The people don't want a Daddy, and what's really silly is to say that those who want a passionate response and a ... well, defense have unmet psychological needs.* He needent be a black John Wayne, but somehow, he's got to start fighting.

Nevermind who gets credit -- Who Shot Liberty Valance? -- the collective actions of the little guys still count. Even if just in the voting booth.

The sooner our president demonstrates via his actions and his priorities that he understand Rich's point above, the sooner the American people can trust that we've got leaders capable of actually leading people and not just scoring good grades, winning praises and rewards, and landing lucrative positions based on all that promise.

---------------------

Collins and Brooks, 5/26/10:

Gail Collins: If TV trivia doesn’t work, let’s go with the oil disaster. We agreed a few weeks back that Obama was handling it well. Now, although I don’t see what he could have done different, it doesn’t feel as if it’s going to go down in history as one of the great achievements of the administration.

The chattering class seems to feel Obama should be acting angrier, which doesn’t do much for me. I’m tired of making judgments about the way somebody appears, rather than what he’s actually done. Although I cannot promise I will never again make fun of worthy politicians who get into silly situations.

David Brooks: I persist in the belief that unless Barack Obama has a degree in underwater engineering that he’s not telling anybody about, there’s really not a lot, post-spill, he could be doing. Like you, I’m not a huge fan of presidential grandstanding. The idea that the president is the big national daddy who can take care of all our problems is silly.

ADDED:
I found this concession a bit troubling too:

But the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.

Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.

These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.

If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.

Resign before you wave that white flag on behalf of the rest of us? Surrendering to corporate bigness now is exactly the opposite response we want to be undertaking.

Truth be told: the world is round, and what goes around tends to come around. Whether it's oil gushing unchecked and unknown toxins being dumped into the food chain, or ill-advised international actions that indeed have worldwide consequences.

Nobody said this would be a Sunday picnic: gird those loins, Mr. President, and for heaven's sake, surround yourself with those Americans who still believe in playing defense and not those who would have us surrender to supposedly superior forces...

Oil Slick in Paradise .

Jimmy Buffett hopes you'll come down to visit his new Pensacola hotel, opening in two weeks.

The coast is clear...

Long time ago when we was Fab .

We will not rest...

*bumped from below*

Conservative Egyptians snag a court win.

It's not exactly Loving v. Virginia:

By MAAMOUN YOUSSEF
The Associated Press

CAIRO — An Egyptian appeals court on Saturday upheld a ruling that orders the country's Interior Ministry to strip the citizenship from Egyptians married to Israeli women.

The case underlines the deep animosity many Egyptians still hold toward Israelis, despite a peace treaty signed between the two countries 31 years ago.

The Supreme Administrative Court's decision also scores a point for Egyptian hard-liners who have long resisted any improvement in ties with Israel since the signing of the 1979 peace treaty.

In upholding last year's lower court ruling, the appeals court said Saturday that the Interior Ministry should present each marriage case to the Cabinet on an individual basis. The Cabinet will then rule on whether to strip the Egyptian of his citizenship.

The court also said officials should take into consideration whether a man married an Israeli Arab or a Jew when making its decision to revoke citizenship.

Saturday's decision, which cannot be appealed, comes more than year after a lower court ruled that the Interior Ministry, which deals with citizenship documents, must implement the 1976 article of the citizenship law. That bill revokes citizenship of Egyptians who married Israelis who have served in the army or embrace Zionism as an ideology.
...
Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the late Grand Sheik of Cairo's Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's premier institution and oldest university, has said that while marriage between an Egyptian man and an Israeli woman is not religiously forbidden, the government has the right to strip the man of his citizenship for marrying a woman from "an enemy state."

Precious Life.

I've been thinking...
Mr. Shalit is a young man.

It is a crime to take a young man's life -- even a soldier, collectively serving his country's cause. Better yet...

as the mighty power of symbolic gesture, let Israel show she understands that the punitive policies of the past have not worked. Instead of taking Mr. Shalit's life, in a true Fail Safe spin, let them merely unplug Arial "bulldozer" Sharon.

The mighty warrior is already gone. Yet his legacy lives on, a costly one.

Let the Israeli people show in mourning his death, that a new beginning is indeed within their grasp. It's possible to turn away from the reaping of today, what was sowed not so long ago.

Perhaps wise counsel to his sons might allow the switch of Mr. Shalit, remaining in custody, for the sacrifice of Sharon whose brain died four years ago already.

You know, as a way of avenging those Turkish deaths and all.

One Shalit for 9 Turks?

What if...
instead of releasing the Israeli soldier, the Palestinians got tough -- akin to the dilemma in Fail Safe.

Whether the continued military incompetence we've seen in earlier invasions of Lebanon and Gaza is responsible for the deaths on the aid ship, or whether some of the dead were indeed summarily executed with 4 bullets to the head, it doesn't really matter.

9 Turks dead. 0 Israeli soldiers, who boarded the aid ship in international waters.

How can Israel compensate for the dead? How can you get an "eye for an eye" Old Testament people to understand the pain their killings are causing to others? More importantly, how do you stop their vicious cycle of incompetent military killings?

Perhaps you even up the death tallies. I believe the rockets that Hamas has fired into Israel have killed exactly one person in recent years -- an Israeli Arab, at that. Yet she feels the need to board aid ships in international waters, and blockade the civilian population of a neighboring unoccupied territory out of some strange legacy of insecurity and a twisted idea of self defense.

It's the imbalance that's killing us here. If Israel is to change, she too must share in the pain. Let her people mourn, like the Turks today, and the Lebanese whose people were killed in the ill-planned invasion.

Mr Shalit is a soldier, not a civilian. What about a simple lethal injection? Give the poor boy a sedative even beforehand; let him make his spiritual amends before taking his life, much as we do condemned prisoners. Don't make him suffer as you take the life from him -- none of this beheading, or victory dancing around the corpse. Deliver the body, intact, to the victim's family for proper timely burial.

War is hell. This is War. Innocent deaths must be avenged, whether caused deliberately or by bumbling incompetence. And the people holding Mr. Shalit aren't bound by any formal rules of standard military convention.

It will be a horrible pain to Shalit's family. I understand that. Soldier Shalit would be a sacrificial lamb, not for any crimes he himself committed, but to make a point that killings affect families, real people.

I think, as so much time as passed since the Holocaust, and Israel has adopted policies of collective punishment and special treatment based on ethnic bloodlines (aparteid roads, anyone?), they have forgotten the pain of innocent deaths. They wail and beat their breasts when incoming rockets call plaster to fall in a settler's illegal home, and a piece of plaster scratches an innocent babe's skin.

For this, they need behave like pirates, overtaking ships in international waters in order to maintain their blockade and punish a people.

The world finally wised up to the treatment of the Holocaust. Americans too are finally waking up to what kind of a country, "an independent democracy", they helped to build in our alleged ally Israel.

Trust me: once that death toll score evens out a bit, and there's more parity on the playing field, the dominant team (on paper) will have an incentive to perform better, with less incompetence causing deaths to others. That unintentional incompetence excuse has played itself out.

RIP Mr. Shalit. May your coming death remind us that pain of loss knows no bloodlines.

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ADDED: Here's a brief look at the lives that were cut short trying to break the Gaza blockade.

A decent summary of the big-picture issues at hand.