Behind the headlines, but not too far

Image from MI Printing.

TOM BROKAW: Well, I really think that, behind the headlines-- this is the Washington Post this morning, and it says that, "Obama sees 2014 as key to his legacy." What we have going on here, 18 months out, are both sides positioning themselves for trying to retain control on the Republican side of the House, and maybe even win the Senate; the president trying to build a legacy of some kind. There's a whole lot of politics in this, as there is in everything else. Kind of two villages, clashing with each other, who seem to occupy a separate universe. (via driftglass)

Drifters didn't get a chance to take formal note of what is to me the most amazing part of this horror, which is that Brokaw knows perfectly well that it's not a question of both sides at all, and is too cynical, or insufficiently sober (has anyone else noticed how drunk he has sounded whenever he pops up on TV over the past ten years or so?) to disguise it. Because that first clause of analysis, from "What we have going on here," says it's about "both sides" but isn't. How many parties are trying to retain control on the Republican side of the House, or maybe even win the Senate? As I count all the parties that have control on the Republican side of the House and haven't won the Senate yet this cycle, I can't get past one.

And then he realizes that grammar has let him down and it's oops, did I let the cat out again? and adding an additional clause, not about the Democrats, who scarcely exist, but the president, who has to be accused of the parallel crime of wanting to, um, accomplish something (the swine! the bloody show-off!).

Cheap shot

Image vis Midtown Miscreant.

It's easy to dump on Dennis Rodman kvelling over his new little friend Kim Jong-eun, but what the hell.

– “I hate the fact that he’s doing that [human rights violations], but the fact is that, you know what, that’s a human being, though. He let his guard down one day to me, a friend.”

"I hate it too, man," said Jong-eun confidentially. "Violating human rights is like so not what I'm about. But you got to cut me some slack. Like I'm only human myself, after all? Like people can constantly be stomping on my feelings and I'm not even supposed to say anything, or send them to labor camp, or have them shot?"

Exactly. And that's just not the man I know, the kind of guy who'd help a homie out with his $808,000 in back child support. And you wouldn't believe the shit people say about the guy:

(a) Violation of the right to food, in particular the effect of State-controlled food distribution policies on the nutritional status and health of the population and the restricted entry of international humanitarian aid to deal with the endemic food crisis;
(b) Torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, including inhuman conditions of detention;
(c) Arbitrary detention, as a form of persecution and the criminalization of any behaviour deemed threatening or contrary to the official ideology of the Government, the lack of rule of law and the absence of due process or an independent judiciary;
(d) Violations of human rights associated with prison camps;

(e) Discrimination and the disproportionate or specific effect of human rights violations on vulnerable groups, in particular women, children, people living with disabilities and returnees. Of particular concern is the fact that society is divided into three distinct groups classified according to their political allegiance to the Government. A person‟s place in this hierarchy determines the level of access that he or she will have to basic human rights, including access to food, health, education and freedom of movement;

(f) Extensive violation of freedom of expression and other related freedoms;
(g) Violation of the right to life, in particular the abusive application of the death penalty and the use of public executions;
(h) Restrictions on freedom of movement and abusive treatment of citizens forcibly returned;
(i) Enforced disappearances, including in the form of abductions of foreign nationals.

This is a little guy who just loves basketball more than anything else, people. And you know how old he is? I'm like who do you know who wasn't in trouble once in a while when he was a kid? You know what I was up to when I was his age? I'll tell you, I was pimping sneakers.

– “It’s a different story because guess what, the kid is only 28 years old, 28. He’s not his dad, not his grandpa. He’s 28 years old.”

– “It’s just like we do over here in America, right? It’s amazing that we have presidents over here do the same thing, right? It’s amazing that Bill Clinton could do one thing and have sex with his secretary and really get away with it and still be powerful.”

And I was like shut up because I never even heard that one before. You mean like Albright? Eww! Politicians, they're all the same.

Moral hazardous waste

From MyAnimeList.

Nick Dearden in the Guardian (via Ed Kilgore):

Sixty years ago today, an agreement was reached in London to cancel half of postwar Germany's debt. That cancellation, and the way it was done, was vital to the reconstruction of Europe from war. It stands in marked contrast to the suffering being inflicted on European people today in the name of debt....

Perhaps the most innovative feature of the London agreement was a clause that said West Germany should only pay for debts out of its trade surplus, and any repayments were limited to 3% of exports earnings every year. This meant those countries that were owed debt had to buy West German exports in order to be paid. It meant West Germany would only pay from genuine earnings, without recourse to new loans. And it meant Germany's creditors had an interest in the country growing and its economy thriving.

Following the London deal, West Germany experienced an "economic miracle", with the debt problem resolved and years of economic growth.

Amazing, isn't it: 20th-century history gives us such a completely worked out experiment in the economics of moral hazard. Step 1 (1919): Punish the Germans for starting the worst war ever by putting them in permanent debt. Result, a new worst war ever. Step 2 (1953): Don't punish the Germans for attempting to establish themselves as the Master Race and enslave the rest of the world; instead, give them a chance to make some serious money. Result, serious money. For everybody.

And now Germany wants to punish Greece and Spain (who incidentally contributed to Germany's debt relief 60 years ago), not for starting wars, but for taking out loans they couldn't quite afford. It's as if the financial Powers were saying to themselves, "I say, Greece and Spain haven't gone Fascist for a good long while, have they? Shall we give them a little nudge?"

Our fun-filled state legislatures

Sometimes a cigar is just an assault weapon.

Illinois had the tightest restrictions against carrying firearms in the country when a federal appeals court threw the law out, so their legislature was putting together a new one on Tuesday. Rep. Jim Sacia (R) was moved to speak in debate:

“Here is the problem in Illinois,” he said on the House floor. “I love you folks in Chicago. You’re the ones that have the problem, you have a runaway gun problem. Don’t blame the rest of us. This isn’t about Democrats, it’s not about Republicans. It’s because Chicago wants a warm fuzzy. ‘Let’s pass a bill that will eliminate assault rifles.’ Last year there were more people killed with hammers than with assault rifles.

“Here’s an analogy folks, I ask you to think of this. You folks in Chicago want me to get castrated because your families are having too many kids. It spells out exactly what is happening here.” (Raw Story)

Tell me Dr. Freud paid you to say that, just so he could prove his silly theory was correct.

As far as Rep. Sacia's penis (long may it wave!) is concerned, I'm pretty sure Illinois doesn't allow open carry. Put it back in your pants, Jim—oh, I'm sorry, was that your head?

We love you, Jim Sacia!

The above image represents Rep. Sacia receiving the kisses of the Humane Society, ASPCA, and Doudoubirds (who produced the picture) on March 9, 2012, after he moved to table a bill

aimed at criminalizing whistleblowers who expose animal abuse, unsafe working conditions, environmental destruction and other illegal and unethical activities on farms.

It was one of those deals where your friendly neighborhood American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) kindly writes it up for you, because of their concern for the embarrassment and humiliation an agribusinessman goes through when some busybody films him torturing animals.

What Doudoubirds and the others were too polite to note is that it was Rep. Sacia who had introduced the "ag gag" bill in the first place, on February 8, 2012. Looks like he just changed his mind all of a sudden, but he declined to explain why. Le cœur a ses raisons, etc., etc. Couldn't have had anything to do with his being up for reelection (really, he was unopposed).

On the question of the lethal blunt instruments, I think we all might want to ask ourselves how many times in the last year somebody used a hammer to kill four IHOP patrons (some members of the Nevada National Guard), 12 members of a Colorado Batman audience, six Sikh worshipers, or 26 people in a Connecticut elementary school, 20 of them first graders? See, a hammer is ideal for your intimate little date murder, for example, but it is not the weapon of choice for a templeful of Punjabis, all the males carrying daggers under their turbans, where the well-accessorized killer-about-town looks for something, shall we say, a little racier.

And remember, if you want to kill somebody with a hammer, a well-bred person uses a nail. It's neater. Jael and Sisera, Roman School, undated, from Wikigallery.

My dream Obama

David Brooks writes:

The original Handsome Dan, purchased by Yale tackle Andrew Graves from a local blacksmith in 1889. From Wikipedia.

In my column last Friday, I inadvertently said that President Obama had no plan for helping Speaker Boehner control his caucus and averting the sequester other than his usual program of taxing the rich, or at least that's what I'm told I said, although it doesn't sound quite right. But apparently it actually wasn't quite right, is the thing, strange as it seems, and the White House actually does have some ideas that they have informed the Republicans about. Obama is still useless, obviously, but not in exactly the ways I described.

But since humiliation is good for the soul, I want everybody to know that I'm fully capable of acknowledging when I'm wrong, and I thought I would do that today by working it over in my mind and showing how my conclusion—that Obama is a [jump]

To the pure, all things are Purim

Thers, reporting Dov Hikind's amazing Purim prank, makes the minor error of supposing that there are few African American Purim parties. This would not be entirely true. There are up to 150,000 black Jews in the U.S., even before you count Amar'e Stoudemire, and that's a lot of false noses. But there's not much photographic evidence, I'm afraid.

Purim in San Francisco, 2008.

[jump]

Retroactionary Watch

Weasley clock project, from Oh Gizmo.

Times, writing about how Republicans don't seem to mind cutting the Pentagon budget any more:

“Fiscal questions trump defense in a way they never would have after 9/11,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. “But the war in Iraq is over. Troops are coming home from Afghanistan, and we want to secure the cuts.”

So it's no longer after 9/11? Shifted temporal direction again?

This time I think it's a little less insane: not retroactionary time travel but the more familiar cyclical view of time. Think of it in terms of a clock. As the big hand travels down from 12 to 6 it's two, five, ten, a quarter, and so on after wherever the little hand is; and then from the 6 back up to 12 it's before whatever's up next, say the next crisis landmark. (In Germany, where 9:30 is halb zehn or "half ten", they start anticipating a tiny bit earlier—I think some do that in England too.)

So we got somewhat blindsided when on 9/11 "everything changed". It did, but only for a metaphorical half an hour. It stopped being after 9/11 when Obama first got elected—at figuratively 9/11:30—and started being before Obama commits some military blunder, twenty-five to Iranian invasion, or a quarter to Syrian quagmire, or what have you. Of course that didn't happen, though some Republicans continue to hope against hope that he did something wrong in Benghazi.

They could always try old Senator Dole's crack about "Democrat wars" but it didn't work very well last time, after the little escapades in Grenada and Panama and so on, and it seems unlikely to play any better as we extricate ourselves from Iraq and Afghanistan. They can't get back to their preferred "Democrats are weak on defense" stance, though, until that minute hand finishes its current tour. Might as well encourage cuts, in the meantime, especially in Democrats' districts. Then when it's campaign o'clock they can start howling about how Obama gutted our forces, leaving us once again prey to that North Korean invasion that the high school kids will have to repel. OMG, wake up, sheeple, it's already five to Red Dawn!

Slack or be slacked

Ross Douthat:

the decline of work isn’t actually some wild Marxist scenario. It’s a basic reality of 21st-century American life, one that predates the financial crash and promises to continue apace even as normal economic growth returns. This decline isn’t unemployment in the usual sense, where people look for work and can’t find it. It’s a kind of post-employment, in which people drop out of the work force and find ways to live, more or less permanently, without a steady job. So instead of spreading from the top down, leisure time — wanted or unwanted — is expanding from the bottom up.  Long hours are increasingly the province of the rich.

Sadly, no. Marx called it the reserve army of labor, a mass of people large enough to guarantee that employers would be able to keep wages down at subsistence level forever, or until the collapse of the system.

Naturally it includes short hours—if they keep you under 30 hours they don't have to contribute to your health insurance. So you pick up additional gigs as you can. I wonder how many hours young Ross puts in, and I mean sitting at the keyboard, not standing around at PR functions munching on Danish.

Found by tourist Sophie Nørgaard in San Diego. She remarks: "Danish pastry - Ingen rugbrød, men "PEAR DANISH" ????!"

Thanks to Steve M. for reading it first.

Unmanned

An exceedingly callow young denizen of Thinktankistan called Michael Kugelman has undertaken the task of teaching Pakistanis to stop worrying and love the drone, or at least put up with it, in an op-ed in the online Dawn, and Matt Taibbi just savages him for it, in his own blog:

So there it is, folks. Welcome to the honor of American citizenship. Should we replace E Pluribus Unum with We Don't Kill as Many Children as Measles? Of course people aren't mad about bombs being dropped on them from space without reason; they're mad because anti-Americanism is alluring!

He also tears a fine new one for the authors of a Times editorial in favor of a drone court, though he misses Emptywheel's insight, which I think is indispensable, that it would be a system for punishing crimes before they are committed.

Aerial Target: Design for an unmanned, radio-operated plane for use against Zeppelin aircraft and controlled  bomb, 1916.

Taibbi includes the first real discussion I've seen of the issue of cowardice in drone fighting:

What in Tarnation?

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. Fox News photo.

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal on Meet the Press, 2/24/2013, with new photographic evidence of the existence of Hell.

One entity, one vote!

This photo of Kalispell is courtesy of TripAdvisor.

If Rep. Steve Lavin (R-Kalispell) gets his way, owners of property in, say, Troy, but who live in, say, Ekalaka, will be able to vote and run for office in municipal elections in Montana even though they are not residents of the municipalities in which they’re voting. Even more startling, Lavin’s bill, HB-486, can be construed as giving the out-of-state corporate owners of property in a Montana municipality a vote in that municipality’s elections. Walmart’s bigwigs in Arkansas might be able to vote in Kalispell’s city council election by mail ballot.  (James Connor's Flathead Memo, February 21 2013)

And immediately, of course, the blamesters, as I like to call them, are snapping at your heels. "You're already buying the candidates, that isn't enough? Now you want to vote for them too?"

You have no idea how hurtful that is. When you're a corporation. In fact I have no idea either, not really. It's a little like the question of whether the unborn child feels pain or not, inside the womb, sheer guesswork. They're at another—some say a higher—order of existence, and we can't communicate directly with them. Does that mean they don't care? You can say any spiteful thing you want and it's not going to bother them? Hath not a corporation cameras? Hath not a corporation recording devices, with microphones planted in certain meeting rooms, lavatories, and so forth? If you prime us with alcohol, do we not leak?

The fact is, corporations live among us, in their disembodied way, working hard, playing by the rules, and trying to ensure a better life for their subsidiaries. If they have an interest in Kalispell, it's sort of like living there, except for the living part; they're concerned, just as you or I might be, with the little things that make a place a home, like do you have to pay workers minimum wage even if they're illegals, or how strict are they about hazardous wastes. Corporate citizenship is second-class citizenship; they feel they deserve the real deal. Is that asking so much? (Apparently yes, the bill didn't make it out of committee. But it's the thought that counts.)

Sequester break

The sequester event is evidently driving the natives mad, to the point where David Brooks found himself typing a lie so egregious that he was obliged to post a correction, which is as far as I know a unique occurrence in the history of the column, and then submit being taken to the metaphorical woodshed by Ezra Klein, though of course Klein is so courteous and Brooks so fatuous that he may not realize he's been there.* I hope the kids in Humility Class think to ask him how it felt, though.

The Vixen thinks the sequester was a kind of present from Obama to Boehner, a device meant to help the Speaker get some control over his goofy caucus, but too complex, alas, so that he couldn't figure out how to operate it. There's something to that, for sure (note that Boehner did manage to split the Fiscal Cliff into parts and get half of it down, the tax rise half, at the beginning of January—the sequester is what's left).

But I don't think Boehner himself sees it as a gift. I think, in the pattern that's been repeating itself two or three times a year, he begins by believing he's tricked Obama ("I got 98% of what I wanted") and ends up feeling that the tricked one is himself: he's raised his patrons' taxes, the Hastert rule is broken, he failed to defeat Cantor because Cantor didn't even want to run for Speaker, and all he got was this lousy T-shirt. You can already see the outlines of the same thing happening in the next couple of weeks or so: in the deal he's finally forced to accept the chained Consumer Price Index will be hedged round with compensatory machinery, and the Medicare cuts will turn out to be the $137 billion that the CBO just lopped off its projection.

Fen de Villiers, Time Sequestered (wood, plaster, ink). Photo by Tim Peters.

*Brooks also slipped into another reference to a "progressive sales tax", meaning his dread X-tax, which is starting to make him sound like one of those exotic single-issue perpetual presidential candidates, like Pierre "Pete" DuPont and Malcolm "Steve" Forbes. Patrick "Pat" Buchanan. David "Dave" Brooks. Could Brooks really have his eye on those truly vast spaces for entertaining? Or is he just after a gig at CNN?

Afternoon Update:
Second paragraph seems to suggest wrongly that the Happy New Year Fiscal Cliff deal is all that needs to be said about taxes, but it's not, as BooMan reminds us: additional revenue was always part of the deal.

Cheap shots: Dinner before tender

I wish ThinkProgress would stop doing this:

Fox Host Calls Universal Preschool ‘Immoral Crazy Talk’

 host Gerri Willis called the effort “immoral“:

WILLIS: I have to tell you, I think it’s immoral to make all of these promises, when you know you can’t afford it, we can’t afford it. Preschool for everyone, are you kidding me? We don’t have the money for that! … This is just crazy talk and I think it’s immoral to put this across as something that’s actually doable, when it’s not.

It would be delightful and hilarious if she had said that universal pre-K was immoral crazy talk, but she didn't; she said that it was immoral to hold out parents' hopes of having it when (according to her, and no doubt she is wrong) they can't. Making your opponent's words say something they weren't meant to say is a Republican trick.

Also too, the way they then proceed to bury their silly joke in solemn discussion, proving to the skeptical that preschool is not immoral or crazy. They could have used the time better [jump]

Original thought

Shorter David Brooks, New York Times, "What Data Can't Do":

Not everything that can be counted counts.
Not everything that counts can be counted.
Not everyone that counts hangs out with Friedman.
Like I know the CEO of a bank with a branch in Italy.

Image via Katherine on MySpace.

Update 2/20:
What is most dangerously wrong in Brooks's column is ably dismissed by Paul Krugman. I'm pretty sure there's something hilariously wrong about the way Brooks reads Naseem Taleb, but I'm far from sure I understand Taleb myself—anybody out there care to help out?

Pre-Crime does not pay

Flower chucker. From Notional Value.

As Emptywheel has been pointing out in her series on "Setting Up a Department of Pre-Crime", discussing the FISA or FISA-like court that might be established to oversee the president's American-murdering activities, such a court is going to be in the very odd position of, [jump]

Retroactionary biology

Via Stoney Wage Slave.

I figured I had enough of a handle on Intelligent Design that I would never have to study it, but I was startled about the use of "destiny" as part of the scientific toolbox as reported in Mother Jones:

Late last month, Rick Brattin, a Republican state representative in Missouri, introduced a bill that would require that intelligent design and "destiny" get the same educational treatment and textbook space in Missouri schools as the theory of evolution. Brattin insists that his bill has nothing to do with religion—it's all in the name of science. 

"I'm a science enthusiast...I'm a huge science buff," Brattin tells The Riverfront Times. "This [bill] is about testable data in today's world." But Eric Meikle, education project director at the National Center for Science Education, disagrees. "This bill is very idiosyncratic [jump]

Cheap shots, 2/15/2013

Our bad—from Washington Post's Suzy Parker:

CORRECTION:  An earlier version of this post and the post’s URL incorrectly reported that Sarah Palin had signed on as a contributor to the Al Jazeera America news network. The blogger cited a report on the Daily Currant Web site as the basis for that information without realizing that the piece was satirical. 

 To be fair, it's not always obvious that the Daily Currant is meant to be funny. With headlines like

Lehman Brothers CEO Arrested For Accounting Fraud

and

Glenn Beck Calls 911 After Accidentally Eating Halal Pizza

it could easily be some kind of fantasy wish fulfillment site.

Photo by Reuters/Mike Segar.

Twit:

Obama's SOTU was more recycled rhetoric. He wants to make the fed govt more intrusive, bankrupt, and controlling. #sotUGottaBKiddingMe
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) February 13, 2013

Self-Awareness Gap

Rand Paul, in his re-rebuttal or post-rebuttal of the SOTU, on the subject of why America is exceptional:

For the first time in history, men and women were guaranteed a chance to succeed based NOT on who your parents were but on your own initiative and desire to work.

Photo from Politico.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Paranoia) on former Senator Chuck Hagel:

Saying that he had serious doubts about the source of payments that Mr. Hagel had accepted for speaking engagements, Mr. Cruz declared, “It is at a minimum relevant to know if that $200,000 that he deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea.”

Right, and I'd like to know why Senator Cruz was late with his financial statement last summer: it is at a minimum relevant to know if the "legal fees" from the Chinese "tire company" Shandong Linglong were really profits from his part ownership of a brothel in Qingdao for gentlemen with especially fancy tastes involving nuns' habits.

Why does he always look as if he's about to burst into tears? Texas Tribune.

Who says Republicans don't have a plan for dealing with global warning?

From Wayne LaPierre's Daily Caller rant (via ThinkProgress):

Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival. It’s responsible behavior, and it’s time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that.

 Because it's OK to shoot a tornado in self-defense.

LaPierre foams at the mouth. From Business Insider.

Shorter David Brooks, New York Times, "When Families Fail":

Let's compromise: You can have your universal pre-K as long as I can say rude things about Head Start* and about poor people, who are clearly unqualified to be parents.

*Dishonest or ill-informed: cites research from 2010 suggesting that the impact of Head Start disappears by the time its students get to 3rd grade, without noting later critiques of the research and evidence of effects in high school and adulthood.

Gaffeteria

Turkeys, from timduru.org.

Barack Obama, sometime after 9:00, September 12, 2013:

Tonight, I’ll lay out additional proposals that are fully paid for and fully consistent with the budget framework both parties agreed to just 18 months ago. Let me repeat – nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.

National Review Online, shortly after 11:00:

VIDEO: Oddly, despite president's repeated promise not to increase deficit 'a single dime,' deficit keeps growing - bit.ly/WHT4Hp
— National Review (@NRO) February 13, 2013

Go ahead and watch the video if you want. It features President Obama saying many, many times that this or that program is not going to add one dime to the deficit. And then those brilliant minds at the National Review put on a title that says

Hahahahahaha, the national debt went up by 58 trillion dimes!!!!

But guess what, children, the debt and the deficit are different things. And the deficit has indeed been increasing by rather less than a single dime over the past four years. As in look:

Recent US Federal Deficit Numbers

Obama Deficits	Bush Deficits
FY 2013*: $901 billion	FY 2009†: $1,413 billion
FY 2012: $1,089 billion	FY 2008: $459 billion
FY 2011: $1,300 billion	FY 2007: $161 billion
FY 2010: $1,293 billion

Although the federal deficit is the amount each year by which federal outlays in the federal budget exceed federal receipts, the gross federal debt increases each year by substantially more than the amount of the deficit each year. That is because a substantial amount of federal borrowing is not counted in the budget. See here.

Note:

* Federal Deficit is budgeted.
† Some people have emailed to insist that the FY 2009 deficit should be assigned to Obama. Good point.*

*I don't know what's good about it. The FY 2009 deficit is not assigned to Obama because it is Bush's expenditures, over which Obama had no control.

Indeed, Obama has added negative dimes to the deficit, lots and lots of negative dimes, so fast that some people are a little bit worried about it, like super-liberal Investor's Business Daily:

Believe it or not, the federal deficit has fallen faster over the past three years than it has in any such stretch since demobilization from World War II.

In fact, outside of that post-WWII era, the only time the deficit has fallen faster was when the economy relapsed in 1937, turning the Great Depression into a decade-long affair.

It is not surprising that the debt has gotten larger. That's what happens when there's a deficit. What is surprising is that these guys at the National Review still haven't learned the difference! Liars or stupid? You decide.

This is no country for old women

Updated 2/19/2013

David Brooks writes:

Via Eliva Hellena.

The Europeans who settled North America escaped the lazy, improvident parents who were holding them back and crossed the Atlantic without ever looking back, like stones from a slingshot, in the belief that a single-minded focus on money-making would enable them one day to give their own children something cooler for Christmas than that same dumb-ass sweater. So did the pioneers who traveled the Oregon trail, and each generation of immigrants after that, except for the Asians and Hispanics, who insist on living ten to a bed so they can send remittances back to the Black Hole from which they have fled, as if a little money could make a difference to those haggard, toothless invalids in their opium dens and botánicas.

That's why they call America the Land of the Future, even though technically everywhere you go it's still the present, and time traveling is actually physically impossible; because every true American's mind used to be fully occupied with counting chickens from eggs that hadn't even been laid. We couldn't see the wilderness we were in for the tract houses and strip malls that would one day be there. And so the government invested heavily in things like railroads and canals.*

But nowadays this has all been turned upside down, and instead of starving our parents in order to put our kids in the sleepaway camps where they'll meet kids that will be able to give them jobs ten or fifteen years down the line, we're neglecting the kids to take care of the parents, putting them in luxurious nursing homes, making videos of them telling their stupid stories about the Depression, and generally keeping them alive until they're 120 or 130 years old.

The Federal government is the most obvious example. It's become nothing but a kind of vacuum cleaner to suck up value out of the economy and shower it on the elderly. This harms children in two ways. First, it takes money that could be used for investment in the future and essentially throws it away on this idiotic ancestor worship.** Second, it's the children that will end up paying for it.*** A report from the International Monetary Fund says that their taxes will have to go up 35%, even as entitlement spending will have to be cut by the same amount.****

Via webmd.com.

But it's not just the government, it's private enterprise as well. Banks have slowed down on business investment even more than on real estate, devoting their time instead to credit cards, for some reason.***** And student loans. Meanwhile, companies are pouring billions of dollars into their retirement funds to keep their diabetes-crippled retirees tooling around on their imported scooters and spending nothing (compared to Germany, Finland, and South Korea) on research and development.****** 

What happened to turn us around from that traditional throw-mama-from-the-train fascination with risk and adventure to our current terrorized selves? I'm guessing it was the Depression and World War II, in which we sacrificed so much that, like Scarlett O'Hara, we decided we'd never sacrifice anything again.******* There's less of a sense of obligation to the future, in a chain linking the dead (who don't need any money) to the unborn (who certainly will).

Nevertheless Republicans and Democrats just keep arguing about government and business, who started it, and who needs a time out, and President Obama's address tonight looks likely to be another salvo in the same tired battle. He's going to quote Sun Tzu, I understand ("Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across", whatever the hell that's supposed to mean), as if he were the one teaching Grand Strategy at Yale instead of me.

If he would just address himself to the future instead he could give a fantastic speech. He could agree to give a permit to the Keystone XL pipeline, which is a totally futury thing (we won't know if it will make Nebraska uninhabitable until the future). He could cut corporate taxes and pay for it with a progressive national sales tax, one of my most futuristic ideas ever, and he could make cuts in Social Security and Medicare, yielding money for the National Institutes of Health and charter schools and maybe charter universities. Maybe the NIH could come up with a drug to make those old people stop whining so much—for God's sake, Grandma, man up!

*As well as subsidizing industry and occasionally owning it themselves, picking winners and losers, and using tariff policy to reinforce the choices. They had this insane idea that government could somehow beat the market to the next big thing!

**Absolutely. If we could only cut the Social Security and Medicare budgets, Congressional Republicans would be jumping to put that money into infrastructure and schools.

*** Except that they won't, nor is there any good reason to do so. Although they will have to pay the interest, meaning it's a better idea to borrow now, while the rates are low, than later.

**** Oh, you precious little Brooks! No, what that report said (in April 2011) is that we should have raised taxes and cut entitlements by 35% then, or if you prefer you could leave entitlements alone and raise taxes by 88%. And you know you have to listen to the IMF, because they're the ones who advised Ireland, and Greece, and Spain, and UK. And Latvia. And Iceland—oh, wait, smarty pants little Iceland thought they knew better than the IMF and, uh, actually they were sort of right.

*****Wouldn't have anything to do with deregulation, would it?

******Those figures are for growth between 1999 and 2006. For what it's worth, in 2011 the US spent a higher proportion of GDP on research and development than any industrialized country except Japan, South Korea, Israel, Sweden, and Finland; more than Germany, Taiwan, Austria, Switzerland, or Singapore, to say nothing of total laggards like China, France, and UK.

Via AgeNorthernIreland.

*******Yes, undoubtedly. How else do you explain why after the war we didn't build the Interstate highway system, win the race to the moon, create the state university systems of California, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, etc. (of course only losers go there), invent the Internet, or decode the human genome. The failure to invest certainly had nothing to do with the antitax movement and its triumphs from around 1978!

Update:

Tom Levenson has a wonderful post on this column. While I still really like my own post here, his covers many extremely important points that I didn't, or didn't even notice. How can there be so much wrong with one little essay? The moral is:

Of the faking of Brooks there is no end.

Say it to my face! No, wait a minute...

Image by Michael Ferry, from Album3.

Is this what they call butthurt?

In the April 2011 speech at George Washington University, Obama sharply criticized Ryan’s proposal to privatize Medicare, saying, “It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that ten years from now, if you’re a 65 year old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck - you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.”...

Bill Daley, the White House chief of staff at the time, tried to warn Obama of Ryan’s presence, but didn’t get to him in time. And with the bright lights shining on stage, blocking his view of the crowd, the President went ahead with his critique.

“I mean, Jesus, it was heavy,” former Sen. Alan Simpson told FRONTLINE. “He didn’t use Ryan’s name, he just made fun of anyone who could propose anything like what he had read recently as a proposal presented to the House Republican leadership that did this to old people, and it went on and on. It was tough. And it was nasty.”

White House economic adviser Gene Sperling chased Ryan down after the speech. “All I was trying to do was to let him know that — that we didn’t know they were coming,” Sperling told FRONTLINE. “His response was that he felt the President had ‘poisoned the well.’” (via TPM)

I mean, Jesus, you don't make fun of a guy's plan. When he's sitting right there. I mean, who do you think you are, Alan Simpson?