Wednesday, November 25, 2009

MERCI

MERCI 

It's Thanksgiving . . . 2009. 

This year, I have decided to thank the French. 

Truth be told, the French in recent times have received precious little thanks. In the run up to and aftermath of the on going Iraq War, they were of course vilified. America's higher-ups treated them as the despicable denizens of Old Europe, unwilling and unable to roll up their sleeves on the side of democracy and the ubiquitous war on terror. When they stood their ground, refusing to be intimidated into capitulation, we unleashed the big guns.

We renamed french fries Freedom Fries. 

And dusted off all those World War II jokes. 

My guess is that the French let that whole culinary correction thing roll right off their collective backs. In fact, they probably liked it. At its best, and even at its worst, France is a nation of fine food. It is very hard to get a bad meal at a half way decent restaurant in Paris. You can't get a cheap one. Especially now, with the dollar tanking. But it will usually be a good one. 

So I bet they were pretty happy to be done with les Americain's "french fries." 

In 1972, when I was an exchange student living in Paris, the whole city was in a twist over the fact that a McDonald's was opening on the Champs Elysees. There were street protests and ominous editorials bemoaning another unwanted invasion. For awhile, it looked like Le Big Mac was going to be une bust. Things, however, have settled down appreciably. Mickey Dees is packed every day of the week. President Sarkozy is asking his fellow citoyens to be a little less French and more American when it comes to labor markets. My French friends even brag these days about California wine. 

The only thing they really oppose is our unnecessary wars. 

And our right wing. 

And I really can't argue with them on either count. 

In 2005, I returned for my first visit to France in twenty nine years. Walking around Versailles with the same fellow I had lived with as a teen, he told me that 80% of the French had supported John Kerry in his bid for the Presidency. Over here, where he was being swift boated into an un-American coward, the nut case right said that Kerry "looked" French . . . and it wasn't a compliment. Over there, he was still a hero. Which of course is why he lost. 

Thank God Barack doesn't look French. 

France isn't just a country. It's closer to an intoxicating experience. I went to a three day conference in Paris last winter. Everyone had come to talk law and do business. These conferences typically make attendees participate in team building exercises. You know, the stuff that uproariously funny commercial lampoons as two guys who have had enough catch the first American Air Lines flight out of town. But ours was different. We painted a picture. On a ten foot square canvas made of mini-squares we could later disassemble and take home. 

We did Picasso. 

Instead of psychobabble. 

At the last night dinner cruise on the Seine, I sat between a young Anglo-French lawyer and a Dutch-Israeli real estate investor. The City of Lights rolled by, gorgeous even in the chill of a cold winter night. Which is another thing you have to thank them for. 

They'll always have Paris.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

WORLD SERIOUS

WORLD SERIOUS

My daughter, a freshman in college, called earlier in the semester to report that she had gotten a high mark on an English essay. The Professor had even read part of it to the class. At home, this was greeted with cheers, coming as it had from a young adult whose early relationship with the English language at one point resembled hand to hand combat. 

As a kid, when Courtney had an idea, it was an "ideal". Announcing she had apologized for any transgressions big or small came out as "I said my sorries." As a sort of liquid epiphany, apple juice regularly emerged as a request for "apple jews." Apple Catholics or Protestants were apparently not as sweet. The best baseball player ever to don a uniform was "Babe Ruth-ez". And early on, at a point when she still thought her older brother was cool, she promised that if she ever came into money, she would be sure to get him tickets to the "World Serious." 

I say the hell with her brother for the time being. 

The Republicans need those tickets. 

Tuesday, as we all know, was Election Day. Turnout was low. Here in New York well less than 30% of the registered voters cast ballots, and the same was the case throughout the nation. The Republicans won the gubernatorial races in New Jersey (by a little) and Virgina (by a lot). New York City's now Independent (previously Republican and probably Democrat previous to that) Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- having spent $100 million of his own money to the other guy's five -- won reelection to a third term by a less than resounding five points. And suburbanites tossed out a three term incumbent County Executive in Westchester and nearly did the same to a two termer on Long Island. Both were Democrats. 

This is hardly what the statisticians would call a "representative sample." Most of the races had decidedly local angles to them, all successfully exploited by the victors. And when 70% of those eligible to vote stay home, those who show up tend to be (1) motivated and (2) extreme. In Virginia, for example, those who voted this year had favored John McCain by 8 points a year ago. Clearly a lot of last year's Obama voters -- who had won the state by 12 points for Barack -- stayed home. Enough in fact to create a 20 point swing in starting points. It is not a surprise that a Republican won that race, and given the margin he probably would have won even if all those Obama voters had showed. But it would have been a lot closer. 

For its part, New Jersey was close. 

Even though it should not have been. 

For most of the race, the now Governor-Elect Chris Christie was ahead by double digits. He explains his slide from inevitability to mere victory as the product of Governor Corzine's negative campaign ads. He doth, however, protest too much. Both of them ran negative ads, and as the children are wont to say, Christie started it. Jon Corzine did not invent political corruption in the Garden State and had nothing to do with the parade of hacks marching to their perp walks in this summer's political version of the Sopranos. But if all you knew came from Christie's commercials, you'd have thought that Corzine himself belonged in the slammer. It's easy to become Governor of New Jersey if you promise to end corruption and lower property taxes. Actually doing this, however, is the rough equivalent of a political hat trick. 

Many have tried. 

None have succeeded. 

Not even Chris Christie when he was New Jersey's US Attorney. The bad guys he put in jail were just replaced by a new crop of bad guys for the current US Attorney to put in jail. When that group is replaced and Christie is in his fourth year as Governor, someone will run against him promising to end corruption. And that someone won't have to write new campaign ads. He can just dust off Christie's. 

The Chairman of the national Republican Party, Michael Steele, wants none of this local angle stuff. For his money, Tuesday's elections were an indictment of an "incredibly arrogant" Democratic Party that is putting "our freedom and economy at risk." Of course, the economy was at risk long before January 20, 2009. In fact, it was more or less on life support. And it is very hard to talk about the loss of freedom these days without images of Dick Cheney's uber-state coming immediately to mind. Steele must think that a free and productive America is one where Wall Street is made safe for renewed financial bubbles and health care is provided at the whim of for profit insurance companies. 

The rest of us know otherwise. 

Even the rest of us in New Jersey and Virginia. 

We've already been to . . . 

The World Serious. 

In fact, we live there.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

BORING

BORING 

I'm bored. 

I know this is my problem and not yours. 

Maybe you are very excited. 

Barack is arguing with Fox over whether Fox is really a wing of the Republican Party or a straight news organization. The Republicans are arguing with Norway over who deserves to get the Nobel Peace Prize. Gen. McChrystal is arguing with the Administration (or, more particularly I guess, Joe Biden) over whether we need 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan. The American Medical Association is arguing for the public option. Americans are arguing with Wall Street about obscene bonuses. And Sarah Palin is . . . 

Still arguing. 

So maybe it's just me. A kind of inherent dullness borne of some deep genetic reality that says all this exciting stuff is all so . . . 

Boring. 

But maybe not. 

Oh, I agree, the AMA thing is kind of a hoot. You could look far and wide for the last time the AMA has supported anything remotely akin to national health insurance and come up empty handed. But here they are, endorsing the public option, and proving once and for all that this whole current health care debate really is the insurance companies against everyone else. Too bad the insurance companies may win. Which, of course, would be exciting . . . 

In that perverse sort of way those who have no business winning still manage to do so against all odds.

I mean, it's pretty hard to find a better opponent than insurance companies. I have never seen one of those favorable/unfavorable polls on them. Probably because you can't get anyone to say something favorable. So you'd think that, in a one-on-one against them on health care -- with the AMA on your side, no less -- the insurance boys would be toast. 

But they're not. 

Newt Gingrich has promised them that if a health care bill passes, his party will go to the country in 2010 and 2012, win, and then repeal the health care reform not yet passed today. In truth, this sounds more like a wish than a promise. A "been there, done that," so let's do it again boast. A bit of retro from the GOP's glory days of '94, when voters had no knowledge of what the Party of God would actually do if they ran the table and won it all. In a word . . . 

Boring. 

Then there's Wall Street. 

The gloom and doom is over. 

Or at least pretty aggressively abated. 

Earlier in the year, the TARP money they got from us taxpayers made it possible for them to survive. Now they are reserving record level bonus pools for themselves, which gives new meaning to the words "Thank you." The real fear among reformers is that the Administration in general, and Geithner's Treasury Department in particular, is so larded with the authors of the last two financial bubbles that nothing will change. And as of now, it's hard to argue with that. Health care reform -- a long term driver of the deficit reduction needed to allow fiscal policy to work without crippling later inflation -- is stalled. And the financial sector is still largely deregulated. 

It's deja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. 

What a yawn.

I should be able to get excited about Barack's Nobel Prize. And I am. But the truth is that I am excited because it sends the right wing around the bend. So, in a reprise of my Catholic youth, excitement is tempered with guilt. I generally buy into the notion that Nobel Prizes should go to those who do something . . . 

Other than give great speeches. 

You know -- negotiate a treaty, end a war, cure AIDS, keep an eye on Russia from your backyard. 

Even the President was embarrassed. There he was in the middle of trying to fashion a new war strategy for Afghanistan, refereeing internal disputes over troop levels between his Vice President and the Commander on the ground, wondering how in the world we managed to pick another ally who is not all that good at running his country and oh, by the way, may have stolen the recent election, keeping his eye on the other war he had nothing to do with but is committed to ending, and watching Iran pretend to negotiate on nukes (having stolen a recent election), none of which has led to much of anything yet, and the Norwegians wake us up one day with the news that he has been awarded the Peace Prize.

Maybe it was for next year. 

Fox, of course, had a field day. They reported all the right wing chest thumpers feigning sincere outrage that so undeserving a recipient could have been picked. They gave plenty of time to all those who lamented (as they now do on an annual basis) how the whole Peace Prize thing is nothing more than Norway's exercise of political leverage in the service of appeasement and old Europe. They even reported calls from some that Barack refuse the prize or give it back (which, come to think of it, might not be a bad idea -- maybe he and Kissinger could work a "two-fer", albeit for different reasons). 

All this, they call "straight news". 

Wow.

Even the lies are . . . 

Boring.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

THE DOG DAYS OF AUGUST

THE DOG DAYS OF AUGUST 

It is hot and humid in New York City. After an unseasonably cool summer, the natural order has reasserted itself. 

So, too, it appears in the nation as a whole.

The Republicans have now pretty much embraced their alternative to Obama's politics of change. To "Yes, We Can" they shout "No, We Won't". The issues are more or less irrelevant. When the Administration proposed the stimulus package earlier in the year, the GOP rediscovered its hatred for deficits and opposed it. Never mind that the country was rapidly travelling down the slippery slope to Depression. Or that they themselves had inherited Clinton's trillion dollar plus surplus only to squander it on tax cuts for the top 1% and an off-budget war without rationale (or at least one based on fact) in Iraq. The party of one and a half regions (the old Confederacy and some Plains states) would rather oppose than propose. 

A few years ago, I wrote an email to to E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post. I told him that Republicans and conservatives run on the platform that government can do no good, and once elected, try to prove it. 

Now they are doing that even when they are out of power. 

The issue du jour is health care. Progressives already have given up on their preferred reform -- Medicare for all, which is a form of single payer. Instead, as the Clintons did in the '90s, they have accepted the notion that health policy must be fashioned on the dysfunctional foundation created by insurance companies. I suppose there is some market based mechanism that might provide reasonable care for all at costs that do not bankrupt the country. Hillary certainly tried to craft one in 1993, only to be told that her combination of employer mandates, community based rating, and regulatory oversight was government run amok. Her proposal never even made it out of committee. It just became a battering ram for Gingrich's revolution. Now, in this potential summer of his discontent, Obama is running into the same buzz saw that killed health care reform in the last Democratic Administration. The President, of course, did not march blindly down the path trod by his predecessor. Where the Clintons created first a task force and then an enormous legislative package, sent to the Hill on a wave of "You will pass and I will sign" inspiration from the Presidential bully pulpit, Obama has allowed the Congressional committees to do their work, proposing only broad principles that had to be respected for him to get on board. For him, in truth, there are only two sine qua nons -- all must have access to quality health care and costs must be contained. 

So much, however, for differences that don't matter. 

This GOP is no different from Gingrich's. 

Which was no different from Goldwater's. 

Which was no different from Herbert Hoover's. 

They do not believe in health care reform. They believe in the profit motive and pretty much nothing else, at least when it comes to domestic economic policy. Applied to the current health care crisis, that results in what for them are a number of ostensibly fundamental principles. 

First, for them, there is no crisis. They note that three quarters of the country claims it is satisfied with their current health coverage. What counts as "satisfied" in this context is, of course, more than somewhat loaded. People who have health insurance are "satisfied" only because they have it. If they lose their jobs (and hence their insurance), actually get a serious illness (which then becomes a pre-existing condition, precluding insurability in the future absent later employment based coverage), have a chronic condition like diabetes (in which case, they are forever hostage to being lucky enough to have continuous employment with firms that provide insurance lest they too become uninsurable), or run a small business where they actually have to pay the premiums for everyone else (in which case, they know that premium costs have skyrocketed by more than 80% over the past eight years), they aren't all that "satisfied." 

Lucky to be insured, yes. 

Satisfied? 

Not on your life. 

Second, conservatives believe that profit motivated competition actually works in the health sector. Though this is more an article of faith than an empirical reality, it is nevertheless a fundamental element of their economic religion. It ignores, however, a number of salient facts. One is that, for those 65 and older, Medicare already has lopped off the highest risk category of insured, i.e. , those most likely to get sick. Given that the largest proportion of our health care dollars are spent in the last days of life, this is no small point. Put bluntly, we already have socialized well more than half the health delivery system. There really should be nothing wrong in principle with socializing the other half. 

The right wing's politics of loud, however, will have none of this. They have now transformed Medicare -- a program the Goldwater Republicans of the 1960s opposed and voted against -- into a government program that no one who has wants in any way to lose ("Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare" said the sign at one of those euphemistically named "Town Hall" meetings where the screamers wouldn't even let the legislators speak), but no one who doesn't have can in any way propose getting (which is what the screamers are saying when they yell about "socialism" or "communism" or anything remotely "European").

The rest of us are left to trust that the benighted insurance companies will take care of us as they run up their profits. This, unfortunately, is a non sequitur for two reasons -- (1) the surest way to higher profit for the insurance companies is less coverage for all of us, whether by exclusions or higher co-pays or the managed "denial" practiced by insurance company bureaucrats under the rubric of "managed care," and (2) in an unregulated environment, the insurance companies can and always will pass the (high) cost of gold-plated care, emergency room treatments for the uninsured, and their bloated administrative budgets (26% of every insurance dollar goes to administrative cost; the comparable amount under Medicare is about 3%) onto us consumers, which is why premium costs have skyrocketed in the last decade. 

So much for competition working. 

Obama and the Democrats have proposed a sensible solution to these basic problems. To rein in health care costs, they contend that a publicly funded insurance option should be available for those who want it. This is a form of Medicare-lite. If you can't get health care because it is either too expensive, your employer doesn't provide it, or the private sector will no longer give you it, you get to enroll in the public taxpayer financed plan. 

Everyone will be legally obligated to have insurance (just as anyone who has a car is obliged to carry auto insurance), so the pool of available premium payers will increase by the 45 million who are now uninsured (minus those who can't afford to pay). Employers who don't insure will pay a small tax, so no one gets to be a financial free loader on the public option plan. (Like the Hoover Republicans who opposed Social Security in the '30s, the right wing today claims that this feature will cost us jobs in the small business sector. It won't, largely because employers who do not now insure are doing so not because they once couldn't, but rather because they no longer can given the quadrupling of insurance premium costs in the last decade.) 

And the public plan will keep the insurance companies honest. They won't exclude, or deny, or bloat their administrative budgets because, if they do, they will lose policy holders to the public alternative and eventually go out of business. For the same reason, they won't increase their charges at rates five times that of inflation, which is what they are doing now. The GOP claims that the the public option will rapidly deteriorate into a form of rationing, though the basis for this charge is impossible to ascertain. The screamers who love their Medicare apparently aren't worried about rationing now, and the public option won't be any different. If consumers enrolled in the public option want to buy supplemental plans, they can, just as is the case with current Medicare recipients. In addition, the present system already rations. It gives gold plated care to those who can afford it, and something less to everyone else. 

The right wing calls that market based competition. 

The diabetic who can't pay for her insulin knows she is being rationed. 

Back in the '90s, policy wonks proposed all sorts of competitive solutions to the problem of government waste in general and the assumed (but never proven) lack of productivity of union workers in particular. Osborne and Gaebler wrote a book about it called Reinventing Government. In it, they gave example after example of how competition could make government more efficient. They even pointed out how, in one example that refutes a whole host of conservative shibboleths, unionized sanitation workers in Phoenix agreed to compete with non-unionized waste haulers in that city. The winners were the citizens. Sanitation costs went down. 

And, oh, by the way, the union delivered the less expensive product. 

Lots of folks on the right embraced this formula when it gave them a perceived cudgel to use on organized labor. Now, however, that the tables have been turned, and public agency competition has been proposed to make health care affordable and accessible to all, the free marketeers are screaming about uneven playing fields and socialism. 

They are even showing up at their health care rallies and Town Halls with guns strapped to their legs.

I hope one doesn't accidentally go off during one of their screaming fits. 

The resulting injury . . . 

Probably won't be covered by their insurance company.

Monday, July 20, 2009

ON A SUNDAY IN SCOTLAND

ON A SUNDAY IN SCOTLAND

It's only a game for the elite on this side of "the pond," as they say.

Over there, where golf began, it's played by everyone from the assembly line worker to the hedge fund manager. If you live in St. Andrews, you can buy an (affordable) annual pass that allows you to play each of the seven courses owned by the St. Andrews Trust. One of them is the fabled Old Course.

So golf is a national game in Scotland.

And yesterday, that nation held its collective breath as a legend just shy of his sixtieth birthday came within eight feet of winning The Open Championship, golf's oldest and most hallowed crown, on a weather beaten track called Turnberry, famous for prior great moments in the sport, a runway used by the RAF in World War II, and winds that blow off the Irish Sea in changing fifteen minute increments.

Now it is also famous for something else.

Tom Watson . . . 2.0

When he came to Ailes earlier in the week, he was just a relic. He had already won The Open five times. Once at this very course, in the now infamous "Duel in the Sun" in 1977 in a play off victory against Jack Nicklaus that both greats had made it into with enormous birdie putts on the final hole of regulation play. He had already won nine major tournaments and countless regular tour events. But because golf is the one sport where relics still get to play competitively, this five time winner of what we Americans, much to the consternation of the British, call the "British Open," was allowed to tee it up.

Nothing of the sort could ever happen in any of our home grown sports. Sure, Satchel Paige played for a minor league baseball team in his fifties, and the occasional forty something trots out onto one or more of our football (not soccer) fields every fifth autumn or so to steal a page from the past.

But you won't find any sixty year olds in the World Series . . . or the Super Bowl.

They'll be on the couch.

Watching.

Where I was for six hours on Sunday.

Only I was participating.

Of all the sports, the four hundred year old one we call golf is the most like life. Like life, it is very hard to get right. Winston Churchill once quipped that "Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose." Though also attributed to him, Churchill did not say "Golf consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” But he easily could have. And the point would have been the same.

It ain't easy.

Like life, it also ain't fair.

In one of his famous press conferences in the '60s, JFK was asked about the resentment reservists might feel on being called up to serve. He noted that inequity was inherent in the world. Some serve and die. Some are wounded. Some are never called up. "Life is unfair," said the then President. Today, that comment seems harsh. But Kennedy had the right to make it. His older brother had been killed in World War II and he himself had been seriously injured. Though some were never called, they both served. And one died.

Life is unfair . . . and so is golf. Kennedy knew that too. Unbeknownst to voters, he was one of the best golfers to be President -- a single digit handicap. He kept it a secret in 1960 because he was contrasting his youth to President Eisenhower's age, and did not want the country to think it was electing another golfer (Ike was an aficionado of the sport, regularly leaving spike marks on the floor of the Oval Office as he returned from the White House putting green he had installed).

The unfairness of it all was in abundant evidence in Scotland yesterday. For 71 holes, the near sixty year old had confounded all that the evil golf gods could throw at him. He carefully avoided the numerous pot bunkers designed to gobble balls and inflate scores. Like an ancient mariner, he assayed and navigated the variable winds (oddly, on Saturday, he was the only golfer who left the first tee box before he hit to get a sense of how the wind was blowing across the first fairway; age and experience sometimes amount to wisdom). He played within himself, never expecting or asking more than that of which his own aged frame was capable.

And he made putt after improbable putt.

One from sixty feet. Another from near eighty feet. Too many to count from between ten and twenty feet. And a whole host from five to ten feet.

Except that last one on the 72nd hole that would have won the tournament. The one eight feet from the hole. The one that should not have been there. The one left from that first putt from off the green that should not have been there. Because no sixty year old can hit an eight iron flush at the pin 150 plus yards away on the 72nd hole on Championship Sunday . . . without the damn ball staying on the green.

Except this time it didn't.

Life is unfair.

When it was over, he didn't complain or whine. He also didn't do that during the four hole play-off, when his age finally caught up with him and he could not right the ship of tired legs splaying shots left and right. He congratulated the winner (who himself was to be congratulated, not just for winning but also for the gracious way in which he acknowledged having spoiled our whole party). He owned the failure. He accepted the regret.

Before the final round began, his friend Jack Nicklaus had text messaged him to "Win one for the old folks. Make us proud, Make us cry again." And today, Tom Boswell had the best response to that message.

"Don't worry, Tom, you did."

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

SARAH

SARAH 

Unknown in lower 48, 
She took us by surprise.
A maverick from the tundra 
Was her oft-stated disguise. 

 At first she tripped on Charlie 
And blamed the hated left. 
Who knew that Bush's doctrine 
Carried such destructive heft? 

Then Katie threw her softballs -- 
Pick one more you can hate! 
Brown, Roe, Miranda
She just stared, no talking straight. 

So comics had a field day 
With her winks and nods and betchas. 
"He pals around with terrorists" -- 
Her false but favorite gotcha. 

They lost, and rather handily, 
Swept by history's tide. 
But she was poised to marry up, 
The right wing's favorite bride. 

They'd wait four years, 2012, 
Pit bull, lipstick, and betcha. 
But now they'll have to wait some more, 
'Cause she just up and quitcha.

Monday, June 8, 2009

PASSAGES

PASSAGES 

We should probably celebrate New Years in June.

Not January. 

June is a month of passages. 

We move from buds to blooms. The rhythm of baseball season finally returns to its ritualistic predictability, rescuing itself from that unseasonably cold April beginning. Kids all over the world are graduating. Nowadays from everything. College. High school. Kindergarten. Day care. Lots of people get married this month. And vacations either begin . . . or fall within the time when they are reasonably foreseeable. 

No one graduates in January. I did . . . from law school. But I had to wait until June to actually wear the cap and gown and celebrate with my family. There was no celebration in January. I went right to work for a newly appointed federal appellate judge. He was then afraid of his new job. And I was then afraid of him. So it was entirely appropriate that our relationship began in a January winter. More purgatory than passage. 

Things seem to more or less end in January. 

Football. That long holiday stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Presidential transitions. 

But they begin in June. 

My son was born in June. He turned 21 last week, which we have turned into a passage all its own. Mostly because that is when kids who three years earlier were old enough to vote and go to war become old enough to drink. In truth, it is really a false passage. All the college kids drink before they are 21. They all have fake id's. College Presidents of late have been complaining that they spend substantial amounts of institutional time running interference for students who get arrested in the we-know-they-all-drink-but-will-occasionally-enforce-the-law policing du jour. The kids themselves think it's a farce. 

When I was 21, I had been able to buy liquor legally for three years. My son once asked why that was OK for me but not him. I tried to be honest. I told him my generation had just screwed it up for his. I told him that we all had at least one friend (and usually many more) we had buried because of some drunken or drug induced escapade.

I don't think he found the honesty refreshing. 

Just annoying. 

In that "yeah, sure" sort of way 21 year olds have at being annoyed when they know honesty is fronting for hypocrisy. Because he knew we didn't change the law to protect them. We did it to protect ourselves. We didn't want to become the parents crying at their child's funeral. 

Fair enough. 

But someday he'll thank me. He'll even probably want to really crack down on those fake id's. He'll want to bring in the Mormon missionaries to turn all those frat parties into latter day alcohol free "First Nights." He'll do this when he becomes a father. Trying to be honest, he'll settle for some selfishly functional hypocrisy. He'll want to avoid those funerals too. 

And attend those graduations. 

In some not so far away Junes.

Friday, May 15, 2009

TORTURED

TORTURED 

The current debate on the legality and morality of torture is . . . 

Well, tortured. 

We should start with first principles (or at least what everyone thought were first principles prior to 9/11). Torture has been illegal for some time. The ban on torture is clear in the Geneva Convention and in most state law, including our own, which either adopts that Convention or reflects it in domestic statutes. The prohibition is also something that has engendered near universal support in the civilized world. Our contemporary affection for it was born largely out of the Nuremberg trials, which claimed that civilized peoples had jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against humanity wherever and by whomever they were perpetrated. At that time, the defense of superior orders, as well as the notion that any prosecution of these crimes was merely a case of "victor's justice," was soundly rejected. 

Not for 'nuthin, moreover, the United States led the charge. 

Herman Goering proudly marched into an American base at the end of World War II ready to surrender his sword in the quaint but time honored ritual of a defeated General recognizing the legitimate conquest of his victorious foe. He expected in the process to be treated with the respect all prior surrendering Generals had received, a sort of reciprocal noblesse oblige in which officers were deemed members of the same club and the surrendering losers were given reasonable quarters, hot food, good wine and continued respect. Instead, within a relatively short period, he was indicted and thrown in the dock. More or less the same thing occurred in Japan in the wake of their defeat. 

Fast forward fifty five plus years or so, we now find ourselves debating whether our own "officers," including Bush and especially Cheney, must be indicted for their own crimes against humanity. Because it is an issue no sitting American politician truly wants to confront, both sides of the ideological divide are crafting their own unque avoidance strategies. For its part, the Obama Administration for the time being abjures any outright indictment of the former President and Vice President, embracing a kind of good faith procedural legalism in which Obama himself announces that any who violated the law will be held responsible . . . 

By the US Department of Justice . . . 

In due course . . . 

Which presumably is on the case. 

Don't hold your breath waiting for the trials to start. 

On the other side, the avoidance strategy is quite explicit and embraces two tactical moves in order to reach the stated goal of no prosecutions, not now, not ever. On the one hand, there is absolutely no acknowledgment of the Nuremberg principle, let alone any reasoned effort to grapple with it. Try googling "Nuremberg" to see if it comes up in any articles on the current torture debate. I did and couldn't find any. Cheney hasn't mentioned it, nor has Charles Krauthammer, who is otherwise waxing eloquent in his defense of the morality of torture as practiced by the Bush Administration. 

What Cheney and Krauthammer do say is the right wing's second tactical move, and is reducible at its core to two words. 
They are . . . 

Torture works. 

So, for a large part of the past month, we have witnessed an unprecedented display of public comment from a former Vice President insisting that the Bush Administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques" saved "tens of thousands, if not hundred of thousands" of lives. And, for his part, Krauthammer is claiming that torture is justified in two situations -- the so called "ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant in which a high value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives." In his first of two articles on the subject, he cited Bush Administration figures who claimed that information of both sorts was obtained via torture in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In his second article, he cited the success of the Israelis in getting information via torture as to the whereabouts of Cpl. Waxman when Palestinian terrorists had captured him in 1994. Both sources assert that, but for the interrogation techniques used, critical information would not have been gained. 

There is, of course, a fairly short answer to both Cheney's and Krauthammer's claims. It is that . . . 

We'll never know. 

Which is exactly where the right wing wants to leave it. 

And exactly where it cannot be left. 

We now live in a world where the efficacy of torture is being tested on a grand scale. Unfortunately, however, empirical realities are being ignored in the face of asserted realities that, though unproven, would be catastrophic were they to be true. The essence of the right wing's claims, and the motive behind Obama's careful proceduralism which appears to put the issue on a permanent (or at least four or eight year) back burner, is not that torture works. Rather, it's that we can't take the risk of figuring out whether it does not. The answer, as George Bush and Condoleeza Rice were wont to say only a short time ago, "may come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Fairly confident that we will not take that risk, Cheney and Krauthammer simply assert -- with no evidence whatsoever -- that torture is efficacious.

In fact, however, it is not. 

For at least two reasons.

First, no one can claim that catastrophes were averted in the wake of 9/11 owing to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. We do not know what else was tried or what else was gleaned from whatever was tied, and what we do know about the lengths of interrogations suggests that it often took months, not minutes, to get a lot of the information deemed so valuable. Both realities would tend to refute the notion that torture works, the first by demonstrating either that Bush and Co. simply ignored alternatives on the assumption they would not work or used torture even in the face of information being gleaned legitimately, the second by demonstrating that a months long torture regime more or less refutes the notion that what was learned was catastrophically time-sensitive. The whole point of Krauthammer's point is that we need to know now, not a year (and 100 plus episodes of water boarding) from now.

Second, there is at least some current evidence that, far from working, torture may have created false information. This has historically been proven to be the case and is one reason why John McCain, a torture victim himself, opposes it. Now, according to some reports surfacing, a high value Iraqi was tortured in order to get him to disclose a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime in Iraq. This dovetailed nicely with the Administration's need to trump up an alternative justification for the war in Iraq once their WMD claims went up in smoke. And the Iraqi, of course, coughed up the necessary link. There was, however, only one problem with his information.

It was false. 

Cheney (and presumably Krauthammer as well) wants all of the CIA's torture memos declassified and claims they will support his assertion that torture works. No doubt they will. Cheney, after all, was regularly parking himself at Langley to make sure that whatever the agency said comported with his views. Many contend the former Veep is a war criminal. But no one asserts he is stupid. So I have no doubt that those memos will help him spin his position in some way. 

But I want to see them anyway. 

For two reasons here, as well. 

First, if the memos do not show that legitimate alternatives were tried and failed, or that the techniques were not used over long periods of time on particular detainees, or that the information gleaned was not in fact false, then the only thing tortured about Cheney's and Krauthammer's current position will be its logic. 

And second, I'd like to see what the memos say about . . . 

Nuremberg.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

SHE HAD A DREAM

SHE HAD A DREAM 

Of those 100 million plus You Tube hits over the last ten days, at least twenty are from me. I just can't get enough of her. Every time I watch it, I wind up crying. A friend recently told my wife that she had a husband who wears his heart on his sleeve. 

This time, however, it was lodged firmly in my throat. 

We live in a world where appearance is reality. Or at least close enough to reality that it can by no means be safely ignored. We also live in a world of conventional wisdom. If a frumpy "plus size" woman pushing 50 has not fulfilled her "dream" of becoming a professional singer, chances are . . . 

She can't sing. 

We all knew that when she walked onto the stage. A slow, somewhat uncomfortable walk that we thought said "I have never been here before and do not expect to be back any time soon." Then she started answering questions. 

And really convinced us her fifteen minutes of fame would either be funny for us . . . or embarrassing for her . . . or (we hoped) both. 

Simon started with softballs. "What's your name, darling?" (He would never have tried that "darling" bit on Amanda; she would have clocked him). "Susan Boyle," she said, safely enough. "And where are you from?" "Blightman, near Bathgate, in West Lothian," she replied. That's a "big town," said Simon smoothly. Her puzzled look said "not really." 

And then she stopped. For more than a moment. And we knew again she was cooked. TV pros don't stop. Silence is deadly. Pregnant pauses are decidedly for amateurs. We had an amateur and we knew it. She scratched her head. Which no one else on TV does either. Because their hair is very made up. Which was not her problem. Because her hair was barely made up. 

"It's more a collection of . . ." 

And then she stopped again. To find a word, for heaven's sake. Doesn't she understand she is on TV? We knew she didn't.

". . . villages, don't ya think?" 

Simon doesn't get paid to think. At least not about the size of West Lothian "villages." So he plowed on. 

 "And how old are you Susan?" "I am 47," she said. Simon's eyes opened . . . wide. He couldn't say what he was thinking. Which was that she must be kiddin'.

 She wasn't. 

"And that's just one side of me," she added, suggestively rolling her decidedly non-Madonna like hips. Pierce frowned at the unvarnished tackiness of it all. Simon muttered a disgusted "Wow" sotto voce to Amanda. Even in Europe, this was still a family show. So tackiness approaches raunchiness only at a distance. Simon moved on. 

Deftly. 

"OK. What's the dream?" he asked. 

"I'm tryin' to be a professional singer," said she. And then the camera panned to a woman in the audience. Whose look said either "Yikes" or "C'mon" depending on the continent. Simon moved in for the proverbial kill. "And why hasn't it worked out so far, Susan?" "I've not been given the chance before, but here's hoping it'll change" said Susan. We didn't believe her. And when she told us she wanted to be as successful as Elaine Paige, a theatrical superstar, we all laughed. 

Piers had had enough. "What are you going to sing tonight?" he asked, just to get it over with. "I'm going to sing I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables," she said, just to let us know how bad what was coming would be. "Big song," said Simon. Pies chuckled. Amanda just stared. 

Then Susan Boyle sang. 

And right about that time, to quote Forrest Gump, "God showed up." 

She didn't just sing. She overwhelmed. She was perfect. The audience was on its feet. Simon was simply fooled and couldn't wash that "I've been had" smile off his face. Amanda was in shock, and Piers later admitted as much. In the evaluations which followed, Amanda apologized for all us "cynics," calling the performance "the biggest wake up call ever." Piers confessed that when she had said she wanted to be "like Elaine Paige, everyone was laughing at you." 

"No one is laughing now," he added. 

Except God. 

Who always knew she could sing. 

Even when we were certain that this frumpy, slighty overweight, 50ish, not ready for prime time, spinster, with a silly dream, from a village in West Lothian . . . 

Couldn't.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

SOUNDS OF SILENCE

SOUNDS OF SILENCE 

I have not written a blogpost in almost two months. 

A cousin in Colorado wondered if all was well. She was used to receiving my monthly (or, during the recent election, weekly) missives and thought something might be wrong. I told here everything was fine and filled her in on some family news. 

Another friend mentioned that he too had gone to the blog recently and had seen nothing since early February. He was worried that I would "lose my audience." With his finger on the pulse of 21st century internet based media, he issued a dire warning. "If you want to get hits, you have to do it all the time. Good bloggers blog every day. And theirs are shorter than yours." Translated for my 20th century literary based mind, "get hits" is a synonym for having been "read," and "good bloggers" are those who, tautologically speaking, "get hits." On his view, reading appears to be more or less beside the point. A "hit", I have learned, is anyone who accesses the blog, whether or not they actually read it. Shorter appears to be better because it merely increases the chances that some of the "hitters", as it were, will also turn out to be readers. 

What's a neophyte blogger to do? 

I told my cousin I had not written anything lately because I was still trying to get a bead on what is going on in the economy. Said I: "The whole banking plan is very complicated and I am not quite sure I understand it yet." Said she (tongue firmly planted in cheek): "You mean you actually want to understand what is happening before you write about it?" 

But this is not a laughing matter. 

Bloggers (and others) are weighing in en masse on the Obama-Geithner plan to create a public-private partnership to begin purchasing the so-called toxic assets, largely mortgage backed securities which are not trading anymore (and thus can't really be priced) along with those killer credit default swaps and options that piled leverage on top of the way overly leveraged mortgage backed securities. No one really knows whether the plan will work (except Paul Krugman, who -- for reasons I do not understand -- pretty much says it won't, and Tim Geithner, who -- for reasons I very much understand -- does not promise it will but is officially reduced to the position that it has to). 

I don't know either. 

And so have been reduced to silence. 

Which is another word for "thinking". 

Along with the other "weigher-inners", I could break my studied silence and take a position. As far as I can tell, that would not really require "weighing in" on the actual economic effects of the plan. Instead, I would just need to make some aphoristically cute atmospheric point. Like . . . 

Why is the President doing a town hall meeting in California when he should be 24/7 on the banking plan? Or . . .

Why is the President talking about universal health care, or universal pre-k, or -- frankly -- universal anything, when the universe's entire foundation (aka the banking system) is not functioning? Or . . . 

Why didn't Geithner or Obama know about those AIG bonuses, and anyway how will we stop them, which has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the banking plan will actually work but otherwise satisfies a "weigher-inner's" felt urge to say something that appears to be related even if it isn't? Or . . . 

What's the point of passing a back to the '70s larded by liberals budget that raises taxes and refuses to delay on going green and a whole host of Democratic platform planks which will just balloon the deficit, when we are already committed to ballooning the deficit to bail out the bankers and hedge funders (and, just for edge and moral superiority, those AIG bonus babies)? 

Or I could just say nothing. 

And keep thinking. 

I won't get any "hits" this way. 

But my cousin in Colorado still loves me.

Friday, February 6, 2009

FROGS

FROGS

In the annals of counter intuitive reality, I thought nothing could top the frogs in the gradually warming water.

It seems that a frog, like you and me, will react immediately to the touch of boiling water, bolting from the offending hot stuff in a split second. Put the reptile in a bucket of gradually warming water, however, and it will literally sit there until it is boiled to death.

So, as I said, I thought nothing could top the frogs. 

And then I heard the Republican position on the current economic crisis and the stimulus package winding its way through the halls of Congress. 

And realized I was wrong. 

In a Back to the Future moment that only true conservative believers can revel in, the GOP is telling us that the solution to our current problems is some combination of tax cuts, a spending freeze, reduction of the deficit, and the condemnation of anything else as that most hated of political beasts, the "earmark." Never mind that the first and second will not stimulate, the third would actually make things worse at this precise moment, and the fourth is merely a rhetorical sponge -- and a mostly inaccurate one at that -- there to absorb anything at odds with one through three. 

It is very easy to pick apart the stimulus package, and this makes for great political theatre, however de minimis the actual dollars are when it comes to any particular nit. Whoever added the line for contraceptive funding to the House bill obviously had stimulus in mind, but not the sort we are looking for. Nevertheless, as Obama pointed out earlier this week, the specific spending now criticized amounts to about 1% of the overall package, a lot of money to be sure, but hardly more than a rounding error in the context of our multi-trillion dollar economy. 

The real problem is that the President is being way too apologetic and should stop it. The bill is more than defensible in almost all its particulars.

But you do have to read the fine print. 

And ignore the Rush Limbaugh echo chamber. 

For example, among the items in the House bill criticized recently on the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal were $6 billion to construct, alter and repair federal buildings, $325 million to repair trails and "remediate mines" on federal lands, $462 million to construct, renovate and repair laboratories leased by the CDC, $427 million to construct research facilities for the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, $75 million for salaries and expenses at the FBI, and $6.2 billion for weatherization assistance. 

All of this is directly stimulative. The vast majority is for new or retrofit construction projects which create local jobs with obvious economic multiplier effects. If you doubt this, just look for a construction project in any urban neighborhood and then ask the local deli owner what he thinks of it. Those sold pastrami sandwiches will tell you all you need to know. And whether they are swinging steel girders on high risers or weatherizing the suburban mansions of any remaining yuppies, the hard hats won't care. Both jobs will pay the bills. Equally stimulative are the much derided line items for "salaries," notwithstanding the fun had by those who play the conservative parlor game of bashing government employees as undeserving leeches sucking off the tit of their ostensibly more productive private sector brethren. What the parlor pundits miss is that, unlike the upper echelon taxpayers favored by conservatives and the GOP, those FBI agents and employees will actually spend whatever portion of the $75 million goes to salaries. 

Even the more esoteric stuff is perfectly appropriate for these less than perfect times. Stealing a page from Franklin Roosevelt's book, the House bill provides hundreds of millions to repair trails on public lands. This is merely the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the 1930s come back to life. In the Depression, the CCC took tens of thousands off the streets and gave them work on federal lands. And the modest equivalent now proposed could today provide work for an army of college students and others. 

In truth, conservatives are not bitching about whether the expenditures are sufficiently stimulative. Were they doing so, a credible claim could be made that too much of the spending extends into fiscal years 2010 and 2011 when it should instead be front loaded, and an even stronger claim could be made that the overall amount spent is way too low. My guess is that as the bills make their way through both chambers and then to conference, the first problem will be addressed. Nevertheless, the conservatives will not come along. 

Because it's the second problem that really scares them. 

In 1993 and 1994, as the Clinton Administration teed up universal health care and sought to craft legislation to make it a reality, conservative pundit William Kristol famously advised Republicans to say nothing but "No." Kristol thought that any universal health program would cement the middle class' allegiance to the Democratic Party for another generation or two and that, as a consequence, when it came to universal health care, Republicans couldn't bargain, negotiate or compromise. All they could do was oppose. 

Something similar but much bigger is at work today. Conservatives cannot afford to let the government forestall this crisis. They cannot allow an insufficiently funded Round I stimulus package to lay the groundwork for more money later on. If that occurs and works, they will be out of business for quite some time, their laissez faire trickle down ideology in tatters, their second Gilded Age gone the way of the first.

The stakes, of course, are much higher now than they were in the '90s with health care. Then, it was about a program. Today, it is about the world's economy. Consumers aren't spending. Real estate developers are moth balling planned commercial investments. Businesses are not expanding capacity because they either can't sell what they have already produced or do not think they will sell what they could now produce. And Nobel economist Paul Krugman is warning of the "possibility" of a "prolonged deflationary trap," which is econo-talk for a Depression. 

But in the face of all this, the party of W marches on. 

Obliviously.

Just like the frogs.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

RIGHT HOOK

RIGHT HOOK 

The ink is not yet dry on his Inaugural Address, and the sober but inspiring words breathed through the chill of a January afternoon and a collapsing economy have not yet entered the historic pantheon where they one day may reside. The afterglow of parties held long into the Inaugural night is not yet extinguished, as revellers recall their own celebratory dances with history and more than a few beers. And more or less as a bonus, we found out yesterday that The One can't just speak. 

He can also dance. 

Which is good. 

Because he's going to need all the moves he has. 

Lost in the banner headlines and generally favorable reviews on this post-Inaugural Wednesday is the right wing's game plan for return. It's not easy to find. George Will is today lauding President Obama's demure but no less direct admonition in his speech yesterday that we grow up as a nation and realize there are no free lunches. Put childish things aside, says the President quoting the Bible, and Will reads that as a not so subtle demand that everyone realize Washington cannot be all to all. Then Andrea Peyser of Murdoch's NY Post waxes positively eloquent from a bar stool in a working class part of New York City, telling erstwhile populist conservatives that, hey, the new guy gets it. With his praise for "the doers," a "graceful" and "humble" Obama won over the heart of a self professed "fierce skeptic" who, as she put it, "didn't vote for him . . . trust him . . . [or] support him." 

Wow. Maybe this whole Red/Blue thing is about to go the way of the dinosaur. 

Then I read Dick Morris. 

And my post-partisan love affair with the new bi-partisan bubble was burst. 

Morris is never subtle and today he did not disappoint. His headline had to be music to Sarah Palin's ears -- "The Obama Presidency: Here Comes Socialism." Underneath it, Morris catalogues the forced march to European style socialism he envisions us making over the course of the next four years. It starts with Obama's emulation of the last President who ostensibly took us on this trip -- FDR. According to Dick, Obama will rescue the banking system "by nationalizing it," with the government getting preferred stock in exchange for troubled assets, and then follow up with a wish list of spending programs running the gamut from alternative energy sources and technology enhancements to school renovations and infrastructure repairs. This will bust the budget at precisely that point in time when tax credits and other middle class tax relief measures have expanded the group of non-federal tax paying citizens to a "clear majority of the American population," leaving only the well off (or, as Morris puts it, Republicans) to shoulder the tax increases needed to replenish the treasury's deficit laden coffers. 

Meanwhile, in the world of Obama created by Morris, the imbalance between our demand for health care and the supply of available doctors, nurses and facilities will lead to price controls and rationing, the inevitable result of the President's supposed unwillingness to let medical prices increase so that investments can be made to increase supply. On the political side, Morris asserts that illegal immigrants will be given a "path the citizenship" and labor will get a check off system, the combined effect of which will be to turn red states like Texas into bastions of blue while union households (and therefore Democrats) proliferate as membership rises. Morris imagines the consequence of this putative parade of horribles will be that "Obama's name will be mud by 2012 and probably 2010," following which the "Republican Party will . . . regain much of its lost power." But the socialist die will have been cast. And it will be "too late to reverse." 

It's a shame this sort of stuff is advertised as non-fiction. 

Because Morris's diatribe mixes in equal parts deceit and conceit. As well as the usual dollop of fear. 

The deceit is both historic and contemporary. Like most conservative revisionists, Morris believes that Roosevelt's New Deal was an economic failure. Designed to cure the Great Depression, FDR's program lowered unemployment from 23% when he was inaugurated to about 13% in 1937. Then it went back up to 17% in 1938, a sort of second Depression, and never got below 15% before World War II. Morris claims that Roosevelt's "policies of over regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession." Hence, Q.E.D. (it is demonstrated, for all you non-Latin scholars who weren't educated by the Jesuits) say the conservatives. The New Deal failed. 

 There is only one problem with this account. 

 It is wrong. 

 The New Deal didn't fail to end the Depression. It just failed to continue and the Depression was made worse as a result. FDR wobbled and for a time threw away his Keynesian compass. In his heyday of New Deal spending and fiscal stimulus, Roosevelt brought the unemployment rate down by ten points (which we would take in a heartbeat today). Unfortunately, after being re-elected in 1936, rather than increasing the stimulus, he tried to balance the budget and raised taxes to do so. This triggered a new recession, the child of pandering to conservative shibboleths that budgets must be balanced at all costs. What could have continued was thus abbreviated, and the country did not fully recover until the mother of all fiscal stimulus and spending plans was passed, which we know today as World War II. 

Nor did FDR's legislative accomplishments create the kind of business uncertainty that led to a renewed recession. There was nothing uncertain about what the politicians had wrought, unless the captains of industry and finance in the '30s saw uncertainty in a hoped for return to the halcyon days of dog eat dog laissez faire where the aged and widows were poor, workers were broke, and gains from any productivity always migrated to the top. In fact, after World War II ended, there was real fear that a new Depression would emerge. And that was stopped by the GI Bill (which put cash in the pockets of veterans, educated a generation, and laid the groundwork for the productivity gains of the '50s and '60s), as well as the unionization FDR had heralded and Morris seems to lament. There is a reason the middle class emerged in the wake of the war. It is because the previous post-industrial imbalance between labor and capital had been addressed to some extent and productivity gains were thus more evenly distributed across the population. 

Having distorted history, Morris then tries to do the same to Obama's program. He begins with the claim that the President intends to "nationalize the banking system," which is an odd charge, especially in light of current realities. What Morris posits is that the government will finally get around to buying up (or insuring the banks against the losses from) toxic assets, principally bad mortgage loans and the paper created to securitize them. In exchange, the government will get preferred stock in the banks, which is just a fancy term for an IOU. Like any loan, it will bear interest. Because, however, the assets are so toxic and the debt will be so large, Morris claims that upon recovering their positions the banks will essentially be able only to pay back the government and the common shareholders will in effect get nothing. When the common stockholders realize this, they will flee. And voila, the government will in effect own the banks, which will then have been "nationalized."

"Nationalization," of course, is always a bad thing to true conservatives. It is basically their polite way of calling you a socialist . . . or communist. From time to time, conservatives in fact nationalize things. But usually they call it a national security emergency or a war of some sort. Back in the '50s, the conservatives helped "nationalize" American transportation by building the interstate highway system. But they called it the National Defense Highway Act and told us we needed the interstates so tanks could easily roll from Kansas to New York in case the Russians invaded. 

In any case, my first reaction to the nationalization charge was "So what." Then I realized this is exactly what Morris wants us east coast liberal Obama lovers to say. So my second reaction was to wonder what he would propose as an alternative. The government could always take the toxic paper in exchange for nothing. 

That would save the common shareholders.

But screw the American taxpayer. 

Which is probably not a good idea. 

Every other preferred stockholder gets a dividend on what amounts to a quasi-loan to the corporation whose stock he has purchased. Why should John Q. Public be any different? The answer is he shouldn't. 

The other answer is that Morris is overwrought . . . by a long shot. The notion that common shareholders in banks with toxic assets will be wiped out is neither certain nor likely. The whole purpose of recovery is to allow the institutions to function while they work off the debt. It may take awhile, but if the banks recover, so will the common shareholders, sooner or later. As the debt is lowered, the common shares will become more valuable. Thus, far from the Obama plan (assuming Morris's version is the one ultimately adopted) resulting in an inevitable "nationalization" of the banking system, the contrary is likely to be the case. 

Now to the conceit. 

The assumption throughout Morris's piece is that Obama is incapable of making hard choices. He will ration health care because he will not permit medical inflation. He will legalize illegals and unionize the workforce merely to insure the success of Democratic Party candidates. The first charge, however, is simply the result of a false choice. And the second assumes there are no good reasons for the policies, in which case the motive must merely be political . . . and cynical.

Nothing about this President, however, justifies these claims. 

The supply/demand imbalance in our health care system today is largely a function of three flaws. First, the present system disincentivizes participation. We have encouraged insurance companies to cherry pick, the result of having allowed health administrators to serve as gatekeepers in a system of managed care that saves money by denying coverage and excluding claimants. Whether we get to universal coverage via a single payer system or by mandating that everyone have insurance, either approach will pump more money into the system and allow more investment in doctors, nurses, hospitals, equipment and care. 

The conservative approach -- which generally relies on tax deferred medical savings accounts (MSAs) coupled with provisions for catastrophic insurance -- would disincentivize participation on an even larger scale because it would decrease the pool of those who pay into the system on a regular basis. The key to a sound insurance system is to get as many healthy people as possible into the pool. MSAs are only as valuable as the incomes which fund them, which means that the young (and healthy) or middle aged but not very well off are likely either to opt out or participate at levels insufficient to generate sufficient cash to cover Morris's investment gap; at the same time, an insurance regime limited to catastrophic care creates a dangerous incentive to avoid preventive care in favor of later catastrophic care, which is neither good for America's health nor particularly helpful in reining in medical inflation. 

Second, the health care "market" is not free and hasn't been since World War II, when wage controls forced employers to give employees health insurance (which was then cheap) in lieu of prohibited cash. When the health care market was free, people did not get care and died as a result. That is a policy we could return to, and without admitting it, Morris and his followers seem to get there by default. Nevertheless, assuming we believe minimal care is a right people enjoy, not a commodity they can avoid, the market in health care is like the market in electricity. It has to be organized efficiently on the assumption that everyone needs it, all should get it, and we need not go broke providing it. Part of the way to do that, and this is the third problem with the present system, is that we have to use technology effectively, computerizing record keeping and generating user friendly outcomes based data bases so that providers everywhere can have access to the best research and treatment protocols and administrators are not endlessly duplicating patient data and billing files. 

Morris,of course, mentions none of this. Instead, he avoids the problems, flinging around words like rationing and price controls with an abandon that in the end reveals him for what he is -- a health policy Wizard of Oz. There is nothing behind his curtain. 

Ditto on illegal immigrants and labor policy. With Morris, it's all fear and no fact. In his most responsible hour last year, John McCain recognized that the present immigration system is a joke. Our borders are porous; our outrage is hypocritical; and our policy is unfair (both to those who are here and those who want to be). One need not be in favor of rationalizing that system merely to increase the votes obtained in the next election. McCain certainly wasn't motivated by that, and it is unfair to assume Obama is either. 

The same is true of labor reform. In the '30s and beyond, unions were critical to equalizing the economy's distribution of productivity gains and making the middle class possible. Since the conservative ascendancy of the late '70s, there have been enormous productivity gains but they have by and large gone to the top 10%. If labor is strengthened and collective bargaining re-emerges as a real economic force, the likelihood is that any future gains will be distributed as they were when the Greatest Generation came of age, not as they were when that generation began to die. 

When I listened to him yesterday, I heard a President Obama inviting us to change, warning us that change would not be easy, advising us that old approaches and resentments would be dangerously counterproductive, and asking -- as had his 16th predecessor -- that we unleash the "better angels of our nature." 

Dick Morris apparently missed that show. 

Too bad.

'Cause this guy can dance.