ELIOT'S REVENGE

ELIOT'S  REVENGE

April 2013.

It started good enough.

With baseball. 

Then it was all downhill.

The Boston Marathon bombing was book ended by two Senate votes on what now passes for gun control in this country -- a bill expanding background checks to gun shows and internet sales so as to close a loophole and  tighten the prohibitions on sales to convicted felons and the mentally ill.  The first was just a vote to actually have a debate on the bill.  Though there was a real danger that it would not pass the Senate,  a phalanx of parents of the Newtown victims went to Washington and more or less embarrassed them into at least talking about it.  

This in turn created a sort of false dawn in which we imagined for a moment that mass tragedy could actually shock federal legislators into ignoring the paper tiger that is the NRA and voting for something, however meager,  that 90% of the country supports.

Alas, it was not to be.

A week later, the full Senate voted against the actual bill by supporting a filibuster on it.  The 54-46 vote in "favor"  failed to cross the 60 vote margin  necessary to end debate and pass the bill, effectively killing it. 

In between these two votes, two wannabe jihadis -- one an American citizen, the other a legal resident -- blew up the  Boston Marathon  at the finish line with home made pressure cooker bombs assembled, apparently, from instructions readily available on-line.  The older of the two, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, attracted the attention of the Russians a few years back and were investigated by the FBI in 2011, which determined they had no ties to terrorism but added their names to the so-called TECS (for "Treasury Enforcement Communications System") database. 

The Russians later requested that the CIA also investigate the Tsarnaev mother and elder son.  This resulted in their names being added to a terrorism database known as TIDE (for "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment").  That's a list of 700,00 names used by federal agencies to come up with more specific watch lists.  Neither of the two, however, were moved to any of those more specific lists.  In addition,  the entries in the TIDE database were inaccurate -- the Russians had apparently misspelled mother and son's name.  For their part, the entries in the TECS system expire in a year.

There is considerable interest in Congress now about why the FBI closed or did not re-open its investigation of Tamerlan.  Republican Senator Lindsey Graham claims that "The ball was dropped in one of two ways --  [either]the FBI missed a lot of things, [or] . . . our laws do not allow . . . follow up in a sound solid way."  According to Graham, "There was a lot to be learned from this guy. He was on websites talking about killing Americans. He went overseas ... he was clearly talking about radical ideas. He was visiting radical areas." 

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) believes the problem is  "outdated guidelines."   He says the FBI couldn't re-open its investigation of Tamerlan after  Homeland Security (via the TECS entry) was "pinged" when he left to visit Russia in January 2012.  It is unclear whether Homeland Security was even allowed to inform the FBI of the overseas travel, and it apparently never did so.  Though the Joint Terrorism Task Force was notified at that point, it is not clear what they did with the information or which federal agency they gave it to.  

By the time Tamerlan returned in June, the TECS entry had expired (and would only have indicated that the FBI's investigation had closed, even if it hadn't expired),  so there was no additional "ping."  In the meantime, TIDE didn't light up on either his exit or return because the misspelled names provided by the Russians didn't match Tamerlan's travel documents. If, however, accurate information had been provided, the TIDE data in June 2012 also would have indicated that the FBI had closed its investigation.

So, in a nutshell,  the feds have some 'splainin to do.

The first issue is whether the FBI knew or should have known of Tsarnaev's trip to Russia in January 2012, and if so, what the agency did or should have done with that information.  The second is to which specific agency  the Joint Terrorism Task Force reported the trip,  and what that agency did or should have done with that information.  The third is whether Sen. Graham has the time line right.  His statement suggests that Tamerlan's radical web surfing might have occurred before the FBI investigated. The agency, however, says it checked his web usage before concluding the investigation.  The fourth is what the Russians knew, what they told us, and why they did not tell us any more, if more there was to tell. 

Congress will leave no stone unturned in attempting to answer these questions.  

As it should.

This is about terrorism.  Perhaps of the so-called lone wolf variety, which is the hardest to discover and stop.  Three people died and hundreds were injured.  As we all know, more than  three thousand have died at the hands of terrorists over the course of the last decade and a half, and our response has been swift. In the wake of 9/11, we passed the Patriot Act with record speed, sacrificing liberty for security in a bargain with the devil that will haunt us for decades.  Years later, we renewed that Act with equal dispatch.  That's what we do when 3,000 plus victims die at the hands of terrorists.

On gun violence, however, it's been a different story, as Chris Hayes recently pointed out on MSNBC.

30,000.

That's the approximate number of people who die from gun violence each year.

364,483.

That's the number who died from gun violence during the period 1999-2010.

Question: What has Congress done in the last decade to combat this epidemic?

Answer: Nothing.

In January,  PBS commentator Mark Shields pointed out that,  if you go back to 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, more Americans have died from gun violence than have been killed in all of the country's twelve wars.  The count is . . .

War - 1,171,177.

Guns -  1,364,483.

For the record,  five Democrats  voted against the background check bill earlier this month.  One, the majority leader, did so merely to preserve the possibility that the measure could be brought up again and otherwise would have voted for it.  Of the remaining four, however,  three  of them were from states where more than 80% of the public supported the bill.  So was Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican who also voted to kill the bill.  When asked why they ignored the views of such super-majorities in their own states, the Senators either said nothing . . . or claimed those figures were wrong   . . . or asserted that the anti-gun control forces were louder and vote on that issue alone.

By the way, Lindsey Graham voted against the background check bill as well.  So did Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker.   When reporters caught up to him last Friday,  he was at Reagan National Airport,  on his way home, bemoaning sequestration cuts that furloughed air traffic controllers and created delays at major city airports throughout the country . . .

But praising the House of Representatives  for eliminating those cuts.

Which -- in what may be a new legislative land speed record in Washington.-- it did in about forty eight hours last week.

For the 70,000 kids who won't get into Head Start because of  sequestration, the cuts remain.  The same goes for those out in the cold seniors who won't get their  meals on wheels.

T.S. Eliot was right  . . .

"April is the cruelest month."

THE GAY MARRIAGE CASE

THE GAY MARRIAGE CASE

Should gay men and lesbian women be permitted to enter into state-sanctioned  marriages?

This question -- which is now the subject of two Supreme Court cases, numerous state referenda, evolving state laws, and kitchen table conversations throughout the country -- is much easier to answer as a matter of policy than as a matter of constitutional law.

As a matter of policy, the arguments against gay and lesbian marriage are universally bad.  Same-sex marriage does not make opposite sex marriage less likely, nor does it weaken (or really have any effect at all on) heterosexual unions or the institution of heterosexual marriage.  The empirical reality is that sexual orientation is a matter of birth, not choice, and all our various attractions will remain as they were regardless of whether the pool of state sanctioned marriage licenses expands to accept same sex couples.  No heterosexual couple will join or split on account of the legality of gay and lesbian unions.  The children of traditional marriages will, of course, see examples of non-traditional arrangements and will process the information they get from those families as they do with others; some of the examples will be good, some bad.

But there is no evolutionary or existential threat in the offing here. 

Neither to heterosexual coupling nor to the so-called "traditional" family.

In fact, such an outcome is not even possible. 

Another canard is that same sex unions will harm children.  This is false.  On the one hand, the assumption that heterosexual unions must be the preferred arrangement when it comes to child-rearing is itself suspect in the extreme.  There is no evidence that children raised by gay or lesbian couples turn out worse than those raised by their hetero counterparts.  Nor is there any evidence that the mere existence of same sex families has some powerful -- and adverse -- spillover effect  on the families, and children, of their opposite sex neighbors.   

There is, of course, abundant evidence that in tact families are better for children, on average, than those that are broken.   

Roughly half the marriages in this country still end in divorce, and the evidence is that we still have a long way to go in getting marriage (and divorce) right for the kids (and for the grown-ups too).  To date, however, gays and lesbians have had nothing to do with this reality; we heterosexuals have created it all on our own.   When all the evidence is in, I suspect the results will be the same for gays and lesbians.  If their families break up, their children will suffer too.

Because, as the song goes, breaking up is hard to do.

Not because Mommies and Daddies are always better parents.

 

Nevertheless, when you scratch the surface of the policy debate on same sex marriage, it is hard not to get the impression that opponents are blaming the LGBTs for the break up of the family.    A number of the amici briefs filed in Hollingsworth v. Perry --  the gay marriage case heard by the Supreme Court last week --  were explicit in making this claim.  

Here are three  examples.

The Westboro Baptist Church filed a brief telling the Court that "America has erred in making fornication, adultery, divorce, remarriage, abortion-for-convenience-on-demand and sodomy standard fare in this country."  It continued: "It is time to reverse that course, and for the Court to squarely hold that the governments of America have a compelling interest in upholding traditional opposite sex marriage, and further in protecting the people from the devastating effects of same-sex marriage."

In its amicus brief, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was less strident but no less insistent.  It claimed the following:  "Societal ills that flow from the dissolution of marriage and family would not be addressed -- indeed, they would only be aggravated -- were the government to fail to reinforce  the union of one man and one woman with the unique encouragement and support it deserves." 

Then there was the Thomas More Law Center.  Its amicus brief argued that: "Declaring that adherence to the traditional definition of marriage is irrational and illegitimate would profoundly delegitimize those who subscribe to such a position, facilitating the imposition of a species of ideological totalitarianism upon objectors to a regime of redefined marriage."

There are a number of disturbing trends in these positions.  The worst, however, is the more or less straight line each draws between homosexuality and the  perceived sexual or moral lapses of the last century. In this world, being gay or lesbian is not inherent; rather, it follows from government's failure to marshall the state's police power to declare war on fornication, adultery, divorce and re-marriage.  Whatever bad outcomes attend "the dissolution of the family," banning gays and lesbians from marrying somehow emerges as a credible means to reverse that trend, even though gays and lesbians had nothing to do with it and will never be able to stop it.  Finally, having raised their Sodom and Gomorrah world to the level of the culturally accepted, and having helped ruin the family in the process,  gays and lesbians then get to brand their opponents as illegitimate, imposing their own "ideological totalitarianism" on erstwhile defenders of the heterosexual realm.

Wow.  

Who knew?

It's as if we marched from Stonewall to the new Soviet in forty or so short years

It is an understatement to call this sort of stuff nonsense.  But it would be foolish not to take it seriously. 

So constitutional law does.

Which is why gay marriage as a constitutional right is so much harder to get to than gay marriage as a socially desirable policy.

The issue for the Supreme Court is whether excluding gay and lesbian couples from state sanctioned marriages in California -- but pretty much nothing else, given that state's aggressive panoply of civil union and equal benefits statutes -- violates either the equal protection or due process clauses of the 14th Amendment to the federal Constitution.  This amendment was passed in the wake of the Civil War and was designed to insure equal rights for former slaves.  Much to the chagrin of conservative jurisprudes, who claim that the amendment should be construed only to give effect to the original intent of its framers, it has since then been used to fashion a right to privacy (ultimately precluding state bans at least on early term abortions) and to bar gender discrimination absent some reasonably ascertainable state interest.  

For years, no one contemplated the possibility that the 14th Amendment could be used to strike down laws barring gay or lesbian marriages or laws that defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.  That was, afterall, how all the dictionaries defined the word.  The issue, moreover, was certainly on no one's radar screen in the 1860s, when the 14th Amendment was drafted and ratified.  In fairness, courts can't construe amendments until they get cases requiring a construction, and no one in the wake of the Civil War was filing cases claiming equal rights for gays and lesbians.  This did not happen until quite recently.  But here we are.  

In 2013.

What to do?

In law school, my first Professor of Constitional Law, Joseph Goldstein,  made us all write Supreme Court opinions.  When I first took a class from him, Prof. Goldstein was himself new to the subject; in fact, I do not think he had ever before taught it.  His expertise -- in fact, his fame -- was in family law in general and how that law effected children, in particular.  Along with two others, he authored the famous "Beyond", "Before" and "Beside" the "Best Interests of the Child" treatises.  If there is a seminar in heaven on Hollingsworth, he is definitely running it.  

And telling all his students to be "Tenth Justices."

So here is what Tenth Justice Me would say:

"There are three principles which decide this case.  

First, marriage is fundamental.  This is  a proposition the Court has recognized on more occasions, and in more contexts, than it can count.  The institution, moreover, has been held fundamental regardless of whether a couple could or even intended to have children.  It therefore must be held to be fundamental for gays and lesbians.

Second,  a 14th Amendment broad enough to support a right to privacy and bar gender discrimination is broad enough to support a right to gay marriage.   Constitutional principles emerge in concrete settings but are phrased in abstract language. There is a reason for this.  Those principles are meant to survive and govern in contexts other than those in which they emerge.  No one in the 1860s could have predicted all the circumstances in which equal protection of the laws or due process could or would in the future be violated.  So no one did so.  Instead, the drafters of the 14th Amendment fulfilled their responsibility by amending the Constitution to guarantee those protections to all.

And today, we are merely fulfilling our responsibility to guarantee those rights to gays and lesbians.

Third, we cannot ignore the thirty states that have passed laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.  Or that a majority of Californians have sought to so do in this case.  The Constitution commits us to representative government and that means we must respect the decisions made by our representatives.

Unless those decisions have no basis in reason or fact.

California's proposition barring gays from marriage is such a decision.

There is no evidence -- none -- that gay or lesbian marriage will hurt children, harm heterosexual marriages, accelerate the dissolution of the family, or otherwise imperil moral prerogatives or religious liberties.  No religion that does not want to sanction gay or lesbian marriage will be forced to do so, and while officers of the state (e.g., Justices of the Peace, Notaries) may be required to perform weddings they might otherwise oppose, public officials are routinely called upon to check their private views at the door when those views conflict with their public functions.  Similarly, no law that precludes marriage on the basis of reason and fact (e.g., laws banning polygamy or laws establishing age requirements for marriage licenses) will fail in the future.

California has, in truth, reduced this issue to its essentials. Under state law, gays and lesbians can form domestic partnerships, raise children, distribute their estates to their partners, and otherwise enjoy all the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.  Except one.  They cannot be "married."  If we lived in an "Alice in Wonderland" world, this might not matter.  What's in a word, afterall?

But we do not live in that world.

In our world, as the Court noted almost sixty years ago, "separate but equal is inherently unequal."  It creates stigma.  It assigns badges of inferiority, usually to groups -- like gays and lesbians -- that have been historically vilified.  

We do not decide today that marriage matters.  We have known that for some time now.What we decide today is that marriage matters . . .

For gays and lesbians . . .

And for their kids too."

A PRAYER FOR FRANCIS

A PRAYER FOR FRANCIS

When I was a kid, I went to church a lot.

I went to a Catholic parochial school in Brooklyn in the '60s.  It was then called Our Lady Help of Christians. There were two classes, A and B,  for each of eight grades.  There were slightly more than fifty (50) students in each class, so more than eight hundred of us in the school.  The parish was the center of everyone's social life.  We played baseball and basketball for the parish team and joined the parish Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.  The fathers were in the Holy Name Society.  The mothers were in the sodality and the PTA.

There was a 9 am Mass each Sunday, just for the kids.  Attendance was not optional.  The nuns watched all eight hundred of us fidget in our seats.  If you spoke to the friend next to you, and you were seen, the ushers removed you to the back pew, a sort of march to perdition.  It was also all spit and polish.  We dressed for church even better than we dressed for school -- collared shirt, tie, blazer, creased slacks and shined shoes.

Vatican II started when I was three and ended when I was nine.  While it was going on, none of us kids knew anything about it.  But when it was over, the parish erupted in change.  We altar boys had painstakingly learned the Mass in Latin; we re-learned it in English.  The priest had previously always had his back to us.  Now he was turned around.  Soon, the old ornate altar was gone, replaced by a marble table and a multi-colored resurrection mosaic on the back wall.  As the tumult of the '60s was broadcast on the nightly news, Mass became more hip and, we thought, more relevant.  Guitars replaced the organ and folk songs replaced hymns. The hippest priest -- Father Duffy -- quoted Simon and Garfunkel in one of his homilies. We all had to be that bridge over troubled water for the poor and the possessed.

In 1970, I went to a Catholic high school -- Xavier in Manhattan.  The Jesuits taught there, and there were lots of them.  In fact, Jesuit scholastics -- members of that religious order who were in training to become priests and who, as part of that training, did mandatory years of service as teachers -- made those schools. They were intellectual evangelists who grabbed the minds of outer-borough teens and convinced them that they could be -- in fact, had to be -- something.  And that the something had to combine success and ethics in at least equal measures.  The one to whom I became closest, now a Jesuit psychologist and professor at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY -- taught me the most important lesson of my life -- "to pray as if everything depends on God but act as if everything depends on me."

So I did.

And in doing that, I questioned where my church was going over the course of the next three decades.  I didn't get it.

And still don't.

I don't understand the whole anti-gay thing.  The higher-ups say it isn't that, but c'mon.  Being gay is not an "objective disorder" any more than being left or right handed.   Gay marriage, adoption and child -rearing are not  "‘move[s]’ of the Father of Lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God."  They are about love and embrace all the problems and possibilities of other families.   But the Catholic hierarchy routinely trots out the first canard and the new pope has proclaimed the second.

I don't understand the assault on reason.  If Thomas Aquinas did one thing, it was to put the Catholic church firmly in the camp of requiring that faith comport with reason rather than being at war with it.  But the hierarchy's position on reproductive rights is a mass of contradiction.  They are for natural family planning but against artificial birth control on the theory that all intercourse must be open to procreation.  But no one who practices the "rhythm" method of birth control is open to that result; in fact, they are actively seeking to avoid it.

They claim that person hood begins at conception, but this is a position that two of the most renowned fathers of the church -- St. Augustine and Aquinas -- opposed.  Neither thought early term abortion the killing of an ensouled person and both have contemporary science on their side given what we now know about embryological and neurological development.  This does not make abortion an issue without ethical consequence, but it does make it one where the black and white of curial absolutism should have no place.

I don't understand the obstinacy, the secrecy, the hypocrisy of Rome.  Even if you grant them some good faith in confronting the scandal of abusing children, and they are due more of that than their critics allow even on the best of days, the bungling brought on by these sins of pride has been breathtaking.  That they ostensibly answered to God did not excuse them from answering to man in the case of criminal conduct with utterly tragic consequences.  Zero tolerance should not have become the new policy.  It should have been the policy all along.  This, moreover, is something the Jesuits knew from the outset, which is why they were way ahead of other religious orders in psychological testing of candidates for the priesthood and have had the lowest incidence of priestly abuse cases within the institution as a whole.

And finally, here in the United States, I do not understand the politics.  A church that proclaims a "preferential option for the poor" really should be careful to avoid the appearance that it favors a party or set of positions that, over the course of the last decade or so, has created more of them. But the Catholic hierarchy has done just that, praising the supposed courage of political conservatives on right to life issues while downplaying the larger consequences of conservative ideology.  You can't simultaneously be against poverty, unemployment, hunger and a whole host of economic and distributional ills brought on by this generation's love affair with Mammon,  and for the very people whose policies generated those problems in the first place.

What is wrong?

The problem is not that the Catholic church is not "liberal" enough.

The problem is that it isn't holy enough.

Holiness is about many things, but charity and love and compassion and openness to the other are among them.

We Catholics now have a new pope.  He is an Argentinian Jesuit.  He has done some great things and said some dumb things, the latter of which probably explains why a lot of Jesuits in Argentina reportedly did not like him.  He will be the first to admit that he is very human.  He is, as one of my friends who knows put it, "genuinely anti-pomp." As a cardinal, he gave up a palace and rode the bus.   He is the first non-European pope, the first South American pope, the first Francis, and . . .

He only has one lung.

He will need it.

Because he has to breathe a new spirit of holiness into a church that needs it.

Today, he asked us to pray for him.  And I did.  I offered up  my own version of the prayer of his namesake, St. Francis: 

Lord, make him an instrument of your peace,

Where there is hatred, let him sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Master,

grant that he may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

BOOKSTORE BRAWL

BOOKSTORE BRAWL

So there I was sitting in my favorite bookstore in Pleasantville, NY on a cloudy, wintry afternoon this past Saturday.

When the chill breezes of right wing austerity hit me smack in the face.

I had just finished browsing and was gathering my four selections and making the trip to the check out counter.  Including myself, there were about ten patrons in the store, along with Roy and Yvonne, proprietor and proprietress, respectively, of this, one of the remaining two independent bookstores in northern Westchester County.

I had been ensnared by Al Gore's latest tome, a Toffler-esque look at the "drivers" of today's change, as well as by an insider's account of the Vatican and the latest bio on Boston's notorious former crime boss, Whitey Bulger.  My reading habits being eclectic, the group was then rounded out  by a new biography on  Calvin Coolidge, America's 30th president in the roaring '20s.

Coolidge had a reputation for being very sparse with words.  So sparse, in fact,  that he earned the moniker "Silent Cal" during the course of his career.  That career included stints as a Massachusetts city councilman, mayor, legislator and governor, followed thereafter by a few years as Vice-President (to Warren Harding) and about five and a half years as President.  His silence was apparently most pronounced in social settings, where the habit of small talk never became his.

Unlike in the The Village Bookstore in Pleasantville . . .

Where small talk on Saturday afternoons is one of the reasons we regularly show up.

Anyway, arriving at the check out counter, Yvonne and Roy spied my selection as I hunted for my frequent buyer card.  (I would only be able to march home to my wife with four new hardcovers  -- to go with the forty boxes of books waiting to be shelved on yet to be built bookcases in this, our new home -- if I was able to explain that two were "really free" and therefore could not be avoided.)  The card found, and marital bliss preserved for at least another week, Yvonne and Roy then remarked that my selection of the Coolidge volume was . . .

A bit of a shock.

Small talk being what it is, and this being a bookstore where we small talkers presume to  expound on ostensibly big ideas, Yvonne and Roy  knew that I was no fan of conservative Republicans, not to mention books written by former staffers for George W. Bush, as was the case with this latest effort on Silent Cal.  I agreed that they had a right to be surprised but joked that it was important to "keep your eye on" the enemy.

But then, turning serious, I pointed out that America's 30th president might provide a lesson for today.

Though Coolidge generally gets credit for ending the deficits of his era, the critical fact is that he did it during a growing economy.  Today's environment is, of course,  radically different.  Unlike during Coolidge's tenure in the 1920s, growth today is anemic and monetary policy is powerless to increase it with interest rates as low as they can go (namely, at about zero).  Fiscal stimulus -- deficits be damned -- is really all we have left to combat the current plague; robust growth will itself lower the deficit and we should therefore do all we can to generate it first.  We can deal with the rest thereafter.

Though the current crop of dysfunctional DC pols appear unable to avoid the draconian spending cuts to be brought on by a sequestration that is now only days away,  this will -- in the current environment -- only be recessionary.  And though most of today's prominent deficit hawks -- Boehner and Cantor and GOP whip Kevin McCarthy -- were yesterday's deficit spenders, mindless authors of Bush's unnecessary tax cuts and unpaid for wars, their hypocrisy is lost in a journalistic echo chamber that assumes all sides are guilty when in fact the guilt is not remotely shared.  The Clinton Democrats were many things to many people.  But they were also the last pols to give us a surplus and growth.

All this I earnestly imparted to Yvonne and Roy.  

While happily acknowledging to the guy behind me in the check out line that, "if this made me a liberal, I was."  

For good measure, I also praised Paul Krugman.  

And then, in the calm columns of a small independent bookstore, on a lazy Saturday in February . . .

All hell broke loose.

Unbeknownst to us on the check out line, about twenty feet away, in the history section no less, a big guy with a small mind had overheard our small talk and announced to all in the store that . . .

"Krugman is an asshole."

Now, Paul Krugman is many things, but rectally challenged is not one of them.

In fact, he is a relentlessly courageous New York Times columnist, a storied Princeton economics professor,  and a Nobel laureate.  Over the past decade, he has emerged as one of the only experts to focus on facts and rebut the right wing nonsense that has for the last four years wrongly predicted  massive inflation and a bond market meltdown if the deficit is not cut right now.  

As Krugman has consistently noted throughout this period,  Keynes was right.  When interest rates are at zero and growth is stalled, demand implodes.  The danger in that case is deflation and depression, not inflation and bond market revenge.  Wherever austerity has been practiced today --  Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Greece -- it has failed; wherever it has been cabined -- here, Japan, Iceland -- growth has at least been positive.

Needless to say, all of this had to be pointed out to BGSM (big guy, small mind).  

His rejoinder was that while I had my opinion, he had his.  Mine was that his opinion (or, really, ad hominem) was not based on evidence but mine -- or, rather, Paul Krugman's  -- was.  At that point, he did not deign to point out the evidence supporting his view, which, assuming it is different from Krugman's, presumably amounts to some form of the claim that austerity works.  Instead, he told the store that . . .

He had an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Which, given that school's love affair with austerity as ideology rather than economics as science, was probably his first problem.  

And which, of course, I promptly pointed out.  

Because, as some other politician might say . . .

I am no Calvin Coolidge.    

BARACK'S "ASK NOT"

BARACK'S "ASK NOT"

At various moments in history, our leaders define our moment. 

And they do so in words that become unique to that moment.

In 1776,  Jefferson embraced the Enlightenment ideal that "all men are created equal."  What he meant, really, was that all educated, white men were created equal.  Slaves and women and the non-propertied class were not included.  But it was still a great advance.  The Enlightenment's equality of the mind unhinged us from the monarchs, aristocrats, clerics and court jesters who for centuries had held a monopoly on thoughts that mattered, and thus made science and widespread progress possible.

In the 1860s, Lincoln made a nation of what had until then been a collection.  He extended the Jeffersonian ideal to the victims of the nation's greatest crime -- slavery -- and set in motion the hundred plus years of cautious progress that ultimately made those victims full citizens.  That was the goal of his "government of the people, by the people and for the people."

It too, however, was insufficient.

For Lincoln's vision did not include America's wives or mothers or daughters.  Nor did it include -- and couldn't, really, because an assassin's gun deprived us of knowing what the great man would have thought of the corporate capture of his party of emancipation -- the bottom and middle rungs of an economic ladder that industrialism would turn into a Gilded Age of class based exclusion and poverty, and that social Darwinism would turn into the cyclical spectre of economic depression.

And so, in the first and fourth decades of the 20th century, two cousins named Roosevelt would condemn the "malefactors of  great wealth" and lay down the foundation for the "four freedoms" -- of speech and worship, and from want and fear.  To make real those freedoms from want and fear, FDR would protect labor unions and give us Social Security and President Johnson-- thirty years later -- would create Medicare and the War on Poverty. 

But these too failed to create a  "more perfect union."  

In truth, a "more" perfect union should not be possible.   The concept is an oxymoron.  Perfection, by definition, cannot itself be "more" perfectible.  Nonetheless, here, on a patch of land in the North American temperate zone, circles are squared as we Americans try to temper the arrogance of asserted perfection with the humble admission of need for improvement.

We invent our own logic, however inverted that logic may be.

Which is how we got Reagan.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan warned against Roosevelt's  and Johnson's -- and, so he thought, the entire Democratic Party's -- ostensibly unvarnished collectivism.  He called government "the problem."  He attacked and weakened labor.  He made a hero of Calvin Coolidge, the last President to preside over a nation of splendiferous wealth, and promoted a culture that spawned Buffett and Gates (but also Milken and Madoff) and thousands like them over the next thirty years. He won the White House, and the Senate, and then unleashed a second Gilded Age.  Wealth was less regulated, less taxed, and way more concentrated, than at any time since the 1920s.  In truth, he created the one per cent.

And made us all think we could get there. 

This was the Age of Reagan.  

It ended in the fall of 2008 with George W. Bush's lesser Depression. "W" made no bones about being Reagan's heir.  He sought to deregulate and privatize at home while claiming to export freedom at the end of an American gun abroad.  By November 2008, it had all come crashing down.  The nation, it turned out, could become a . . .

Less perfect union as well.

Along the way, a skinny guy with a scary middle name wowed us with a keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.  He was smart, eloquent . . . and black.  Four years later, we entered the Age of Obama.  He is only the second person in the history of the United States to become President on the strength of his oratory; the first was Abraham Lincoln.  And so, like Lincoln, what matters most are often . . .

His words.

President Barack Obama was sworn in for his second term yesterday and re-took the oath as part of the public Inauguration today. 

He then gave his Second Inaugural Address.

The speech was exceptional.  Only he could have given it and, arguably, only it was appropriate to the moment we now face, one where the enormity of our challenges is met by the polarizing partisanship of our politics.  It is unlikely to be equaled any time soon.  It was, therefore, a veritable tour de force.

The speech summoned a citizenry to action. In fact, its unifying theme was that republican (small "r") responsibility creates the obligation of citizen action.  At both the beginning and the end of this unique Inaugural Address, Barack Obama made that framework clear.

Like every President before him, Obama embraced Jefferson's "self evident" truths --  that "all men are created equal " and are "endowed" with those heralded  "inalienable rights" to  "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  But he then became the first President to tell us that "while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing."  In the same breath, he warned that "while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth."  And at the end, this call to citizen action was re-stated.  All of us, he said, have an obligation -- "as citizens" -- "to shape the debates of our times -- not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals."

Back in the summer, in Charlotte during his speech accepting the Democratic nomination, Obama had told us that the coming campaign would not be about him.  Pundits scoffed at his supposed false humility.  But it wasn't false at all.  The campaign, the government he envisioned, was not about him.  He can't give us the government we want. 

But we can.

And today, in his Second Inaugural,  he told us how. 

Vote?  Certainly, and he might well have added: "not just in Presidential years."  But most importantly, his call to citizen action was a call to  . . .

Raise your voice.

If you want to make schools safe and eliminate as possibilities the horrors of Newtown,  you must raise your voice and stand up to the NRA.  If you want to secure those freedoms from want and fear, you must raise your voice and reject a rhetoric that turns Medicare and Social Security into entitlements for takers rather than security for hard workers.  If you want to begin to confront the challenge of climate change before it is too late, you have to raise your voice against deniers of science.   If you believe all are created equal, you must raise your voice in support of marriage equality for gays and pay equality for women.  And if you want to sustain a middle class, you must raise your voice and stand with those who would regulate Wall Street and stimulate the demand to employ Main Street.

Gridlock, of course, is still a problem.  And Obama cannot solve that problem by himself either.  He can't turn partisanship into progress, or extremism into reason, or racism into tolerance.  But if, in raising our voices, we do not "mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name calling as reasoned debate,"  we can.

In his only Inaugural Address, President Kennedy issued his famous challenge: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."  In his Second Inaugural, Barack Obama told anyone who accepted Kennedy's challenge exactly what they could "do."

Be a citizen.  

Raise your voice. 

Every day.

Not just on Election Day.

BONFIRE OF INSANITY

BONFIRE OF INSANITY

About a generation ago,  Gerald R. Ford arguably lost the the 1976 Presidential election by refusing to let the federal government lend New York City any money to finance its ballooning debt.  In the face of a near bankruptcy that would have sent the nation's then largest metropolis -- along with its seven million inhabitants and the lucrative national franchise known as Wall Street-- into a death spiral, Ford chose to troll for votes everywhere else.

This prompted one of the city's two remaining tabloids, the Daily News,  to run a headline that became iconic -- "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

It seems that some political parties never learn.

John Boehner -- Ohio Republican, Speaker of the House, ostensible deficit hawk but really one of the myriad defenders of a new Gilded Age where a 39.6% marginal tax rate is just too much for your average billionaire -- refused yesterday to allow the House of Representatives to vote on the $60 billion dollar aid package for Hurricane Sandy's victims.  The Senate had already passed the bill.  And the House stayed in session until near midnight to make sure the rest of the country, including all those red staters, were not forced to suffer a New Year's day tax increase.  

But Boehner wouldn't let them vote on the Sandy aid package.

I guess they were too tired.

This has created what amounts to a political meltdown among New York, New Jersey and Connecticut Republicans -- yes, Virginia, they do exist.  

The Jersey Shore, New York City's Rockaways, the South Shore of Long Island and large parts of Connecticut's Sound Shore can double these days as accurate movie sets for remakes of  Saving Private Ryan's opening scenes from World War II's Normandy beaches.  Thousands of homes lay in ruins in the wake of Sandy.  Thousands more are partially or wholly uninhabitable.  My wife's cousin in Monmouth Beach, NJ lost her whole first floor -- furniture and all -- to the Atlantic Ocean, and has been living for the last two months in a friend's condo.  Another cousin in Belle Harbor, a section of NYC's Rockaways, needs $100k to make his house once again a suitable home.  Still other relatives across Jamaica Bay in  Canarsie lost three cars parked in the street when flood waters turned that Brooklyn neighborhood into a lake.

And these were the lucky people.

Breezy Point, on the far western end of the Rockaways, literally went up in smoke as flooded but live electrical connections ignited a bonfire that quickly consumed more than eighty sardine-packed homes on what locals affectionately call the Irish Riviera.  Even if sufficient numbers of first responders could have crossed the Gil Hodges Bridge that connects Breezy to Brooklyn -- and they couldn't given the high winds -- New York's bravest still would have been stopped by flooding that made it impossible for the trucks to get to the flames.  

So, in one fell swoop, the dreams of hundreds of very middle income families were destroyed by Sandy.  None of these denizens of an outer-borough, as they are known in Manhattan, showed up in Bonfire of the  Vanities,  Tom Wolfe's 1987 punch at this Gilded Age's traders and financiers who always seem to have first call on the nation's resources.  And none of them park their assets on Wall Street or manage their portfolios from their beach houses.  

Their little spit of summer sunshine on the Irish Riviera was their principal asset. 

For many, it was their only asset.

NJ Gov. Chris Christie is mad.  So are Rep. Peter King, Rep. Michael Grimm and Staten Island's Borough President James Molinaro.  They are all Republicans, and right about now they are in the mood to assert their own Second Amendment rights and storm what is left of the dysfunctional GOP caucus in Washington, DC.  During the height of the Sandy crisis, President Obama was calling Christie at midnight to offer federal help; Boehner wouldn't even take Christie's first four phone calls as the Governor tried to get the Speaker to schedule a vote in the House.

Memo to Chris -- when the other guy calls at midnight and your own guy won't even pick up the phone, maybe it's time to choose a new side.

Rep. King had perhaps the best take on this latest GOP meltdown.  "These people have no problem finding New York when it comes to raising money. They only have a problem when it comes to allocating," said King.  He then added that anyone from the tri-state area who donates campaign money to Republicans “should have his head examined.”  Molinaro was a bit more succinct -- “They’re a bunch of idiots.” 

The "idiots," as is their wont, blamed everyone but themselves. Rep. Darrell Issa said the Senate bill was pork, laden with "non-essential" funding.  If it was, there couldn't have been much.  The bill allocated $60 billion to the three states, a mere drop in the bucket for anyone  worried about the deficit (which won't be helped much if the Jersey Shore is closed for business this summer) and small potatoes given the scope of the disaster.

In a move that was all profile and no courage, Boehner's office responded to the onslaught of criticism by announcing there will be a vote on Friday, apparently after the new Congress, which is to be sworn in Thursday, assembles.  Peter King, however,  is not convinced. As he noted,  most of the Republicans do not support the Sandy Relief Bill.  Boehner, who already had problems with his caucus before yesterday,  arguably did not improve his position by  voting in favor of not falling off the fiscal cliff, which a majority of GOP members also opposed, and can't be eager to make them walk another plank.

Nonetheless, the 112th Congress is now gone.  It  will vote no more. 

Maybe the new one will do better.  

It clearly cannot do any worse.

THE GUNS THAT STOLE CHRISTMAS

THE GUNS THAT STOLE CHRISTMAS

One of the guns was a Bushmaster .223 rifle.  The second was a Sig Sauer pistol.  The third a Glock pistol. 

All were semi-automatic. This means that, once a bullet was fired, the guns automatically re-loaded and were set to be fired again.  There was no need to re-cock or manually re-load the guns.

Yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza used one or more of them to kill twenty children and six adults in an elementary school.  He then killed himself.  One newspaper reported that he had fired more than 100 rounds.  His victims were shot multiple -- some as many as three to eleven -- times.  He apparently had previously killed his mother, with whom he lived in that town. He also reportedly suffered from a personality disorder or some other mental illness. 

The dead children were first graders.

The Sig Sauer is advertised as a "weapon of choice for elite units around the world."  Its P220 model pistol, which was created in 1985, "led the semi-automatic revolution" in gun manufacturing.  There are at least twenty three models of Sig Sauer pistols.  Like the elite car companies, they even sell "certified pre-owned" guns.

Glock tells potential customers that "Armed forces all over the world count on Glock. Why shouldn't you?"  According to the company,  "When you carry a Glock, you carry confidence."  It also targets woman.  Glock's web site says "We believe in empowering women.  That's why we've packed full-size performance into even our smallest pistols."  For its part, Bushmaster claims that "With a Bushmaster for security and home defense, you can sleep tight knowing that your loved ones are protected." Its "lightweight carbon models" are supposedly "perfect for women." "Any gun will make an intruder think," it says, but "a Bushmaster will make them think twice."

The guns carried or used in Newtown were legal.  They were registered to Lanza's now dead mother, Nancy, who apparently did not consider the possibility that a personalty-disordered (or otherwise mentally ill) young man and guns might make for a lethal combination.  In any case, she almost certainly was not asked about the condition of her son when she purchased the guns, and the web site manuals and safety materials provided by Bushmaster, Sig Sauer and Glock are themselves silent on mental illness.  According to Sig Sauer's site, it is not "frequently asked" about the issue either.

President Obama was near tears yesterday when he went to the podium to offer condolences.  So were many of the television journalists reporting the story. 

I too am very sad.  

I remember when my son and daughter were first graders.  I remember them as first graders in this Santa Claus is coming to town week, when their combination of joy and innocence could melt the hardest hearts.

But mostly I am very angry.

We live in a country where there are more than 300 million "non-military firearms."  Of the guns in the United States, at least 40% were purchased without a background check.  Though the guns used in Newtown were legal, those used in many homicides are not.  And calling the Newtown firearms "legal" doesn't change the fact that their presence in that home was simply stupid in view of who lived there.  Nor does it change the fact that no one -- not Bushmaster or Sig Sauer or Glock or the retailer or any government -- asked about the household or warned about the dangerous mix it presented once firearms were introduced.

We will now go through our customary period of mourning.  The NRA will be silent for a week or so.  Then it will point out that Connecticut has some of the strictest gun control laws and claim that, since those laws did not stop these killings, gun control is ineffective.  Others will say -- in fact, some already did yesterday -- that if the kids had firearms, fewer would have been killed.  The same thing was said after the shootings in Aurora earlier this year.  

Apparently, however, the guns-uber-alles crowd now thinks first graders should pack heat too!

This is nuts. 

No other country has this problem.  

We can do sufficient background checks to keep guns out of the hands of the most dangerous.  We can criminalize multi-clip ammunition magazines. We can permanently ban possession of assault weapons; the Bushmaster used in Newtown either is such a weapon or, slightly modified, easily becomes one.  We can ban possession of firearms by the mentally ill and make homeowners responsible to insure the ban is enforced in their homes.  Short of new laws, we can stop glorifying a gun culture that tells would be purchasers, in some sort of phallic overload, that when they purchase a gun, they buy "confidence."

But we do none of this.

In trying to capture words adequate to the occasion, Connecticut's Gov. Dan Malloy stood in Newtown yesterday and said that "Evil visited this community today."  He was wrong.  Evil was stored in Nancy Manza's Newtown home.  All that showed up yesterday was . . . 

Evil's accomplice.