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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.