Collins, Cohen and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “The Amtrak Connection,” says that the importance of Arlen Specter’s defection, with his unparalleled instinct for self-preservation, is that he became a Democrat because Pennsylvania likes the Democratic agenda better.  Mr. Cohen, in “Of Loos and Language,” says it’s strange that President Obama, who is far more eloquent than his predecessor, can communicate so well in a world whose lingua franca has become bad English.  Mr. Kristof asks “Is Rape Serious?”  He says the refusal to test the DNA evidence taken from a woman’s body after sexual abuse seems to be because there is an underlying skepticism about rape as a traumatic crime.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Imagine those Amtrak conversations between Joe Biden and Arlen Specter.

The vice president’s devotion to taking the train home to Wilmington, Del., is legend. It turns out that besides reinforcing his commitment to mass transit, Biden’s commute also gave him hours and hours of uninterrupted quality time with the senator from Pennsylvania.

Which he used to urge Specter to ditch the Republicans.

“We have talked over every problem under the sun and under the moon,” said Specter, at a welcome-to-the-Democratic-Party press conference with Biden and President Obama.

Biden, Washington’s most compulsive talker, and Specter, one of the Senate’s most self-absorbed egos, rode the rails, sharing their every thought. Probably not in the quiet car. You’d think that by the time one of them paused to take a breath they’d be in Montreal.

On Wednesday, Biden was bounding around with excitement at his coup, and who could blame him? Heaven knows Obama deserved some good fortune. Other than Specter’s defection, the best news the president got on his 100th day in office was probably word that the Department of Homeland Security had eliminated the threat of swine flu by changing its name to the H1N1 flu.

The Republicans were irate. “Look, you can tweak my nose, and you can step on my toes and you can pull my hair. At some point, enough is going to be enough,” Michael Steele, the party’s chairman, told CNN.

Steele is turning out to be irrepressible, which is the worst thing you could possibly want in a party spokesman. You really do better with a guy who can repress at the drop of a hat.

The chief G.O.P. talking point was that Specter had only switched parties because he wanted to get re-elected. “To me, this was not a question of, ‘oh, gee, all of a sudden I found principles as a Democrat.’ This is about political survival,” said Steele.

It was a superdepressing message to Steele’s fellow party members north of the Mason-Dixon line: Good for you in saddling yourself with a toxic political affiliation out of principle.

And besides, nobody ever suggested that Specter was acting out of anything but self-interest, including Specter himself.

In his coming-out press conference, the newest Democrat — who had been giving interviews for months stressing his determination to stay a Republican and protect the two-party system — said that the precipitation for the jump came on Friday when he got poll results showing how bleak his prospects were for winning the Republican primary in his re-election fight next year.

Then, he managed to drop the fact that he has more seniority than the current chairman of the Labor-Health Appropriations Subcommittee.

Sorry about that, Tom Harkin.

Nobody has ever tried to paint Arlen Specter as a profile in courage. As the Judiciary Committee chairman, he demonstrated his moderateness by consistently expressing sympathy for the Democrats’ objections to proposals like depriving prisoners of the right of habeas corpus or appointing Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Then, of course, he went right ahead and voted with the Bush administration. But he wanted it on the record that his heart was in the right place.

Nevertheless, the Democrats were very, very happy to welcome him into the fold. “I have known Senator Specter for more than a quarter-century. He has always been a man of honor and integrity, and a fine public servant,” said the majority leader, Harry Reid, who wrote in his 2008 autobiography that Specter “is always with us when we don’t need him.”

The fabled 60th vote! Finally, the Democrats can override filibuster threats and pass the Obama agenda! Except that even as Specter was arriving, his new fellow party members were reminding their leaders that they reserved the right to gum up the works at a moment’s notice. “They might have a 60-member majority. That doesn’t mean they have 60 votes,” warned Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, who is busy trying to block the Obama student loan reform bill.

The real import of this story isn’t the 60 votes. It’s that Arlen Specter, with his unparalleled instinct for self-preservation, became a Democrat because the people of Pennsylvania like the Democratic agenda better. And the Republicans were too fanatical or deluded to allow him to straddle the line.

“Well, if spending the hard-earned dollars of the American people and redistributing their wealth and moving towards a collectivist socialist approach to government, if that helps you realize you’re a Democrat, then, you know, good riddance,” Steele said.

The Republican Party has officially moved into nutcase territory. The Republican moderate caucus in the Senate is down to the two women from Maine. And we would all certainly like to listen in on their conversations on the plane ride home.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

A poet friend, Vincent Katz, was over for dinner the other night and asked me with a twinkle in his eye if I was “knackered.” Katz came to poetry via rock ’n roll, and to Oxford via the University of Chicago, and along the way he picked up some English vernacular.

“Knackered?”

The word — meaning more than tired, beat — transported me to the England of my youth, a place of hissing gas fires, metered hot water, contempt for “the Continent,” schoolboys in corduroy shorts, crows over the rubbish dumps, skinheads on the tube, Pink Floyd in Hyde Park, soggy leaves and solid fog.

Aging is like that. The memories pile up. More things are done for the last time than the first. It doesn’t take much to be transported.

Yes, I was knackered — and suddenly nostalgic for the churning clouds of London, the damp mustiness of pre-prosperous England, and the mist hovering in an Oxford dawn.

I dug out a diary I kept at university in the early ’70s and found this: “Sunday morning: the allotments dotted with stooping figures. Steaming water poured over gleaming cars. The papers. This England.”

And this:

Loose summer dresses catching in the crotch
The leather boys stick together
With coffee on the benches.
Tulips dying gape open-mouthed
At the fruit rotting after lunch.

That England’s gone, of course, it’s had its glossy makeover like everywhere else. Gastropubs shun bangers and lumpy mash and even Leeds is trendy.

But language is another story. Katz told me how uncomfortable he felt saying “loo” for the first time. The unthinkable alternative was to ask some bloke for the “bathroom.”

What for, mate?

Katz read classics at St. John’s College (viewed as a too-beautiful refuge of sporty underachievers by my own Balliol) and he summed up the experience this way: “I began to realize (what I should have known all along) that I was living in a completely different culture. It was just as alien to me as France would have been, or Spain, or Italy, or Germany. There is the illusion that we speak the same language, but we really don’t.”

Yes, the illusion is there. The United States freed itself from Britain in a revolution but had to opt for subtler forms of sedition when it came to the language.

I remember getting in a row with an editor and friend, Richard Berry, after writing “car park.” No such thing in American, Berry said. Come on! It’s where you put your car, Richard. Nope, he insisted, parking lot.

I was miffed. I was gutted. (Look that up, Richard.)

“Well done, love,” I told my 14-year-old son the other day. “Well done, love!” he parroted in that scorn-dripping tone teenagers reserve for their Paleolithic parents, weaving an English patter into his Brooklynese. “You mean: Good job!”

Quite.

Jobs, the work ethic — no escape from them in the United States, where finishing a meal in a restaurant prompts the death-penalty-meriting: “Are you still working on that?” When I took an English test to become a U.S. citizen a few years back, one of the three sentences in my dictation was: “I plan to work very hard every day.”

Quite.

America works, every day, its youthful ambition still boundless. England, having seen everything go pear-shaped, relieved of the burden of running a ropey world, boozes and says it’s sorry and prefers a lie-in.

“Oxford was the only place I’ve heard someone use ‘mayn’t’ completely casually,” Katz wrote. “I began to long for those usages — grammatically unimpeachable and stylistically extravagant — and be on the lookout for them. I had a friend who used ‘Crumbs!’ as an exclamation, something I’d only ever read in books or seen in movies.”

Crumbs! It’s been yonks since I heard that or peered through the windscreen over the bonnet at lorries on the motorway. I thought I’d left England behind — its rucksacks and trousers and chemists and fortnights — you know, the full Anglo monty — until I got too knackered to resist.

Katz continued: “After a year or so of tuning into the subtleties of the English language, something quite remarkable occurred — I began to perceive many different layers of expression in ways the British communicate. Where they are often criticized by Americans for being cold, I began to see endless expressions of warmth. Where they might be considered narrow-minded, I found instead some of the most open-minded, progressive minds I have encountered.”

English tolerance can be as uplifting as American idealism, that many-faceted and quizzical “quite” seeing U.S. “hope.”

Since my student walks to the Isis past the wet autumn leaves smoking rather than burning, English has gone global. In fact, the world’s lingua franca is now bad English. It’s strange then that a U.S. president who speaks good English, far better than his predecessor, seems able to communicate with that world. This may even be Barack Obama’s biggest achievement in his first 100 days.

Brilliant!

And now here’s Mr. Kristof:

When a woman reports a rape, her body is a crime scene. She is typically asked to undress over a large sheet of white paper to collect hairs or fibers, and then her body is examined with an ultraviolet light, photographed and thoroughly swabbed for the rapist’s DNA.

It’s a grueling and invasive process that can last four to six hours and produces a “rape kit” — which, it turns out, often sits around for months or years, unopened and untested.

Stunningly often, the rape kit isn’t tested at all because it’s not deemed a priority. If it is tested, this happens at such a lackadaisical pace that it may be a year or more before there are results (if expedited, results are technically possible in a week).

So while we have breakthrough DNA technologies to find culprits and exculpate innocent suspects, we aren’t using them properly — and those who work in this field believe the reason is an underlying doubt about the seriousness of some rape cases. In short, this isn’t justice; it’s indifference.

Solomon Moore, a colleague of mine at The Times, last year wrote about a 43-year-old legal secretary who was raped repeatedly in her home in Los Angeles as her son slept in another room. The attacker forced the woman to clean herself in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

Tim Marcia, the detective on the case, thought this meant that the perpetrator was a habitual offender who would strike again. Mr. Marcia rushed the rape kit to the crime lab but was told to expect a delay of more than one year.

So Mr. Marcia personally drove the kit 350 miles to deliver it to the state lab in Sacramento. Even there, the backlog resulted in a four-month delay — but then it produced a “cold hit,” a match in a database of the DNA of previous offenders.

Yet in the months while the rape kit sat on a shelf, the suspect had allegedly struck twice more. Police said he broke into the homes of a pregnant woman and a 17-year-old girl, sexually assaulting each of them.

“The criminal justice system is still ill equipped to deal with rape and not that good at moving rape cases forward,” notes Sarah Tofte, who just wrote a devastating report for Human Rights Watch about the rape-kit backlog. The report found that in Los Angeles County, there were at last count 12,669 rape kits sitting in police storage facilities. More than 450 of these kits had sat around for more than 10 years, and in many cases, the statute of limitations had expired.

There are no good national figures, and one measure of the indifference is that no one even bothers to count the number of rape kits sitting around untested.

Why don’t police departments treat rape kits with urgency? One reason is probably expense — each kit can cost up to $1,500 to test — but there also seems to be a broad distaste for rape cases as murky, ambiguous and difficult to prosecute, particularly when they involve (as they often do) alcohol or acquaintance rape.

“They talk about the victims’ credibility in a way that they don’t talk about the credibility of victims of other crimes,” Ms. Tofte said.

Charlie Beck, a deputy police chief of Los Angeles, said that there was no excuse for the failure to test rape kits, but he noted that integrating a new technology into police work is complex and involves a learning curve. Since Human Rights Watch began its investigation, he said, the department had resolved to test rape kits routinely — and as a result, cold hits have doubled.

While the backlog and desultory handling of rape kits are nationwide problems, there is one shining exception: New York City has made a concerted effort over the last decade to test every kit that comes in. The result has been at least 2,000 cold hits in rape cases, and the arrest rate for reported cases of rape in New York City rose from 40 percent to 70 percent, according to Human Rights Watch.

Some Americans used to argue that it was impossible to rape an unwilling woman. Few people say that today, or say publicly that a woman “asked for it” if she wore a short skirt. But the refusal to test rape kits seems a throwback to the same antediluvian skepticism about rape as a traumatic crime.

“If you’ve got stacks of physical evidence of a crime, and you’re not doing everything you can with the evidence, then you must be making a decision that this isn’t a very serious crime,” notes Polly Poskin, executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

It’s what we might expect in Afghanistan, not in the United States.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo, in “Vice’s Secret Vices,” says Dick Cheney, our former vice president, continues his 24/7 tour justifying the enhanced interrogation techniques of high value detainees.  “Enhanced interrogation techniques” is the weasel words term for torture, MoDo.  Try using the proper term next time, although when you’re shoveling out fever dream fiction I suppose it doesn’t much matter.  The Moustache of Wisdom gives us “A Tortuous Compromise,” in which he says though the president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible for torture is surely unsatisfying, it is the best solution for right now.  Right.  Sure.  Let’s let the Europeans indict them for war crimes.  Putz.  Here’s MoDo:

In a closed-door session on Tuesday, Dick Cheney testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating the “enhanced” interrogation techniques of “high value” detainees.

This columnist gained exclusive “access” to the classified testimony of the “deeply missed” former vice president.

The chairwoman of the committee, Dianne Feinstein, began by telling Cheney that she was “shocked personally” by what she had learned about the brutality of the way prisoners were treated.

“Those insects weren’t even poisonous,” Cheney growled. “Facial slaps? Abdominal slaps? Throwing a naked man into a wall? Kid stuff. Those methods worked. They kept us safe for seven years. Safer than with that delicate Hawaiian orchid in the White House. America is coming across as weak and indecisive. Just when Rummy and I had stomped out that ‘Blame America First’ flower-child culture, Obama has dragged it back, apologizing profusely all over the world for the country he’s running, canoodling with greasy dictators, kissing up to those weasels in Europe, which is only free today because of our military. Friends and foes alike will be quick to take advantage if they think they’re dealing with a Creamsicle.”

Senator John McCain, looking disgusted, began yelling at Cheney, telling him that waterboarding someone 183 times in a month was against the law. “The Japanese who did that in World War II were tried and hanged,” he sneered.

“Shut your piehole,” Cheney replied flatly. “Everyone’s sick of you being an apologist for torture. Why don’t you go join that pantywaist Specter on the other side where you belong?”

Senator Russ Feingold got into the fray, asking Cheney sarcastically: “Can you tell us exactly which terrorist plots were foiled by torture?”

Cheney offered his mirthless smile. “Certainly,” he replied. “Shortly after 9/11, we disrupted a plot to assassinate a senator, penetrating two terrorist cells and uncovering a Serbian scheme. Our interrogator used a chokehold, threatened to withhold a detainee’s heart medicine, and broke a few laws, but it was well worth it.”

Feingold interrupted with thinly veiled contempt: “You’re telling us now that the Serbs are linked to Al Qaeda?”

Cheney nodded. “Of course. Then, the following year, we were able to get a lead on an international terrorist named Syed Ali and stop a nuclear bomb from being detonated in Los Angeles. Sure, an enemy combatant was shot in the chest. Yes, a hacksaw came into play. There was some wall slamming, throat grabbing and when Ali wouldn’t talk because he was doing ‘Allah’s work,’ our agent had to feign the shooting death of Ali’s first-born son. But in the end we averted World War III with three Middle East countries and kept America safe from a suitcase bomb.

“In 2004, we thwarted the spread of a deadly weaponized virus strain. The following year, after some unsuccessful attempts at sensory disorientation with detainees, we got a torture specialist who had a way with a taser and his trusty syringe. Strict measures, like breaking fingers one by one and using an electrical cord from a lamp to shock a suspect, were necessary. We were under attack by a terrorist named Habib Marwan who controlled a bunch of Middle East terrorist cells. They were planning to meltdown nuclear power plants across the country, shoot down Air Force One and set off a nuclear missile. On top of that, we were dealing with a mole in our counterterrorism unit.

“In 2006, after an incident with the man who made history by becoming the first black president …”

Senator Feinstein interrupted: “Excuse me, Mr. Cheney, are you talking about Barack Obama?”

“I said the first black president,” Cheney snapped, before continuing: “Our interrogator needed to do some things outside protocol. There was an exploding vest, a foot digging into a wound, an injection of pain-inducing hyoscine-pentothal, a threat to cut out the eyes of a suspect being interrogated unless he confessed where the Sentox nerve gas cannisters were. But the Geneva Conventions are a small thing to give up when you consider that we broke up a nefarious plot that reached to the highest levels — the Oval Office.”

Senator Olympia Snowe looked confused: “But you were in the Oval Office in 2006, Mr. Cheney.”

Something dawned on Evan Bayh and he smiled grimly. “Didn’t it turn out in the end, Dick,” he asked, “that some of these so-called terrorist plots were really domestic villains with black ops teams scheming to control the oil supply and get rich? Sort of like what you did with Iraq and Halliburton?”

Cheney glared at him, saying “We’re the patriots.” Bayh walked over and whispered something to the chairwoman.

“Mr. Cheney,” Feinstein said, sounding shocked, “your testimony is delusional, not to mention derivative.”

Cheney looked apoplectic, not to mention apocalyptic. “How dare you,” he cried, “demean our country’s finest counterterrorism agent, Jack Bauer?”

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Weighing everything, President Obama got it about as right as one could when he decided to ban the use of torture, to release the Bush torture memos for public scrutiny and to not prosecute the lawyers and interrogators who implemented the policy. But there is nothing for us to be happy about in any of this.

After all, we’re not just talking about “enhanced interrogations.” Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.

The president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible for this policy is surely unsatisfying; some of this abuse involved sheer brutality that had nothing to do with clear and present dangers. Then why justify the Obama compromise? Two reasons: the first is that because justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart; and the other is that Al Qaeda truly was a unique enemy, and the post-9/11 era a deeply confounding war in a variety of ways.

First, Al Qaeda was undeterred by normal means. Al Qaeda’s weapon of choice was suicide. Al Qaeda operatives were ready to kill themselves — as they did on 9/11, and before that against U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen — long before we could ever threaten to kill them. We could deter the Russians because they loved their children more than they hated us; they did not want to die. The Al Qaeda operatives hated us more than they loved their own children. They glorified martyrdom and left families behind.

Second, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda aspired to deliver a devastating blow to America. They “were involved in an extraordinarily sophisticated and professional effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In this case, nuclear material,” Michael Scheuer, the former C.I.A. bin Laden expert, told “60 Minutes” in 2004. “By the end of 1996, it was clear that this was an organization unlike any other one we had ever seen.”

Third, Al Qaeda comes out of a stream in radical Islam that believes that it has religious sanction for killing absolutely anyone, including fellow Muslims. Al Qaeda in Iraq has blown up Muslims in mosques, shrines and funerals. It respects no redlines or religious constraints. One of its leaders personally severed Daniel Pearl’s head with a butcher knife — on film.

Finally, Al Qaeda’s tactics are designed to be used against, and to undermine, exactly what we are: an open society. By turning human beings into walking missiles and instruments from our daily lives — cars, airplanes, shoes, cellphones, backpacks — into bombs, Al Qaeda attacks the very feature that keeps our open society open: trust. If you have to fear that the person next to you on a plane or in a theater might blow up, there can be no open society.

And therefore, the post-9/11 environment remains perilous. One more 9/11 would close our open society another notch. One more 9/11 and you’ll be taking off more than your shoes at the airport. We have the luxury of having this torture debate now because there was no second 9/11, and it was not for want of trying. Had there been, a vast majority of Americans would have told the government (and still will): “Do whatever it takes.”

So President Obama’s compromise is the best we can forge right now: We have to enjoin those who confront Al Qaeda types every day on the frontlines to act in ways that respect who we are, but also to never forget who they are. They are not white-collar criminals. They do not care whether we torture or not — bin Laden declared war on us when Bill Clinton was president.

I believe that the most important reason there has not been another 9/11, besides the improved security and intelligence, is that Al Qaeda is primarily focused on defeating America in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world — particularly in Iraq. Al Qaeda knows that if it can destroy the U.S. effort (still a long shot) to build a decent, modernizing society in Iraq, it will undermine every U.S. ally in the region.

Conversely, if we, with Iraqis, defeat them by building any kind of decent, pluralistic society in the heart of their world, it will be a devastating blow. Odd as it may seem, the most dangerous moment for us is if Al Qaeda is beaten in Iraq. Because that is when Al Qaeda’s remnants will try to throw a Hail Mary pass — that is, try to set off a bomb in a U.S. city — to obscure its defeat by moderate Arabs and Muslims in the heart of its world.

So, yes, people among us who went over the line may go unpunished, because we still have enemies who respect no lines at all. In such an ugly war, you do your best. That’s what President Obama did.

Douthat, Brooks and Herbert

I may have to pass on Tuesdays.  I don’t know if I can handle both Bobo and Asshat on the same day…  Wee Mr. Douthat hits the lunacy ball right out of the park on his first at bat, giving us “Cheney for President,” in which he opines that a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of the Republican Party’s political viability.  Bobo, in comparison, sounds almost sane.  He’s served up “Globalism Goes Viral,” in which he says swine flu isn’t only a health emergency. It’s a test for how we’re going to organize the 21st century.  Mr. Herbert, in “Workers Walk the Plank,” says while Wall Street is breaking out the Champagne, the rest of the economy is beyond terrible, and will be for the foreseeable future.  And now, for your amusement, here’s young Mr. Douthat Asshat:

Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.

Certainly Cheney himself seems to feel that way. Last week’s Sean Hannity interview, all anti-Obama jabs and roundhouses, was the latest installment in the vice president’s unexpected – and, to Republican politicians, distinctly unwelcome – transformation from election-season wallflower into high-profile spokesman for the conservative opposition. George W. Bush seems happy to be back in civilian life, but Cheney has taken the fight to the Obama White House like a man who wouldn’t have minded campaigning for a third Bush-Cheney term.

Imagine for a moment that he’d had that chance. Imagine that he’d damned the poll numbers, broken his oft-repeated pledge that he had no presidential ambitions of his own, and shouldered his way into the race. Imagine that Republican primary voters, more favorably disposed than most Americans to Cheney and the administration he served, had rewarded him with the nomination.

At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

As a candidate, Cheney would have doubtless been as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless. In debates with Barack Obama, he would have been as cuttingly effective as he was in his encounters with Joe Lieberman and John Edwards in 2000 and 2004 respectively. And when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might – might! – have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that’s necessary if it hopes to regain power.

If a Cheney defeat could have been good for the Republican Party; a Cheney campaign could have been good for the country. The former vice-president’s post-election attacks on Obama are bad form, of course, under the peculiar rules of Washington politesse. But they’re part of an argument about the means and ends of our interrogation policy that should have happened during the general election and didn’t – because McCain wasn’t a supporter of the Bush-era approach, and Obama didn’t see a percentage in harping on the topic.

He wasn’t alone. A large swath of the political class wants to avoid the torture debate. The Obama administration backed into it last week, and obviously wants to back right out again.

But the argument isn’t going away. It will be with us as long as the threat of terrorism endures. And where the Bush administration’s interrogation programs are concerned, we’ve heard too much to just “look forward,” as the president would have us do. We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute – unless the Democratic Party has taken leave of its senses – but so that we can learn, and pass judgment, and struggle toward consensus.

Here Dick Cheney, prodded by the ironies of history into demanding greater disclosure about programs he once sought to keep completely secret, has an important role to play. He wants to defend his record; let him defend it. And let the country judge.

But better if this debate had happened during the campaign season. And better, perhaps, if Cheney himself had been there to have it out.

I had heard reports that this Asshat person was “thoughtful.”  Heh, indeed…  He does, however, serve to make Bobo seem reasoned in comparison:

In these post-cold war days, we don’t face a single concentrated threat. We face a series of decentralized, transnational threats: jihadi terrorism, a global financial crisis, global warming, energy scarcity, nuclear proliferation and, as we’re reminded today, possible health pandemics like swine flu.

These decentralized threats grow out of the widening spread and quickening pace of globalization and are magnified by it. Instant global communication and rapid international travel can sometimes lead to universal, systemic shocks. A bank meltdown or a virus will not stay isolated. They have the potential to hit nearly everywhere at once. They can wreck the key nodes of complex international systems.

So how do we deal with these situations? Do we build centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats? Or do we rely on diverse and decentralized communities and nation-states?

A couple of years ago, G. John Ikenberry of Princeton wrote a superb paper making the case for the centralized response. He argued that America should help build a series of multinational institutions to address global problems. The great powers should construct an “infrastructure of international cooperation … creating shared capacities to respond to a wide variety of contingencies.”

If you apply that logic to the swine flu, you could say that the world should beef up the World Health Organization to give it the power to analyze the spread of the disease, decide when and where quarantines are necessary and organize a single global response.

If we had a body like that, we wouldn’t be seeing the sort of frictions that are emerging from today’s decentralized approach. Europe has offended the U.S. by warning its citizens not to travel across the Atlantic. Ukraine is restricting pork imports. Europe could horde flu vaccines, leaving the U.S., which has only one manufacturing plant, high and dry. Fear of a pandemic could lead to a restrictionist race, as nations compete to curtail movement and build walls.

Those dangers are all real. Yet, so far, that’s not the lesson of this crisis. The response to swine flu suggests that a decentralized approach is best. This crisis is only days old, yet we’ve already seen a bottom-up, highly aggressive response.

In the first place, the decentralized approach is much faster. Mexico responded unilaterally and aggressively to close schools and cancel events. The U.S. has responded with astonishing speed, considering there are still few illnesses and just one hospitalization.

The Times published a photo on Monday of the New York City health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, leading a crisis response meeting. The photo is the very image of a focused, local response. People are wearing polo shirts and casual wear — intensely concentrating on the concrete incidents in their own backyard.

If the response were coordinated by a global agency, those local officials would not be so empowered. Power would be wielded by officials from nations that are far away and emotionally aloof from ground zero. The institution would have to poll its members, negotiate internal differences and proceed, as all multinationals do, at the pace of the most recalcitrant stragglers.

Second, the decentralized approach is more credible. It is a fact of human nature that in times of crisis, people like to feel protected by one of their own. They will only trust people who share their historical experience, who understand their cultural assumptions about disease and the threat of outsiders and who have the legitimacy to make brutal choices. If some authority is going to restrict freedom, it should be somebody elected by the people, not a stranger.

Finally, the decentralized approach has coped reasonably well with uncertainty. It is clear from the response, so far, that there is an informal network of scientists who have met over the years and come to certain shared understandings about things like quarantining and rates of infection. It is also clear that there is a ton they don’t understand.

A single global response would produce a uniform approach. A decentralized response fosters experimentation.

The bottom line is that the swine flu crisis is two emergent problems piled on top of one another. At bottom, there is the dynamic network of the outbreak. It is fueled by complex feedback loops consisting of the virus itself, human mobility to spread it and environmental factors to make it potent. On top, there is the psychology of fear caused by the disease. It emerges from rumors, news reports, Tweets and expert warnings.

The correct response to these dynamic, decentralized, emergent problems is to create dynamic, decentralized, emergent authorities: chains of local officials, state agencies, national governments and international bodies that are as flexible as the problem itself.

Swine flu isn’t only a health emergency. It’s a test for how we’re going to organize the 21st century. Subsidiarity works best.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

I’m sure everyone is thrilled to know that the high rollers on Wall Street are bouncing back. With profits on the rebound, the big shots at the biggest institutions are on track, as The Times reported Sunday, to make as much money this year as they were hauling in before the mega-recession began.

The growing legions of the unemployed can be forgiven for not shouting hallelujah. It’s a little like watching the drunken driver who plowed into your family car and caused untold havoc and heartache, suddenly pulling up one morning, no worse for the wear, in a sparkling new vehicle.

The folks who led the nation to this financial abyss are the ones being made whole on the taxpayers’ dime. We can look after them, all right. But we can’t seem to get credit flowing in any normal way again; we can’t stanch the terrible flow of home foreclosures; and we’re not doing nearly enough to address the most critical need of all: putting people back to work.

While Wall Street is breaking out the Champagne yet again, the rest of the economy is beyond terrible, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, offered a rundown of the unemployment crisis in remarks she prepared for a House subcommittee last week. Ms. Shierholz began by noting that next month the current economic downturn will become the longest since the Great Depression.

“The 10 postwar recessions prior to this one have averaged 10.4 months in length, with the longest being 16 months,” said Ms. Shierholz. “The current recession is now in its 16th month and the labor market is still shedding over 600,000 jobs a month.”

Wall Street can swallow all the Champagne it wants, and the market fanatics can obsess until their brains lock over the daily gyrations of the Dow. The simple fact is that working men and women are being squeezed in the ever-tightening jaws of a catastrophe.

The American auto industry is fading before our eyes. Chrysler is looking to Fiat — Fiat! — as a savior. The once-impregnable General Motors is now a giant junkyard sinking in quicksand. It disclosed Monday that it will cut another 21,000 factory jobs in the United States over the next year. If G.M. were to go under it would take an enormous chain of satellite industries down with it.

More than 13 million people are officially counted as unemployed, with some 5.6 million jobs lost since the recession started. Ms. Shierholz tells us that since the first of the year about 23,000 men and women were being added to the jobless rolls every day.

Job losses on such a scale are knockout blows to ordinary American families.

The importance of employment to the everyday life and long-term health of the nation is too often given short shrift. A recent report, “The 2009 MetLife Study of the American Dream,” found, not surprisingly, that “work is the linchpin holding the dream together” for most Americans.

In fact, the mythic American dream is becoming more and more elusive. The big concern facing millions of families at the moment is economic survival. More than half of all Americans — 56 percent — are concerned that they might lose their jobs in the next year. Few are prepared for such a setback.

As the authors of the MetLife study reported:

“With the erosion of social and corporate safety nets, tightening credit and declining home equity, most Americans have little financial cushioning to survive a job loss. Without a steady paycheck, 50 percent of Americans say they could not meet their financial obligations for more than a month — and, of that, a disturbing 28 percent couldn’t support themselves for more than two weeks of unemployment.”

That’s the case in an environment in which more than three million Americans already have been out of work for more than six months.

The employment issue is not being addressed with the level of urgency that is warranted. For all the talk of green jobs, there is no large-scale creative effort to turn this employment debacle around. There is no crash program on anything like the scale needed, for example, to rebuild the rotting infrastructure — a big-time potential source of jobs.

The financial industry is seen as essential, but millions of American workers are not. They’re expendable.

If as much attention, energy and resources were given to the effort to put Americans back to work as has been given to putting the banking industry back on its feet, you’d have fewer Champagne toasts on Wall Street but a lot more high-fiving in family homes across the country.

After Asshat and Bobo on one day I’m going to have to go and lie down with a cool cloth on my forehead…

Cohen and Krugman

Mr. Cohen, in “Clinton’s Mideast Pirouette,” says the sparring between the U.S. and Israel has begun, and that’s a good thing, with criticism coming from an unlikely source — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Mr. Krugman, in “Money for Nothing,” says it’s necessary to rescue Wall Street to protect the economy, but financial firms should be acting like public utilities, not returning to the practices and paychecks of 2007.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

The sparring between the United States and Israel has begun, and that’s a good thing. Israel’s interests are not served by an uncritical American administration. The Jewish state emerged less secure and less loved from Washington’s post-9/11 Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.

The criticism of the center-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come from an unlikely source: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She’s transitioned with aplomb from the calculation of her interests that she made as a senator from New York to a cool assessment of U.S. interests. These do not always coincide with Israel’s.

I hear that Clinton was shocked by what she saw on her visit last month to the West Bank. This is not surprising. The transition from Israel’s first-world hustle-bustle to the donkeys, carts and idle people beyond the separation wall is brutal. If Clinton cares about one thing, it’s human suffering.

In fact, you don’t so much drive into the Palestinian territories these days as sink into them. Everything, except the Jewish settlers’ cars on fenced settlers-only highways, slows down. The buzz of business gives way to the clunking of hammers.

The whole desolate West Bank scene is punctuated with garrison-like settlements on hilltops. If you’re looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.

Most Israelis never see this, unless they’re in the army. Clinton witnessed it. She was, I understand, troubled by the humiliation around her.

Now, she has warned Netanyahu to get off “the sidelines” with respect to Palestinian peace efforts. Remember that the Israeli prime minister and his right-wing Likud party have still not accepted even the theory of a two-state solution.

In House testimony last week, Clinton said: “For Israel to get the kind of strong support it is looking for vis-à-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts. They go hand in hand.”

That was a direct rebuke to comments from Netanyahu aides who told the Washington Post Israel would not move on peace talks until it sees the United States check Iran’s nuclear program and rising regional influence.

Although I don’t agree with the forms of linkage being made by Netanyahu and Clinton between Iran and an Israeli-Palestinian peace — the issue is not how to threaten Iran but how to bring it inside the tent — I agree with both of them that a link exists. At Madrid, at Oslo and at Annapolis, over a 16-year span, attempts were made to advance peace while excluding Iran. That doesn’t work; it won’t work now.

The trick is to usher Israel-Palestine peace efforts and the quest for a U.S.-Iran rapprochement along in parallel.

That’s why it’s so important that Clinton told Netanyahu that he can’t slip away from working for peace — and that means stopping settlements now — by taking an Iran detour.

Clinton also indicated an important shift on Hamas, which the State Department calls a terrorist group. While stressing that no funds would flow to Hamas “or any entity controlled by it,” she argued for keeping American options open on a possible Palestinian unity government between the moderate Fatah and Hamas.

So long as a unity government meets three conditions — renounces violence, recognizes Israel’s right to exist and abides by past agreements — the United States would be prepared to deal with it, including on $900 million in proposed aid, Clinton indicated. Washington does business with a Lebanese government in which Hezbollah controls 11 of 30 seats, although Hezbollah is also deemed a terrorist group.

Such a changed U.S. policy makes a lot more sense than the previous one, which insisted on Hamas itself — rather than any Palestinian unity government — meeting the three conditions. No peace can be made by pretending Hamas does not exist, which is why advancing Palestinian unity must be a U.S. priority.

This sensible shift will anger Israel, although it deals indirectly with Hamas through Egypt. Israel’s de jure stand on Hamas — that it must recognize Israel before any talks begin — is wildly at odds with Israel’s de facto methodology since 1948.

So it’s a week in which I cheer Clinton, although her reference to “crippling sanctions” against Iran if the proposed rapprochement fails was a mistake. Sanctions haven’t worked and won’t.

Tehran will not come to the table if it sees Obama’s extended hand as just a deceptive prelude to “crippling” measures. My advice to Tehran: watch what Obama says. He’s driving Iran policy.

Obama’s doing it in a way that means the Israeli-American friction evident in Clinton’s remarks will be a theme of his first year in office. As Lee Hamilton, the president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, told me: “Initiatives are underway that show the United States is going to have some major differences with Israel.”

He also said Netanyahu is “a little more flexible than maybe he’s given credit for.”

Netanyahu as Begin the peacemaker? It’s not impossible. Nor is Obama to Tehran. Provided the president pushes on the two fronts at once.

Now here’s Mr. Krugman:

On July 15, 2007, The New York Times published an article with the headline “The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age.” The most prominently featured of the “new titans” was Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, who insisted that he and his peers in the financial sector had earned their immense wealth through their contributions to society.

Soon after that article was printed, the financial edifice Mr. Weill took credit for helping to build collapsed, inflicting immense collateral damage in the process. Even if we manage to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression, the world economy will take years to recover from this crisis.

All of which explains why we should be disturbed by an article in Sunday’s Times reporting that pay at investment banks, after dipping last year, is soaring again — right back up to 2007 levels.

Why is this disturbing? Let me count the ways.

First, there’s no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street actually contribute anything positive to society, let alone enough to justify those humongous paychecks.

Remember that the gilded Wall Street of 2007 was a fairly new phenomenon. From the 1930s until around 1980 banking was a staid, rather boring business that paid no better, on average, than other industries, yet kept the economy’s wheels turning.

So why did some bankers suddenly begin making vast fortunes? It was, we were told, a reward for their creativity — for financial innovation. At this point, however, it’s hard to think of any major recent financial innovations that actually aided society, as opposed to being new, improved ways to blow bubbles, evade regulations and implement de facto Ponzi schemes.

Consider a recent speech by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, in which he tried to defend financial innovation. His examples of “good” financial innovations were (1) credit cards — not exactly a new idea; (2) overdraft protection; and (3) subprime mortgages. (I am not making this up.) These were the things for which bankers got paid the big bucks?

Still, you might argue that we have a free-market economy, and it’s up to the private sector to decide how much its employees are worth. But this brings me to my second point: Wall Street is no longer, in any real sense, part of the private sector. It’s a ward of the state, every bit as dependent on government aid as recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a k a “welfare.”

I’m not just talking about the $600 billion or so already committed under the TARP. There are also the huge credit lines extended by the Federal Reserve; large-scale lending by Federal Home Loan Banks; the taxpayer-financed payoffs of A.I.G. contracts; the vast expansion of F.D.I.C. guarantees; and, more broadly, the implicit backing provided to every financial firm considered too big, or too strategic, to fail.

One can argue that it’s necessary to rescue Wall Street to protect the economy as a whole — and in fact I agree. But given all that taxpayer money on the line, financial firms should be acting like public utilities, not returning to the practices and paychecks of 2007.

Furthermore, paying vast sums to wheeler-dealers isn’t just outrageous; it’s dangerous. Why, after all, did bankers take such huge risks? Because success — or even the temporary appearance of success — offered such gigantic rewards: even executives who blew up their companies could and did walk away with hundreds of millions. Now we’re seeing similar rewards offered to people who can play their risky games with federal backing.

So what’s going on here? Why are paychecks heading for the stratosphere again? Claims that firms have to pay these salaries to retain their best people aren’t plausible: with employment in the financial sector plunging, where are those people going to go?

No, the real reason financial firms are paying big again is simply because they can. They’re making money again (although not as much as they claim), and why not? After all, they can borrow cheaply, thanks to all those federal guarantees, and lend at much higher rates. So it’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may be regulated.

Or maybe not. There’s a palpable sense in the financial press that the storm has passed: stocks are up, the economy’s nose-dive may be leveling off, and the Obama administration will probably let the bankers off with nothing more than a few stern speeches. Rightly or wrongly, the bankers seem to believe that a return to business as usual is just around the corner.

We can only hope that our leaders prove them wrong, and carry through with real reform. In 2008, overpaid bankers taking big risks with other people’s money brought the world economy to its knees. The last thing we need is to give them a chance to do it all over again.

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

MoDo, in “Slouching Toward Oblivion,” says old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology.  Listen up, cupcake — old-school newspapers may be falling by the wayside because they serve up stenographers, plagiarists and wastes of ink like you.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Moore’s Law and the Law of More,” says without a fixed, durable price on carbon, none of the Obama clean-tech initiatives will have an impact on climate change or make America the leader in the next great industrial revolution.  Mr. Kristof says it’s “Time to Come Clean,” and that President Obama worries that a commission to investigate torture and tally its costs would distract from focusing on the economy, but the truth is the opposite.  Mr. Rich discusses “The Banality of Bush White House Evil,” and says torture was a tool in the campaign to exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would support a war that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.  Here’s MoDo:

Maybe it’s because I’m staying at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard, but I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond.

Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.

Now that everybody can check their iPhones and laptops for news that personally interests them, now that they can Google, blog and tweet, as well as shop — and stalk — on Craigslist, old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology.

As a disgusted Desmond asks from behind dark glasses: “And who have they got now? Some nobodies — a lot of pale little frogs croaking pish-posh.”

Eric Schmidt, the Google C.E.O., reassured me that newspapers would last 500 years, but only for a boutique market: commuters taking trains, cabs and subways on the East Coast and in cities like London and Paris.

“For somebody who lives in the suburbs,” he said, “especially if they’re driving and they have kids screaming in the back seat, why would they prefer a physical newspaper over something that is more personal.”

Journalists are still hot in Hollywood. Russell Crowe, playing a messy and morally ambiguous Washington investigative journalist, teaches the self-regarding blogger, Rachel McAdams, a thing or three, including why a pen is necessary. “The Soloist,” based on an inspiring story about a schizophrenic musician by the Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, was shot in the Times newsroom.

But in real life, journalists are feeling the chill. Calling his purchase of The L.A. Times and The Chicago Tribune “a mistake,” Sam “The Sham” Zell said, “It’s very obvious that the newspaper model in its current form does not work and the sooner we all acknowledge that, the better.” He said he probably would not try for a merger because “that’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus.”

Many L.A. Times journalists were outraged over a recent front-page NBC ad for the cop show “Southland” that was tarted up to look like a real news feature story (a tactic the paper repeated with an ad supplement for “The Soloist”).

“It’s one thing being marched to the gallows by an uncaring and unappreciative public, sentenced by shifting technological and cultural habits and a few bonehead moves of your own,” Phil Bronstein, San Francisco Chronicle editor at large, said in a blog, summing up the attitude of the 100-plus journalists at The L.A. Times who signed a petition protesting the “Southland” ad. “But it’s quite another having to go to your death stripped naked as a jaybird.”

When I met up with Bronstein in San Francisco — where The Chronicle was bleeding nearly a million a week last year — he said he thought the L.A. Times reporters had overreacted, and that newspapers should not be so prudish.

“The principle is a sound one — you don’t want to deceive your readers,” he said. “But I’m not all that convinced your readers are so deceivable. A lot of readers think we’re biased, and because we think we’re unbiased, we think they must be stupid. But they’re not. They’re just opinionated.”

Bronstein prefers action to self-pity: “The death spiral stuff is all so self-referential, a lot of fake righteousness.”

I asked him to take me on a justify-your-existence tour.

He started by driving me past an old journalism hangout. “That’s kind of a dead thing, a newspaper bar,” he said. Continuing with the obsolescence theme, he showed me the Linotype machine in the lobby of The Chronicle and his old conference room upstairs.

“This is called the Komodo Dragon Room, for obvious reasons,” he said dryly, referring to the time his ex-wife, Sharon Stone, gave him a meet-and-greet session with a Komodo dragon, who mistook his foot for a snack.

We pass another conference room where the San Francisco political consultant Clint Reilly tangled with Bronstein and left on a stretcher with a broken leg.

We drove around the city for hours, looking at places where journalism had had an impact. At police headquarters, he told of The Chronicle’s coverage of police brutality that forced the department to create a database tracking misbehaving officers. He talked about the paper’s AIDS coverage as we drove through the Castro and past San Francisco General Hospital, where the AIDS wards once overflowed. Parked outside the Giants’ ballpark, he praised the paper’s reporting on Barry Bonds and the steroids scandal, noting that “there are far fewer fly balls going out in the bay.”

His tour ended with cold comfort, as he observed that longer life expectancies may keep us on life support. “For people who still love print, who like to hold it, feel it, rustle it, tear stuff out, do their I. F. Stone thing, it’s important to remember that people are living longer,” he said. “That’s the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer.”

STFU MoDo.  While I cannot conceive of the Times going under, at least it would put you out of a job.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

It is not an exaggeration to say that the team that President Obama appointed to promote his green agenda is nothing short of outstanding — a great combination of scientists and policy makers committed to building an energy economy that is efficient, clean and secure. Now there is only one vacancy left for him to fill. And it’s one that only he can fill: Green President. Is he ready to do that job with the passion and fight that will be required to transform America’s energy future? Hope so. Not sure yet.

Have no doubt, the president is off to a terrific start: His stimulus package will provide an incredible boost for all forms of renewable energy. The energy bill being drafted by House Democrats Henry Waxman and Ed Markey contains unprecedented incentives for energy efficiency and clean-tech innovation. And the ruling from Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency saying that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that threatens public health was courageous and historic.

But while all of that is hugely important, we must not fool ourselves, as we have done for so many years: Price matters. Without a fixed, long-term, durable price on carbon, none of the Obama clean-tech initiatives will achieve the scale needed to have an impact on climate change or make America the leader it must be in the next great industrial revolution: E.T., or energy technology. At this stage, I’d settle for any carbon price mechanism — cap and trade, fee-bates, carbon tax and/or gasoline tax — as long as it real and provides consumers and investors a long-term incentive to shift to clean cars, appliances and buildings.

Bob Lutz, a vice chairman at General Motors, offers a useful example of why price matters. When Congress demands that Detroit make smaller, lighter, better mileage vehicles, but then refuses to put a higher price on carbon — like with a gasoline tax — so more consumers will want to buy these smaller cars, said Lutz, it is the equivalent of ordering all American shirtmakers to make only size smalls while never asking the American people to go on a diet. You’re not going to sell a lot of size smalls.

Have no doubt: From right-wing tea parties to coal states to manufacturers, there is going to be a no-holds-barred campaign to kill any carbon price signal, including cap and trade. A vast army of lobbyists is already working against it. Only President Obama can blunt this. Only he has the platform for framing and elevating the issue properly and taking it to the American people with the passion and clarity needed to move the country. It will take more than one speech.

Here’s one way to start: “My fellow Americans, I want to speak to you about a new economic law. You’ve heard of Moore’s Law in information technology. I’d like to speak to you about the ‘Law of More’ in energy technology. Americans, Indians, Chinese, Africans, we all want more — more comfort in our homes, more mobility in our lives, more technologies with which to innovate. But there is only one way all 6.3 billion of us can have more and not make this an unlivable planet, and that is by living our lives and running our businesses in more sustainable ways and properly accounting for it.

“Right now we’re paying a huge price — a tax — for everyone trying to achieve more in an unsustainable way. But the ‘More Tax’ is not imposed by the U.S. government. It is a tax imposed by the market and will continue rising indefinitely as more and more people want more and more stuff. It will steadily drive up gasoline prices, home heating prices and factory electricity prices. But because this ‘More Tax’ is set by the market and not the government, many opponents contend that there’s nothing to be done: ‘Oh, $4.50 a gallon gasoline — that’s just the market at work. We can’t do anything about that.’ And then all that tax money out of your pocket goes to enrich oil companies and petro-dictators.

“My proposal is that today we fix a durable price on carbon-based fossil fuels, but set it to begin only in 2011, after we’re out of this recession. Every home builder, air-conditioning manufacturer, gasoline refiner, carmaker will know that it’s coming and will, I believe, immediately look for ways to profit from and invest in more energy efficient systems. Yes, the cost of gasoline or kilowatt hours will rise in the short term. But in the long term, your actual bills and expenses will go down because your car, appliances and factory will become steadily more productive and give you more power for less energy.

“I call it the ‘Carbon Tax Cut.’ You won’t receive the dividend in the first week or month, but you will get it soon, and it will be a permanent tax cut, a gift that will keep on giving.

“So those are our choices, folks — an escalating ‘More Tax’ forever, premised on immediate gratification and short-term thinking, or a ‘Carbon Tax Cut’ forever, which is exactly what you’ll get from establishing a carbon price signal that shapes the market in favor of American interests and not those of our adversaries and competitors. If you’re with me, write your member of Congress and senator today.”

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

If, God forbid, terrorists release nerve gas in movie theaters from Los Angeles to Washington tomorrow, the debate about torture will change 180 degrees. The public will turn on President Obama for having “coddled” terrorists.

In short, today’s revulsion at waterboarding is broad but fragile. And that makes it essential that the United States proceed with an independent commission to investigate harsh treatment and tally its costs and benefits.

President Obama worries that the commission will be a distraction, but the truth is the opposite. Revelations will continue to trickle out — including a new hoard of photos of abuses scheduled to be released by May 28 — creating a constant roar of charges and counter-charges. Liberals will jab Mr. Obama from the left, and Dick Cheney from the right, until the president resembles St. Sebastian (the human pincushion). Mr. Obama won’t be able to escape torture.

“He’s trying to get it off the news cycle, and that’s not going to happen,” said Elisa Massimino, chief executive of Human Rights First. “You can’t say you’re going to follow the evidence and then not look for any.”

Morton Halperin of the Open Society Institute, a leader in the coalition supporting a commission, said: “He’s better off saying, ‘there’ll be a commission report, and I’ll deal with it when it’s over.’ It’s a much more credible way to get it off the table.”

There are three solid reasons for a national commission:

First, it could help forge a consensus against torture, for almost everyone in the national security world believes that the result would be a ringing affirmation that we should not torture.

It’s in Mr. Obama’s interest to reach such a consensus, because otherwise the next major terror attack — and there will be one — will be followed by Republican claims that the president’s wimpishness left America vulnerable. His agenda on health care, climate change and education will then risk a collapse into dream dust. The way to inoculate his agenda is to seek common ground through a nonpartisan commission.

Second, a commission could help restore America’s standing by distancing ourselves from past abuses. Alberto Mora, a former general counsel for the Navy, has said that some flag-rank officers believe that Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo constitute “the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq,” because they galvanized jihadis. An Air Force major and interrogator of prisoners who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander told Harper’s Magazine that “hundreds but more likely thousands of American lives” were lost because of “the policy decision to introduce the torture and abuse of prisoners.”

Third, a commission could help counterterrorism efforts. Foreign governments have been wary of cooperating with us for fear of being tarnished by scandal. At home, Arab-American and Somali-American communities have been leery of reporting tips because they see the authorities as unjust and hostile to Muslims.

“Oftentimes, the communities from which we need the most help are those who trust us the least,” Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, told the Council on Foreign Relations recently. Last fall, a Somali-American was among a group of suicide bombers who killed more than 20 people in the northern Somalia; he may have been the first American citizen to commit such a suicide attack.

There’s no magic bullet to prevent that from happening in Minneapolis next time, but a truth commission would perhaps be one way to clear the air, build trust among American Muslims and improve counterterrorism.

The truth commission shouldn’t be bipartisan. Rather, it should be nonpartisan, led by prominent legal figures and national security experts who are not strongly associated with a political party. Among those often mentioned are Sandra Day O’Connor, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, along with retired generals and intelligence experts. Such a panel could not be accused of a witch hunt.

It could explore whether there should be criminal responsibility, and whether health professionals should lose licenses for participating in torture.

Conversely, I hope the commission would also recognize some of the most heroic figures since 9/11: those brave military officers, especially military lawyers, who defied the Pentagon to stand up for terrorism suspects — or, more accurately, for principles of justice.

At a time when we in the news media became lapdogs rather than watchdogs, when Congress and the courts dozed, those military lawyers sacrificed their careers to defend American values. They deserve medals.

Mr. Obama is right that we have to focus on the economy and move ahead. But one of our most precious possessions is our moral core, our value system, and when you’ve lost your way it’s important to retrace your steps to understand where you went astray. Come on, Mr. Obama, let’s not delay that process.

And now here’s Mr. Rich:

We don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.

Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation “techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a confinement box.”

He proposed using 10 such techniques “in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.” Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it “does not, in our view, inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’ ”

Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.

As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”

We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

Collins and Herbert

Ms. Collins made me laugh this morning with “Come Visit.  Live Life.  Eat Cheese.”  She says it’s hard to go wrong when picking a state flower, but the number of bad slogan-driven tourism campaigns is legion.  Poor Wisconsin…  Mr. Herbert, in “A Culture Soaked in Blood,” says America is an insanely violent society, and the worst of that violence is made insanely easy by the widespread availability of guns.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Wisconsin has unveiled a new official state slogan, “Live Like You Mean It,” much to the dismay of some Wisconsinites who wondered why their tourism department spent $50,000 to come up with a catchphrase that used to be in a Bacardi Rum ad campaign.

“It wasn’t so much we didn’t like it as — it’s been used,” said Warren Bluhm of The Green-Bay Press-Gazette, who wrote an editorial denouncing the choice. Under further questioning, Bluhm admitted that he also didn’t like it.

I have been thinking a lot about state slogans this week. Some days when you’re confronted with the Chrysler bankruptcy and the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, you just decide that this is the moment when you’re going to take a cold, hard look at the difficulty marketers have in coming up with a good state tourism campaign.

Besides, I am a big fan of State Things — the ever-growing national collection of mottos, songs, slogans, nicknames and state birds, flowers, rocks and animals. This began back when I was a legislative reporter in Connecticut and covered a hard-fought contest for official status between the deer and the whale, during which the State Senate, in a moment of extreme pique, voted to make Connecticut’s state animal the human being.

Even as we speak, the spotted salamander is engaged in a fierce battle to become Ohio’s state amphibian, and its chances of success are said to be excellent. Go salamander!

It’s hard to go wrong when you’re picking a state flower, but the number of bad slogan-driven tourism campaigns is legion. For a while, Louisiana was trumpeting “Come As You Are. Leave Different,” which sounded sort of sinister, recalling that TV series about vampires roaming the bayous.

Until fairly recently, Connecticut’s slogan was “We’re Full of Surprises,” which was really bad. While the state has a long shoreline and nice bed and breakfasts, when you think of Connecticut surprises, you mainly remember the time the governor went to jail. And we will not dwell on the period when Rhode Island christened itself the “Birthplace of Fun” and allowed the tourism division to dot the landscape with 6-foot-tall statues of Mr. Potato Head.

Happily, all of these states have moved on. But the slogan arc does not always move upward. West Virginia replaced “Almost Heaven” with “Open for Business.”

And Wisconsin has “Live Like You Mean It,” which sounds less like an invitation to vacation than a self-improvement project. As a matter of fact, besides being an old Bacardi slogan, it is also the title of a motivational book whose authors promise to guide you toward “a meaningful, fulfilling, and happier life with results worthy of legacy building.”

I don’t know about you, but when I want to get away from it all, I do not want to take my legacy along with me.

Kelli Trumble, the secretary for the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, said she was heartened that the new slogan already has an “amazing” 90 percent awareness rate in the state, although it’s pretty easy to get attention when you have a radio news anchor in Milwaukee blogging “Wisconsin: We have a lame slogan … AND WE STOLE IT!”

In a telephone interview, she insisted that people were getting past the issue of originality and beginning to tell each other: “I see how this speaks to the essence and spirit of Wisconsonites.”

The essence and spirit of Wisconsinites was unearthed by a panel of brand experts brought together to determine what makes the state different from its competitors — i.e., Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan. This is where the trouble started. Wisconsin always proudly billed itself “America’s Dairyland” and that is still on the state license plates. But if you ask a bunch of brand experts to report on what people think of when they think of Wisconsin, do you think they’re going to come back with “cows?” No.

“What we identified is — our brand essence is that the Wisconsin culture fuels creativity and embraces original thinking in business, travel and education,” Trumble said.

I know, I know. Don’t write to me, Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois. I don’t want to hear about how you have so much original thinking and creativity it’s sloshing over the border. Tell it to the Wisconsin Department of Tourism.

I went to school in Wisconsin, and it never struck me as the sort of place where people were worried about living like they meant it. But they were so deeply into being the nation’s dairy capital that they once banned the importation of margarine across state lines.

Then, in 1985, Gov. Anthony Earl of Wisconsin decided “America’s Dairyland” was boring and sponsored a contest for a new state slogan, which drew an avalanche of suggestions. A screening committee declined to consider the popular favorite: “Eat Cheese or Die.” I truly believe that nothing has gone right for Wisconsin on the slogan front ever since.

Georgia, of course, has doubled up on our state slogan and state song:  “Georgia On My Mind.”  One hesitates to think of what the solons in Atlanta would have come up with had there been no Hoagy Carmichael.  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

Guns.

Philip Markoff, a medical student, supposedly carried his semiautomatic in a hollowed-out volume of “Gray’s Anatomy.” Police believe he used it in a hotel room in Boston last week to murder Julissa Brisman, a 26-year-old woman who had advertised her services as a masseuse on Craigslist.

In Palm Harbor, Fla., a 12-year-old boy named Jacob Larson came across a gun in the family home that, according to police, his parents had forgotten they had. Jacob shot himself in the head and is in a coma, police said. Authorities believe the shooting was accidental.

There is no way to overstate the horror of gun violence in America. Roughly 16,000 to 17,000 Americans are murdered every year, and more than 12,000 of them, on average, are shot to death. This is an insanely violent society, and the worst of that violence is made insanely easy by the widespread availability of guns.

When the music producer Phil Spector decided, for whatever reason, to kill the actress, Lana Clarkson, all he had to do was reach for his gun — one of the 283 million privately owned firearms that are out there. When John Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, went on a killing spree that took 10 lives in the Washington area, the absolute least of their worries was how to get a semiautomatic rifle that fit their deadly mission.

We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows.

There were ceremonies marking the recent 10th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, but very few people remember a mass murder just five months after Columbine, when a man with a semiautomatic handgun opened fire on congregants praying in a Baptist church in Fort Worth. Eight people died, including the gunman, who shot himself.

A little more than a year before the Columbine killings, two boys with high-powered rifles killed a teacher and four little girls at a school in Jonesboro, Ark. That’s not widely remembered either. When something is as pervasive as gun violence in the U.S., which is as common as baseball in the summertime, it’s very hard for individual cases to remain in the public mind.

Homicides are only a part of the story.

While more than 12,000 people are murdered with guns annually, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (using the latest available data) tells us that more than 30,000 people are killed over the course of one typical year by guns. That includes 17,000 who commit suicide, nearly 800 who are killed in accidental shootings and more than 300 killed by the police. (In many of the law enforcement shootings, the police officers are reacting to people armed with guns).

And then there are the people who are shot but don’t die. Nearly 70,000 fall into that category in a typical year, including 48,000 who are criminally attacked, 4,200 who survive a suicide attempt, more than 15,000 who are shot accidentally, and more than 1,000 — many with a gun in possession — who are shot by the police.

The medical cost of treating gunshot wounds in the U.S. is estimated to be well more than $2 billion annually. And the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, has noted that nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading cause of uninsured hospital stays.

The toll on children and teenagers is particularly heartbreaking. According to the Brady Campaign, more than 3,000 kids are shot to death in a typical year. More than 1,900 are murdered, more than 800 commit suicide, about 170 are killed accidentally and 20 or so are killed by the police.

Another 17,000 are shot but survive.

I remember writing from Chicago two years ago about the nearly three dozen public school youngsters who were shot to death in a variety of circumstances around the city over the course of just one school year. Arne Duncan, who was then the chief of the Chicago schools and is now the U.S. secretary of education, said to me at the time: “That’s more than a kid every two weeks. Think about that.”

Actually, that’s our problem. We don’t really think about it. If the crime is horrible enough, we’ll go through the motions of public anguish but we never really do anything about it. Americans are as blasé as can be about this relentless slaughter that keeps the culture soaked in blood.

This blasé attitude, this willful refusal to acknowledge the scope of the horror, leaves the gun nuts free to press their crazy case for more and more guns in ever more hands. They’re committed to keeping the killing easy, and we should be committed for not stopping them.

Bobo and Krugman

Bobo is poll-parsing again.  Which I suppose is easier than, you know, actually thinking.  In “Yanks in Crisis” he says (or hopes) that the economic downturn has produced a desire for change but not a philosophical shift. Americans are open to ideas from government, but remain skeptical and fiercely self-sufficient.  Bobo, there’s a difference between thinking that “big gummint” is bad and being self-sufficient.  Go find out what self-sufficient REALLY means and get back to me.  Mr. Krugman, in “Reclaiming America’s Soul,” says the only way for the nation to regain its moral compass is to investigate how the government’s interrogation abuses happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.  Here’s that dull tool Bobo:

We’re in the middle of the biggest crisis of capitalism in 70 years. We’ve got a new administration in Washington active on every front. What’s all this done to the public mind?

A poll to be released today by The National Journal and Allstate gives a pretty good view. As you’d expect, there’s a lot of economic anxiety in the country, spanning every income category. Sixty-four percent of Americans believe there are more risks that endanger their standards of living today than in their parents’ time. On the other hand, there’s still some sense of opportunity. Forty-two percent believe there are more opportunities to move up than a generation ago, compared with 29 percent who think there are fewer.

In short, there’s a feeling of greater volatility, both up and down. People don’t seem to feel as if they are sliding into a hole, but neither do they feel secure.

So whom do they turn to in times like these? Themselves. Americans have always felt that they are masters of their own fate. Decade after decade, Americans stand out from others in their belief that their own individual actions determine how they fare. That conviction has been utterly unshaken by the global crisis. In question after question, large majorities say their own actions will determine how much they will make, how well they will endure the recession, how healthy they will be and so on.

The crisis has not sent Americans running to government for relief. Nor has it led to a populist surge in anti-business sentiment. In a recent Gallup poll, 55 percent of Americans said that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 32 percent said big business. Those answers are near historical norms.

Americans have always been skeptical of activist government, and that skepticism remains. When Gallup asked specifically about the current crisis, 44 percent of Americans said they disapprove of an expanded role for government during the crisis; 39 percent said they approve of an expanded role but want it reduced when the crisis is over; and only 13 percent want to see a permanently expanded role for government.

When asked by the National Journal group more specifically where good ideas and financial solutions come from, 40 percent said corporate America and 40 percent said government. When asked what could best enhance income security, half of all Americans said it was a matter of individual responsibility, 19 percent said government regulations like increasing the minimum wage were most effective and 15 percent said government programs.

The area where the National Journal poll found the most desire for government activism is health care. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that while there is less support for a health care overhaul than there was in 1993, the public still wants reform that at least improves the current system.

My friend Ron Brownstein of The National Journal looks at the data and concludes that while Americans are still skeptical of government, they are open to rethinking what the social safety net should look like in the 21st century. I look at the data and conclude that the tumult has not significantly changed the way Americans look at government, corporations or the social contract. Americans are open to good ideas from government, as always, but they are still skeptical and fiercely self-sufficient. The economic crisis has produced a desire for change but not a philosophical shift.

The big lesson for the Obama administration is that the American people will continue to support its agenda as long as they think it is competent. It was not automatic that an administration led by a 47-year-old man with little Washington experience would run a professional, smoothly functioning operation. Yet he has. The administration has unveiled a dazzling array of proposals with a high degree of efficiency and managerial skill. This has inspired confidence in his team, if not in the government as a whole.

If that aura of nonideological competence fades, however, support for the agenda will crater. There is little philosophical backing for a government as activist as the one Obama is proposing. Middle-class voters are not willing to hand over higher taxes in exchange for more federal services. The public is significantly to Obama’s right on economic matters and needs constant evidence that he is not trespassing on personal freedom and individual responsibility.

For Republicans, the message is that all is not hopeless. Swing voters have temporarily rejected the party, but not the Weltanschauung. After this crisis is over, they still want a return to normalcy, with balanced budgets and a limited state. Americans still want to see power dispersed among a diversity of institutions, not concentrated in the hands of supertechnocrats in Washington.

The Great Depression altered the national consciousness. So far, the Great Recession has not.

Possibly because of fools like you.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

“Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify torture. Some people in the political and media establishments have echoed his position. We need to look forward, not backward, they say. No prosecutions, please; no investigations; we’re just too busy.

And there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration’s abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true — even if truth and justice came at a high price — that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren’t supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?

For example, would investigating the crimes of the Bush era really divert time and energy needed elsewhere? Let’s be concrete: whose time and energy are we talking about?

Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job — which he’s supposed to do in any case — and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.

I don’t know about you, but I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business.

Still, you might argue — and many do — that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.

But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any.

That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren’t allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.

Some of them probably just don’t want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.

Others, I suspect, would rather not revisit those years because they don’t want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.

For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

It’s hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era — for the sake of the country, of course.

Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.

We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward — because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.

To quote some folks from 1968:  “The whole world’s watching.”

Collins, Cohen and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “Forgive and Forget,” says though Eliot Spitzer is not the most sympathetic personality in the world, new information keeps coming out that makes you feel a little warmer about him.  Mr. Cohen, in “No Time for Retribution,” opines that the right balance between retribution and reconciliation is always hard to find in the aftermath of national trauma, like the revelations of torture. But it’s time for America to move forward.  Bucko, we moved forward after Watergate, but there were hearings.  Oh, yeah, there were hearings.  Mr. Kristof, in “Islam, Virgins and Grapes,” says if the Islamic world is going to enjoy a revival, if fundamentalists are to be tamed, if women are to be treated equally, then moderate interpretations of the Koran will have to gain ascendancy.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Should we forgive Eliot Spitzer?

New York’s most prominent disgraced public official is on a rehabilitation tour. Doing TV interviews, writing for Slate, confessing his sins on the cover of Newsweek.

And as a New Yorker, I am rather proud of the way this is going. You don’t see Eliot volunteering to appear on “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here” like some other ex-governors I could mention.

Although if you want to avoid the humiliation of asking a judge for permission to do a reality TV show in the jungles of Costa Rica like Rod Blagojevich did, being heir to a real estate fortune does help. And really, I would not rule out a future role for Spitzer as celebrity judge on “Top Chef” or the person who pulls out the winning lottery numbers at night on TV.

Whatever he’s doing, it’s working. New York is pretty clearly ready to let Spitzer move on. Although he is not the most sympathetic personality in the world, as he’s re-emerged, new information keeps coming out that makes you feel a little warmer about him.

For instance, I did not know until the Newsweek article that young Eliot “carried a Samsonite briefcase to junior high,” and this really does help explain a lot.

Anyway, in our role as judgmental citizens, we’re currently busy not forgiving a whole pack of bailed-out bankers. Plus, we have to figure out what to do with the federal judge who approved the memo specifying the number of insects you could throw into a box with an arachnophobic suspected terrorist. We’re pretty much booked up through summer.

Our unofficial amnesty, however, only goes so far. If you are running for governor with secret impeachment-provoking hobbies, you need to be a little careful about whom you choose for your No. 2. So we don’t forgive Spitzer for picking David Paterson, a man who had spent almost his entire adult life as a member of the powerless, moribund minority party in the New York State Senate.

New York is now being led by a guy who deliberately chose a career with all the inherent challenge of spending a quarter of a century locked in a closet, and for that, we’re holding grudges.

Maybe it’s easier to get past Spitzer’s unseemly leave-taking because even when he was in power, the State Capitol was not exactly Camelot. Not even an Albany version, in which the rain may never fall till after sundown, but the snow piles up whenever the hell it wants.

He was a great attorney general. But maybe the real lesson from the Spitzer story is that it is important to avoid electing chief executives who spent their glory days as prosecuting attorneys.

If you’re in a state as ridden with corruption and dismal political practices as this one, it often does seem that the prosecutors are the only ones who can get anything done. They’re great at going after bad guys. But they don’t seem to be good at bringing people together behind a banner of change. The public just becomes spectators to the great ongoing squabble.

Under our famous ex-prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, City Hall became a very large version of Jack Bauer’s Counter Terrorist Unit in “24” — a heavily fortified bunker where a kind of nerdy group of warriors spent their lives trying to identify the next villain.

Unlike C.T.U., however, Giuliani’s troops tended to pick the wrong targets, lobbing their missiles at the mild-mannered bureaucrats who ran the World Trade Center (and opposed Rudy’s plans for privatizing the airports) rather than the people who were actually trying to bomb it.

While Spitzer was better at picking his enemies, his reign seemed similar in many ways with people vying for glory based less on success than the intensity of their warfare. Since he has decided that his future, whatever it involves, will not include ever being quoted again by The New York Times, I can’t tell you how he reacted to this assessment. However, I think it is fair to say that he disagrees.

Maybe he’s right. There were early achievements before he became embroiled in a series of shouting matches with Republicans. But as Washington grumbles about Barack Obama being too accommodating, it’s useful to remember that unless you pick your fights very, very carefully, you’ll risk wasting your best ammunition on the wrong targets and leaving the country exhausted from all the yelling.

Meanwhile, New York appears to be facing a looming battle for the governor’s office between Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and Rudy Giuliani. Indictments at dawn.

I wonder what Caroline Kennedy’s up to these days.

Probably still not voting…  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Language is lethal. The Bush administration’s legal memos opening the way to torture are a reminder of the intimate link between a bureaucrat’s lawyerly subordinate clause and a man’s near drowning.

Now we all know what “interrogation with enhanced techniques” means: an insect in a human cage.

Don’t say what you mean when you mean to do the unspeakable. That’s an old rule. It was perfected in the 20th century from Moscow to Buenos Aires.

Opacity is the refuge of the faceless tormentor. The constitutions of totalitarian states are always unreadable, impenetrable — and very long. In a thicket of words lies plausible deniability when the time for horror’s accounting arrives. That hour always comes around.

I keep re-reading some of the sentences in the memos from the dark side. Like a labyrinth, they lead back in on themselves: “You have, however, informed us that you expect these techniques to be used in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.”

The “technique” has a “culmination” that is not necessarily an “ending”; and on round again, several hundred times.

To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.

So I’m wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America’s checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

Those checks and balances are recovering now. I don’t think this recovery would be served by prosecutions, either of C.I.A. operatives or those who gave them legal advice. Such legal action, if initiated, would split the intelligence services and the military in paralyzing ways at a time when two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are still being fought. The country would be lacerated.

The right balance between retribution and reconciliation is always hard to find in the aftermath of national trauma. Ask the Bosnians or South Africans. When wars are ongoing, it is wise to err on the side of caution. There’s work to do. Obama’s right: America should look ahead, not back.

A Truth Commission could address the broad collapse of accountability that opened the way for an imperial presidency and the use of cruel and inhuman treatment, while avoiding a facile search for scapegoats that would allow too many to disregard their own small measure of responsibility.

That, of course, is Obama’s favorite word: responsibility. I think it demands some acknowledgment that, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

With Obama, words have begun to have meaning again. Declarative sentences are back. I couldn’t take my eyes off that photo of Obama shaking hands with President Chávez of Venezuela; it cut through so much epic posturing. But his use of language has been more liberating even than such images.

Two sentences uttered recently by the president in Turkey are an example: “The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their family, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country — I know, because I am one of them.”

It was one of those moments when you realize just how scary Obama must be to America’s jihadist enemies. Knowing Islam across the dinner table, he has no fear of it. His predecessor, in Facebook terms, went on a spree of de-friending that made terrorist recruitment easier. Now the tables have been turned.

The U.S. has emerged from eight years of dyslexia. It has now revealed how dangerously words were manipulated and is learning again to speak a language the world can understand. America’s narrative is inclusive once more, as it must be by the country’s very nature. The power of language to reconcile is as great as its power to kill.

At his first press conference in February, Obama said: “The strongest democracies flourish from frequent and lively debate, but they endure when people of every background and belief find a way to set aside smaller differences in service of a greater purpose.”

That’s a sentence you don’t have to read twice. The differences today are not small — they concern the rule of law and torture — but the spirit of Obama’s words still provides a useful moral compass for this moment of American self-questioning and anguish.

And now here’s Mr. Kristof:

In Afghanistan, 300 brave women marched to demand a measure of equal rights, defying a furious mob of about 1,000 people who spat, threw stones and called the women “whores.” The marchers asserted that a woman should not need her husband’s consent to go to school or work outside the home.

In Pakistan, the Taliban flogged a teenage girl in front of a crowd, as two men held her face down in the dirt. A video shows the girl, whose “crime” may have been to go out of her house alone, crying piteously that she will never break the rules again.

Muslim fundamentalists damage Islam far more than any number of Danish cartoonists ever could, for it’s inevitably the extremists who capture the world’s attention. But there is the beginning of an intellectual reform movement in the Islamic world, and one window into this awakening was an international conference this week at the University of Notre Dame on the latest scholarship about the Koran.

“We’re experiencing right now in Koranic studies a rise of interest analogous to the rise of critical Bible studies in the 19th century,” said Gabriel Said Reynolds, a Notre Dame professor and organizer of the conference.

The Notre Dame conference probably could not have occurred in a Muslim country, for the rigorous application of historical analysis to the Koran is as controversial today in the Muslim world as its application to the Bible was in the 1800s. For some literal-minded Christians, it was traumatic to discover that the ending of the Gospel of Mark, describing encounters with the resurrected Jesus, is stylistically different from the rest of Mark and is widely regarded by scholars as a later addition.

Likewise, Biblical scholars distressed the faithful by focusing on inconsistencies among the gospels. The Gospel of Matthew says that Judas hanged himself, while Acts describes him falling down in a field and dying; the Gospel of John disagrees with other gospels about whether the crucifixion occurred on Passover or the day before. For those who considered every word of the Bible literally God’s word, this kind of scholarship felt sacrilegious.

Now those same discomfiting analytical tools are being applied to the Koran. At Notre Dame, scholars analyzed ancient texts of the Koran that show signs of writing that was erased and rewritten. Other scholars challenged traditional interpretations of the Koran such as the notion that some other person (perhaps Judas or Peter) was transformed to look like Jesus and crucified in his place, while Jesus himself escaped to heaven.

One scholar at the Notre Dame conference, who uses the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg for safety, has raised eyebrows and hackles by suggesting that the “houri” promised to martyrs when they reach Heaven doesn’t actually mean “virgin” after all. He argues that instead it means “grapes,” and since conceptions of paradise involved bounteous fruit, that might make sense. But suicide bombers presumably would be in for a disappointment if they reached the pearly gates and were presented 72 grapes.

One of the scholars at the Notre Dame conference whom I particularly admire is Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, an Egyptian Muslim who argues eloquently that if the Koran is interpreted sensibly in context then it carries a strong message of social justice and women’s rights.

Dr. Abu Zayd’s own career underscores the challenges that scholars face in the Muslim world. When he declared that keeping slave girls and taxing non-Muslims were contrary to Islam, he infuriated conservative judges. An Egyptian court declared that he couldn’t be a real Muslim and thus divorced him from his wife (who, as a Muslim woman, was not eligible to be married to a non-Muslim). The couple fled to Europe, and Dr. Abu Zayd is helping the LibForAll Foundation, which promotes moderate interpretations throughout the Islamic world.

“The Islamic reformation started as early as the 19th century,” notes Dr. Abu Zayd, and, of course, it has even earlier roots as well. One important school of Koranic scholarship, Mutazilism, held 1,000 years ago that the Koran need not be interpreted literally, and even today Iranian scholars are surprisingly open to critical scholarship and interpretations.

If the Islamic world is going to enjoy a revival, if fundamentalists are to be tamed, if women are to be employed more productively, then moderate interpretations of the Koran will have to gain ascendancy. There are signs of that, including a brand of “feminist Islam” that cites verses and traditions suggesting that the Prophet Muhammad favored women’s rights.

Professor Reynolds says that Muslim scholars have asked that conference papers be translated into Arabic so that they can get a broader hearing. If the great intellectual fires are reawakening within Islam, after centuries of torpor, then that will be the best weapon yet against extremism.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo ponders “To Tweet or Not to Tweet,” and says in an interview with the inventors of Twitter she had a simple quest: to find out if they are as annoying as their invention.  I don’t see how they could be…  The Moustache of Wisdom (a moment of silence, please, for his wife’s investments…), in “Swimming Without a Suit,” says America needs to invest money and energy into schools with a sense of urgency that the economic and moral stakes demand.  Here’s MoDo, who’s still in San Francisco:

Alfred Hitchcock would have loved the Twitter headquarters here. Birds gathering everywhere, painted on the wall in flocks, perched on the coffee table, stitched on pillows and framed on the wall with a thought bubble asking employees to please tidy up after themselves.

In a droll nod to shifting technology, there’s a British red telephone booth in the loftlike office that you are welcome to use but you’ll have to bring in your cellphone.

I was here on a simple quest: curious to know if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention. (They’re not. They’re charming.)

I sat down with Biz Stone, 35, and Evan Williams, 37, and asked them to justify themselves.

ME: You say the brevity of Twitter enhances creativity. So I wonder if you can keep your answers to 140 characters, like Twitter users must. Twitter seems like telegrams without the news. We now know that on the president’s trip to Trinidad, ABC News’s Jake Tapper’s shower was spewing brown water. Is there any thought that doesn’t need to be published?

BIZ: The one I’m thinking right now.

ME: Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls?

BIZ: We definitely didn’t design it for that. If they want to use it for that, it’s great.

ME: I heard about a woman who tweeted her father’s funeral. Whatever happened to private pain?

EVAN: I have private pain every day.

ME: If you were out with a girl and she started twittering about it in the middle, would that be a deal-breaker or a turn-on?

BIZ (dryly): In the middle of what?

ME: Do you ever think “I don’t care that my friend is having a hamburger?”

BIZ: If I said I was eating a hamburger, Evan would be surprised because I’m a vegan.

ME: What do you think about the backlash to Twitter on the blogs? Isn’t that a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?

BIZ: If people are passionate about your product, whether it’s because they’re hating or loving it, those are both good scenarios. People can use it to help each other during fuel shortages or revolts or earthquakes or wildfires. That’s the exciting part of it.

ME: Why did you think the answer to e-mail was a new kind of e-mail?

BIZ: With Twitter, it’s as easy to unfollow as it is to follow.

(They’re spilling past 140 characters now, but it must feel good to climb out of their Twitter bird cage. Evan has to leave. Biz and I continue.)

ME: Don’t you get worried about being swallowed up by Google?

BIZ: They don’t swallow you up. They call you up.

ME: Why did you call the company Twitter instead of Clutter?

BIZ: We had a lot of words like “Jitter” and things that reflected a hyper-nervousness. Somebody threw “Twitter” in the hat. I thought “Oh, that’s the short trivial bursts of information that birds do.”

ME: Oprah unleashed mayhem in the Twittersphere last week when, in her first tweet, she greeted “Twitters” instead of “Twitterers.”

BIZ: I’m still kinda old-school. We’re twittering, and we’re all twitterers. And we write tweets. The only thing I don’t love is twits.

ME: Would Shakespeare have tweeted?

BIZ: Brevity’s the soul of wit, right?

ME: Was there anything in your childhood that led you to want to destroy civilization as we know it?

BIZ: You mean enhance civilization, make it even better?

ME: What’s your favorite book?

BIZ: I loved Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid.

ME: But you’ve helped destroy mystery.

BIZ: When you put more information out there, sometimes you can just put a little bit of it out, which just makes the mystery even broader.

ME: When newsprint blows away, I want a second career as a Twitter ghostwriter. Which celebrity on Twitter most needs my help?

BIZ: Definitely not Shaq. Britney, maybe.

ME: Gavin Newsom announced his candidacy for governor today on Twitter and elsewhere. Does that make you the new Larry King?

BIZ: Did he? I didn’t know.

ME: Have you thought about using even fewer than 140 characters?

BIZ: I’ve seen people twitter in haiku only. Twit-u. James Buck, the student who was thrown into an Egyptian prison, just wrote “Arrested.”

ME: I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account. Is there anything you can say to change my mind?

BIZ: Well, when you do find yourself in that position, you’re gonna want Twitter. You might want to type out the message “Help.”

I agree with MoDo on this…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Speaking of financial crises and how they can expose weak companies and weak countries, Warren Buffett once famously quipped that “only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.” So true. But what’s really unnerving is that America appears to be one of those countries that has been swimming buck naked — in more ways than one.

Credit bubbles are like the tide. They can cover up a lot of rot. In our case, the excess consumer demand and jobs created by our credit and housing bubbles have masked not only our weaknesses in manufacturing and other economic fundamentals, but something worse: how far we have fallen behind in K-12 education and how much it is now costing us. That is the conclusion I drew from a new study by the consulting firm McKinsey, entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”

Just a quick review: In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, we still had a lead, albeit smaller, in educating our population through secondary school, and America continued to lead the world economically, albeit with other big economies, like China, closing in. Today, we have fallen behind in both per capita high school graduates and their quality. Consequences to follow.

For instance, in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment that measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranked 25th out of the 30 in math and 24th in science. That put our average youth on par with those from Portugal and the Slovak Republic, “rather than with students in countries that are more relevant competitors for service-sector and high-value jobs, like Canada, the Netherlands, Korea, and Australia,” McKinsey noted.

Actually, our fourth-graders compare well on such global tests with, say, Singapore. But our high school kids really lag, which means that “the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers,” said McKinsey.

There are millions of kids who are in modern suburban schools “who don’t realize how far behind they are,” said Matt Miller, one of the authors. “They are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs — not $40 to $50 an hour.”

It is not that we are failing across the board. There are huge numbers of exciting education innovations in America today — from new modes of teacher compensation to charter schools to school districts scattered around the country that are showing real improvements based on better methods, better principals and higher standards. The problem is that they are too scattered — leaving all kinds of achievement gaps between whites, African-Americans, Latinos and different income levels.

Using an economic model created for this study, McKinsey showed how much those gaps are costing us. Suppose, it noted, “that in the 15 years after the 1983 report ‘A Nation at Risk’ sounded the alarm about the ‘rising tide of mediocrity’ in American education,” the U.S. had lifted lagging student achievement to higher benchmarks of performance? What would have happened?

The answer, says McKinsey: If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

There are some hopeful signs. President Obama recognizes that we urgently need to invest the money and energy to take those schools and best practices that are working from islands of excellence to a new national norm. But we need to do it with the sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand.

With Wall Street’s decline, though, many more educated and idealistic youth want to try teaching. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, called the other day with these statistics about college graduates signing up to join her organization to teach in some of our neediest schools next year: “Our total applications are up 40 percent. Eleven percent of all Ivy League seniors applied, 16 percent of Yale’s senior class, 15 percent of Princeton’s, 25 percent of Spellman’s and 35 percent of the African-American seniors at Harvard. In 130 colleges, between 5 and 15 percent of the senior class applied.”

Part of it, said Kopp, is a lack of jobs elsewhere. But part of it is “students responding to the call that this is a problem our generation can solve.” May it be so, because today, educationally, we are not a nation at risk. We are a nation in decline, and our nakedness is really showing.

Bobo and Herbert

Bobo, in “Big Spending Conservative,” says President Obama is arguing for his activist agenda as a defense of middle-class morality and is positioning Democrats as the party of order and small-town values. This should make Republicans nervous.  How do you know this is full of bull pucky?  He called Obama’s  agenda activist.  Mr. Herbert, in “Children in Peril,” says in a toxic mix for children, poverty and family homelessness are rising, the quality of public education is deteriorating and legions of people are losing access to health care.  Here’s Bobo:

We’ve all heard liberal speeches on the economy. The central concern is inequality. Power and wealth tend to concentrate at the top of society, so government must stand as a countervailing power. It must defend the people against the powerful to ensure fairness and opportunity for all.

It is interesting, therefore, that when President Obama summarized his economic policies in a speech at Georgetown last week, he departed from this story line and worldview. Obama’s chief concern was not inequality. It was irresponsibility. Obama didn’t sound like an economic liberal at Georgetown. He sounded like a cultural conservative.

America once had a responsible economic culture, Obama argued. People used to save their pennies to buy their dream houses. Banks used to lend by “traditional standards.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac used to stick to their “traditional mandate.” Companies like A.I.G. used to limit themselves to the “traditional insurance business.”

But these traditions broke down, Obama continued. They were swamped by irresponsibility. Businesspeople chased “short-term profits” over long-term investments. Smart people spent more time manipulating numbers and symbols than actually making things. Americans consumed too much and saved too little. America became corrupted by “excessive debt,” “reckless speculation” and “fleeting profits.”

Obama vowed to end this irresponsibility and the cycle of boom and bust. It’s time to get back to basics, he said. He embraced tradition, order and authority. He quoted the New Testament and argued that it is time that the U.S. built its economic house on rock and not sand.

If Republicans aren’t nervous, they should be. Obama is arguing for his activist agenda not on the basis of class-consciousness, which is alien to America, but as a defense of middle-class morality, which is central to it. Obama is positioning the Democrats as the party of order, responsibility and small-town values. If he pulls this mantle away from the Republicans, it would be the greatest train robbery in American politics.

Obama then went on to describe his remedy in the soothing, understated manner of a country doctor prescribing a few small procedures. The country has been on an irresponsible bender, so his administration will have to “clear away” a few toxic assets, “reassess” the viability of Chrysler and General Motors, and “create rules that punish shortcuts” on Wall Street.

His view was clear. The market is dynamic and important, but it makes people reckless, parochial and dangerously shortsighted. The market needs adult supervision — a leadership class made up of people who appreciate the market but who also have committed themselves to public service, and who therefore take the long view and are more conscious of the public good.

Obama is building this new leadership class. His administration has become a domestic I.M.F., consisting of teams of experts who can swoop in and provide long-term solutions when systems — finance, housing, health care, education, autos — have broken down.

When the members of this new establishment are confronted with a broken system — whether it involves hospitals, energy, air pollution or cars — their approach is the same. They aim to restructure incentives in order to channel the animal drives of the marketplace in responsible directions.

Obama is taking enormous risks. Even F.D.R. decided to concentrate on the banking crisis in his first year and put other issues off until 1934 and beyond. Obama is doing everything at once. And yet in this speech, and in his heart, his approach seems self-evident, reassuring and almost mundane. As explication, the Georgetown speech was a small masterpiece.

The first danger for the Obama administration, of course, is that his teams of experts may not be as farsighted as they believe. It may not be so easy to out-think the market. His advisers are like jugglers who have thrown knives in the air. It’ll get harder when they start coming down.

Moreover, for an administration that puts responsibility at the center, it is not itself very responsible. Federal spending is the leverage the administration uses to gain control over sector after sector, and yet this money is all borrowed.

Obama imposes hard choices on others, but has postponed his own. He presented an agenda that bleeds red ink a trillion dollars at a time. Now he seems passive as Congress kills his few revenue ideas (cap and trade) and spending cuts (agricultural subsidies). Huge fiscal gaps are opening this decade that can’t be closed by distant entitlement reform. They can’t be closed by cynical Potemkin cuts, a few million at a time.

This is not a matter of economics only, but credibility. Obama understands that this is primarily an authority crisis. A system Americans have trusted — the market — has failed in important ways. He has found a theme and bids to reassert authority. But he will seem like an impostor and a manipulator if he imposes responsibility on everybody but himself.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

With so much attention focused on the banking system and arguments over bailouts, the plight of America’s children in this severe economic downturn is getting short shrift.

Official statistics are not yet readily available, but there is little doubt that poverty and family homelessness are rising, that the quality of public education in many communities is deteriorating and that legions of children are losing access to health care as their parents join the vastly expanding ranks of the unemployed.

This is a toxic mix for children, a demoralizing convergence of factors that have long been known to impede the ability of young people to flourish.

“It’s actually quite frightening,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund in New York. “We’re seeing very unsettling reports of increased numbers of children in poverty. Those numbers may rise from about 12.5 million before the recession to nearly 17 million by the end of this year.”

Dr. Redlener is a pediatrician who also is a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He co-founded the Children’s Health Fund with the singer Paul Simon back in 1987 in response to a homeless crisis in New York City that saw families with small children wallowing tragically in squalid welfare hotels.

Dr. Redlener and Mr. Simon raised enough money to purchase a medically equipped van that traveled the city to bring free health care to homeless kids.

What is happening now, nationally, is overwhelming compared with the problems in New York City in the mid-1980s. “We are seeing the emergence of what amounts to a ‘recession generation,’ ” said Dr. Redlener. “This includes the children who were already living in poverty, but also millions more whose families had a reasonable chance of making it. Two years ago, they saw themselves as working class and middle class, but now many are unemployed or underemployed, and one of the results is that we’re seeing growing numbers of children depending on emergency rooms for health care or going without care.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has noted that changes in food stamp enrollment closely track changes in poverty. Since the start of the recession, the number of people receiving food stamps has increased by 4.6 million, nearly 17 percent. According to the center, that’s an indication of a substantial increase in poverty over the same period. And that’s bad news for children.

Similarly grim evidence is mounting with regard to homelessness. Surges in the number of families living in shelters are being reported by officials in communities across the country.

“This spike in homelessness,” the center said, “is worsening what was already a large and persistent problem. Even before the current recession, an estimated 1.6 million people, including 340,000 children, were homeless and living in emergency shelters or transitional housing over the course of a year. Many more adults and children were living on the street, in shelters for victims of domestic violence, or temporarily in the homes of friends and relations.”

With unemployment expected to continue to rise for the foreseeable future, and with state and local governments staggering beneath the weight of budget deficits, there is no reason to believe that these problems — and their profound negative impact on children — will do anything but worsen.

States from coast to coast are cutting social service programs. Arizona’s child protection agency, for example, has cut back on its investigations of abuse and neglect reports. Similar cutbacks in socially beneficial and even life-saving programs for children are in the works in many states.

Dr. Redlener described what is occurring as “a quiet disaster.”

The number of state-of-the-art mobile medical units operated by the Children’s Health Fund has grown from one in 1987 to 37. In an effort to bring health care to some of the children most in need right now — while at the same time drawing attention to the plight of children in general in these tough economic times — Dr. Redlener is planning to deploy the distinctive blue vans to some of the communities hardest hit by the recession.

The first stop will be Detroit this coming weekend.

“We’re going to take them to various parts of the country where there have been significant cutbacks in services,” he said, “and for a weekend we’ll provide free health and dental care to children whose parents cannot afford to pay for care. We’ll also refer every child that we see to an ongoing source of care in their community, if we can find one.”

The goal, he said, in addition to helping as many children as possible, is to spark additional help for children from all quarters, government and private. “Kids can’t wait for the economic recovery to have their immediate needs cared for,” he said.