Nocera and Collins

Mr. Nocera addresses “The College Sports Cartel” and says the N.C.A.A. is a walking, talking antitrust violation.  It’s that time of year again, and Ms. Collins has “A Quiz for All Seasons.”  She says here’s the End-of-the-Year Republican Presidential Primary Quiz. No peeking at the answers, people, until all questions have been answered!   Here’s Mr. Nocera:

Twice a year in Vienna, the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries gather to decide on the short-term direction of oil prices. Sometimes, O.P.E.C. agrees to cut back on oil production, pushing up the price of oil. Other times, it decides to boost production. Always, the goal is to fix the price of oil, rather than allow it to be set by the competitive marketplace. Indeed, collusion and price-fixing are the main reasons cartels exist — and why they are illegal in America.

Yet, in Indianapolis a few weeks from now, a home-grown cartel will hold its annual meeting, where it, too, will be working to collude and fix prices. This cartel is the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The N.C.A.A. would have you believe that it is the great protector of amateur athletics, preventing college athletes from being tainted by the river of money pouring over college sports.

In fact, the N.C.A.A.’s real role is to oversee the collusion of university athletic departments, whose goal is to maximize revenue and suppress the wages of its captive labor force, a k a the players. Rarely, however, will the cartel nature of the N.C.A.A. be so nakedly on display as at this year’s convention.

In The Times Magazine this weekend, I lay out a proposal to pay the players in the two big revenue sports, college football and men’s basketball, something the N.C.A.A. won’t countenance. In the course of my reporting, I gained a new appreciation for the cartel characteristics of sports leagues.

Sports leagues can’t exist without at least some collusion. As Andy Schwarz, an economist and litigation consultant, puts it, “If steel companies got together to decide when and where to produce steel, that would violate the antitrust laws. But if sports teams in a league get together to decide when and where to play games, that’s generally allowed.” Major League Baseball has long had an antitrust exemption; other professional leagues have salary caps, which are legal because they have been agreed to by the players.

The N.C.A.A. has neither an antitrust exemption nor a player’s union to negotiate with. In other words, it lacks some of the legal protections that shield professional sports from antitrust suits. What it has, instead, is a work force full of young adults dreaming of becoming pros and willing to sign any document, no matter how onerous, if it will help them reach that goal. The document the N.C.A.A. forces them to sign completely stacks the deck against them. To cite just one outrageous example, if a player runs afoul of an N.C.A.A. rule, he isn’t allowed legal counsel to defend himself.

Recently, Mark Emmert, the president of the N.C.A.A., tried to make the rules a tad less onerous. He got the N.C.A.A. board of directors to approve an optional $2,000 stipend as well as a four-year scholarship instead of the current one-year deal for players.

And how did the cartel react to these modest changes? It rose up in revolt. Enough universities signed an override petition to temporarily ice the new stipend. The same thing happened with the four-year scholarship.

A lawyer in Fort Worth, Christian Dennie, who specializes in sports law, got ahold of an internal N.C.A.A. document outlining some of the objections. One is especially worth repeating: “The new coach may have a completely different style of offense/defense that the student athlete no longer fits into,” wrote Indiana State. Four-year scholarships might mean that the school would be stuck with “someone that is of no ‘athletic’ usefulness to the program.” Thus does at least one school show how it truly views its “student athletes.” (Andy Staples at Sports Illustrated first reported on this document.)

At the N.C.A.A. convention in mid-January, both of these rules will be reviewed. In all likelihood, the N.C.A.A. will roll them back. However benignly it characterizes this action, it will be as clear-cut an example of collusion as anything that goes on at an OPEC meeting.

How can it be that the N.C.A.A. can define amateurism in one moment as allowing a $2,000 stipend and in the next moment as forbidding such a stipend? How can it justify rolling back a change that would truly help student athletes, such as the four-year scholarship, simply because coaches want to continue to have life-or-death power over their charges? How can the labor force that generates so much money for everyone else be kept in shackles by the N.C.A.A.?

The N.C.A.A. claims it has the legal right to do all the above and more. And maybe it does. But it certainly would be worthwhile to see someone challenge its cartel behavior in court. The inevitable rollback of the $2,000 stipend and the four-year scholarship would be an awfully good place to start.

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

What a big week coming up! New Year’s Day and then the Iowa caucuses! Doesn’t get any better than that. And, in honor of this double-whammy of exciting events, here’s the End-of-the-Year Republican Presidential Primary Quiz:

I. Which of the following has Rick Perry not gotten wrong, so far, during his presidential campaign:

A) Number of Supreme Court justices

B) Legal voting age in the United States

C) Date of the election

D) Whether New Hampshire has a primary or caucuses

E) Number of stars on the Texas state flag

F) Name of the late leader of North Korea

G) Century in which the American Revolution was fought

*****

II. “I was born free!/Born free!/Free, like a river raging. … Wild, like an untamed stallion” is a quote from:

A) The opening of Rick Perry’s biography

B) Newt Gingrich’s third wedding vows

C) Mitt Romney’s campaign theme song

D) Ron Paul poem entitled “World Without Fed”

*****

III. Match the speaker:

1) “She was hot and got ratings.”

2) “He’s a big cereal hound.”

3) “I had dinner last night with Jim Perry. I was impressed with him.”

4) “He’s on the battlefield right now fighting the battles God wants him to fight.  The only way I get through it is daily Mass and keeping my prayer life in order.”

5)  “She hates Muslims. She hates them. She wants to go get ’em.”

6) “… He really wants my endorsement. I mean, he wants it very badly.”

A) Ann Romney on husband Mitt

B) Donald Trump on Mitt Romney

C) Donald Trump on Rick Perry

D) Karen Santorum on husband Rick

E) Roger Ailes on Sarah Palin

F) Ron Paul on Michele Bachmann

*****

IV. Finish the quote:

1. Rick Perry: “Maybe it’s time to have some provocative language in this country and say things like”:

A) “Yippee Ki Yay.”

B) “Nobody likes Mitt Romney. Face it.”

C) “Close the Departments of Education, Commerce and, yes, Energy!”

D) “Let’s get America working again”

*****

2. Ron Paul on border security: “Every time you think of a fence, keeping all those bad people out, think about maybe those fences being used”:

A) “To keep in those alligators Herman Cain talks about.”

B) “As building materials.”

C) “Against us. Keeping us in.”

D) “For 2,000 miles worth of graffiti.”

*****

3. Michele Bachmann: “There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe”:

A) “In intelligent design.”

B) “That vaccines cause mental retardation.”

C) “That the founding fathers eliminated slavery.”

D) “That I should be president of the United States.”

*****

V. Match the money:

1) Said mortgage giant Freddie Mac paid him $300,000 for his advice “as a historian.”

2) Double-dipping gets him a quarter-million in state salary and pension combined.

3) Got $68,000 for appearing at the International Franchise Association convention in Las Vegas.

4) Although he appears sort of unemployed, he actually made $970,000 last year.

A) Rick Santorum

B) Newt Gingrich

C) Mitt Romney

D) Rick Perry

*****

VI. Match the candidate with a high point from his book:

1) Mitt Romney

2) Herman Cain

3) Rick Perry

4) Ron Paul

5) Newt Gingrich

A) He’s “the kind of guy who goes jogging in the morning, packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets and shoots a coyote that is threatening his daughter’s dog.”

B) Tells the reader how to become the C.E.O. of Self.

C) “Chicken-hawks are individuals who dodged the draft when their numbers came up but who later became champions of senseless and undeclared wars when they were influencing foreign policy. Former Vice President Cheney is the best example of this disgraceful behavior.”

D) His daughter and co-author tells about the time she averted a meltdown during a TV makeup session by begging her father to “Close your eyes and go to a happy place.”

E) “I love jokes and I love laughing.”

*****

ANSWERS:

I-E; II-C; III: 1-E, 2-A, 3-C, 4-D, 5-F, 6-B; IV: 1-D, 2-C, 3-A; V: 1-B, 2-D; 3-C; 4-A; VI: 1-E, 2-B, 3-A, 4-C, 5-D.

Wow.  Just, wow.  Until you see all of that corralled in one place you tend to forget just how much weapons-grade stoopid has been displayed by that clown act…

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo has produced a thing called “Going Home Again” in which he ‘splains to us how a blogger who is part of a communitarian conservative tradition decides to move home to his small-town roots.  The “communitarian conservative tradition” of which he burbles are the so-called “crunchy cons” babbled about by Rod Dreher first in 2002.  Prof. Krugman says “Keynes Was Right,” and that once again, when politicians and policy makers decided to focus on deficits, not jobs, they proved Keynes right about a slump being the wrong time for austerity.  Here’s Bobo’s three-hanky offering:

Rod Dreher grew up in St. Francisville, La., a town of about 1,700 people 30 minutes northwest of Baton Rouge. He left for college and then lived in Washington, New York, Miami, Dallas and Philadelphia, working as a writer for various magazines, a newspaper and a foundation.

His younger sister, Ruthie, went to L.S.U., returned to St. Francisville as a middle-school teacher and married an Iraq war veteran who worked as a fireman. On Feb. 22, 2010, Ruthie, who was 40 then, was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer. She told her brother that she was afraid that her three young girls would be angry with God for taking her from them: “We can’t have anger,” she told him. “Make sure nobody is angry at the doctors, either. They couldn’t have caught it earlier.”

The entire town rallied around her. There were cookouts to raise money for her medical care. Ruthie met a woman named Stephanie when they were both getting chemotherapy. Stephanie continued to accompany Ruthie to the hospital even after her own round of treatments was finished.

April 10, 2010, was officially Ruthie Leming Day in St. Francisville. More than half the town went to a fund-raising concert. Somebody took a camper-trailer to the concert so Ruthie would have a place to rest and take oxygen.

Dreher, one of the country’s most interesting bloggers, captured Ruthie’s illness in real time. “It’s so beautiful to see it’s almost painful,” he wrote the night of the concert, “and so unreal in its generosity that you think it must have been a movie.”

As Ruthie’s illness worsened, Dreher’s grief would be mixed with something else. “The outpouring — an eruption, really — of goodness and charity from the people of our town has been quite simply stunning,” he blogged. “The acts of aid and comfort have been ceaseless, often reducing our parents to tears of shock and awe.”

She died on Sept. 15 this year. More than 1,000 people signed the guest book at the funeral, Dreher reported. Mike, her husband who had wrenched his back trying to perform C.P.R. on her, stood for hours by the open coffin as people filed past. Since Ruthie liked to go barefoot, the pallbearers took off their shoes, rolled up their pants and carried the coffin to the grave in bare feet.

During the wake, Dreher and his wife received an e-mail informing them that the deal for a farmhouse they had hoped to rent in Bucks County, Pa., had fallen through. They were surprised as waves of relief swept over them.

Then a thought occurred. Maybe they should leave the Philadelphia area and move back to Louisiana. “Standing in Ruthie’s kitchen the day after she died, laughing with all of Mike’s friends who had surrounded him to hold him up (‘We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other,’ Mike later said), I thought, ‘Even with all the sadness, there’s no place else in the world I’d rather be.’ ”

They considered the practicalities. They wondered if they were experiencing a passing emotion from a traumatic event. To their great astonishment, they decided to make the move.

They wanted to be enmeshed in a tight community. They wanted to be around Ruthie’s daughters, and they wanted their kids to be able to go deer hunting with Mike. They wanted to be where the family had been for five generations and participate in the rituals ranging from Mardi Gras to L.S.U. football. They decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being a part of a community.

They moved in just before Christmas. For the past many years, Ruthie and her mother had a tradition of going to a nearby cemetery on Christmas Eve to put candles on all the graves. This year, with Ruthie in that cemetery, her mother was too sad to do it. But, as she was driving by the cemetery that night, she noticed little flames dotting the graveyard.

She called Dreher, sobbing. “You’ve got to find out who did this for us. … Whoever it is, they will never know what this meant to me. They will never, ever know.”

It turns out that it was a neighbor named Susan Harvey Wymore, who had learned that Ruthie’s mother would be unable to light the cemetery and did it for her.

Dreher is a writer for The American Conservative and is part of a communitarian conservative tradition that goes back to thinkers like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. Forty years ago, Kirk led one of the two great poles of conservatism. It existed in creative tension with the other great pole, Milton Friedman’s free-market philosophy.

In recent decades, the communitarian conservatism has become less popular while the market conservatism dominates. But that doesn’t make Kirk’s insights into small towns, traditions and community any less true, as Rod Dreher so powerfully rediscovered.

And, as we ALL know, only Republicans live in small towns or give a shit about community.  Bobo is SUCH an asshole.  By the way — the places where Dreher has plied his trade, which Bobo chose not to identify in his opening graf, include The Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, National Review and the John Templeton Foundation.  Feh.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.

Unfortunately, in late 2010 and early 2011, politicians and policy makers in much of the Western world believed that they knew better, that we should focus on deficits, not jobs, even though our economies had barely begun to recover from the slump that followed the financial crisis. And by acting on that anti-Keynesian belief, they ended up proving Keynes right all over again.

In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash.

So the real test of Keynesian economics hasn’t come from the half-hearted efforts of the U.S. federal government to boost the economy, which were largely offset by cuts at the state and local levels. It has, instead, come from European nations like Greece and Ireland that had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans — and have suffered Depression-level economic slumps, with real G.D.P. in both countries down by double digits.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the ideology that dominates much of our political discourse. In March 2011, the Republican staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy.” It ridiculed concerns that cutting spending in a slump would worsen that slump, arguing that spending cuts would improve consumer and business confidence, and that this might well lead to faster, not slower, growth.

They should have known better even at the time: the alleged historical examples of “expansionary austerity” they used to make their case had already been thoroughly debunked. And there was also the embarrassing fact that many on the right had prematurely declared Ireland a success story, demonstrating the virtues of spending cuts, in mid-2010, only to see the Irish slump deepen and whatever confidence investors might have felt evaporate.

Amazingly, by the way, it happened all over again this year. There were widespread proclamations that Ireland had turned the corner, proving that austerity works — and then the numbers came in, and they were as dismal as before.

Yet the insistence on immediate spending cuts continued to dominate the political landscape, with malign effects on the U.S. economy. True, there weren’t major new austerity measures at the federal level, but there was a lot of “passive” austerity as the Obama stimulus faded out and cash-strapped state and local governments continued to cut.

Now, you could argue that Greece and Ireland had no choice about imposing austerity, or, at any rate, no choices other than defaulting on their debts and leaving the euro. But another lesson of 2011 was that America did and does have a choice; Washington may be obsessed with the deficit, but financial markets are, if anything, signaling that we should borrow more.

Again, this wasn’t supposed to happen. We entered 2011 amid dire warnings about a Greek-style debt crisis that would happen as soon as the Federal Reserve stopped buying bonds, or the rating agencies ended our triple-A status, or the superdupercommittee failed to reach a deal, or something. But the Fed ended its bond-purchase program in June; Standard & Poor’s downgraded America in August; the supercommittee deadlocked in November; and U.S. borrowing costs just kept falling. In fact, at this point, inflation-protected U.S. bonds pay negative interest: investors are willing to pay America to hold their money.

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.

The good news, such as it is, is that President Obama has finally gone back to fighting against premature austerity — and he seems to be winning the political battle. And one of these years we might actually end up taking Keynes’s advice, which is every bit as valid now as it was 75 years ago.

As an aside, I find it interesting that all of a sudden this morning there are no comments to the columnist’s pages.  It will be interesting to find out if this was just a fluke, or whether we’re no longer allowed to beat Bobo with sticks…

Collins, solo

Mr. Kristof is off today.  Ms. Collins says we should “Feel Free to Ignore Iowa.”  She says the first-in-the-nation caucuses are only a few days away! Frankly, people, it will be the first big nonevent of 2012.  Here she is:

Only days until the Iowa caucuses! Can you believe it? Less than 8,000 minutes to go!

Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that the Iowa caucuses are really ridiculous.

Not Iowa itself, which is a lovely place despite being the only state besides Mississippi to never have elected a woman as governor or a member of Congress. (See if you can get to work on that, Iowa.) It has many things to recommend, including the Iowa State Fair, which, in my opinion, really sets the planetary pace when it comes to butter sculptures.

And Iowans are extremely nice people. I still have fond memories of the hot dog salesman at an aluminum-siding factory in Grinnell who rescued me from the Steve Forbes for President bus during a snowstorm.

Iowa does have terrible winters. Which limits participation in the caucuses, where attendance is already restricted to registered voters who are prepared to show up for a neighborhood meeting at 7 p.m. on Jan. 3.

The Republicans, who are really the only game in town this year, hope to get more than 100,000 participants. That is approximately the number of people who go to Michigan Stadium to watch the Wolverines play football. However, the Wolverines’ fans do not get free cookies.

Maybe the Republicans will hit 150,000! That is about the same number of people in Pomona, Calif. Imagine your reaction to seeing a story saying that a plurality of people in Pomona, Calif., thought Newt Gingrich would be the best G.O.P. presidential candidate. Would you say, “Wow! I guess Newt is now the de facto front-runner?” Possibly not.

Iowa caucusgoers are supposed to be particularly committed citizens who can make informed choices because they’ve had an opportunity to personally meet and interact with the candidates. Some of that does happen. In 2008, at the Democratic caucus I attended in Des Moines, there was unusually high support for Bill Richardson, mostly from people who said he had been to their house.

“Caucuses tend to foster more grass-roots participation,” said Caroline Tolbert, a professor at the University of Iowa and author of “Why Iowa?” — a question we should all be asking ourselves.

But, this year, the major candidates haven’t even spent all that much time in Iowa. Until recently, Gingrich only showed up for book signings and the occasional brain science lecture. And Iowa is actually not very good at picking the ultimate winner. The theory is that its caucuses winnow the field, that if you can’t manage to come in at least fourth, you are presidential toast. (John McCain came in fourth in 2008, with the support of 15,500 Iowans. This is approximately the number of people who live on my block.)

It’s that fourth-place goal that has Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry staggering around the state trying to visit all 99 counties and eat at least one meal a day at a Pizza Ranch outlet. (Pizza Ranch is a Christian-based, Iowa-based chain that has found success in the conviction that pizza tastes best in a cowboy-themed setting.)

“We have a good plan, and people like us,” Santorum told The Des Moines Register this week. “I hear this all the time. They say, ‘We really like you. You are on my list. You are No. 2 or No. 3 or No. 1,’ and that is a good place to be.”

People, if you had spent the last year doing virtually nothing but visiting with small clumps of voters across the state of Iowa, would you be energized when somebody told you he had you No. 3 on the list? At this point, polls suggest that Santorum could come in anywhere from first to fifth. But he’s still like a kid who so desperately lusts after the most popular girl in the class that he is thrilled by being told he will be permitted to drive said girl and her date to the prom.

On Tuesday, our Iowa voters will go off to 1,774 local caucuses, most of which will be held somewhere other than the normal neighborhood polling place. Those who figure out where to go will have to sit and listen to speeches on behalf of all the candidates. Scratch anybody who was hoping to dash out of work during a coffee break.

History suggests that in some rural districts, the entire caucus will consist of one guy named Earl. History also suggests that the majority of the caucusgoers will be social conservatives, which is perhaps a clue as to why Rick Perry discovered this week that he was actually against abortion even in the case of rape or incest.

To summarize: On Tuesday, there will be a contest to select the preferred candidate of a small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican. The whole world will be watching. The cookies will be excellent.

Iowa — Idiots Out Walking Around.

Dowd, solo

The Moustache of Wisdom is off today, so MoDo has the floor to herself.  In “Kevin Warns Republicans” she says mirabile dictu! Kevin finds something to criticize in his own party.  I wonder if her brother Kevin is real, or whether he’s a creation she drags out from time to time to make a point.  Here she is:

We had two Christmas miracles this year. The first was that Kevin was there to celebrate his favorite holiday. After a random blood test last summer, my brother learned that he had a 20.3 centimeter malignant tumor in his kidney, struggling to burst out like the creature in “Alien.” With the guidance of the saintly Dr. Jerry Groopman, and the brilliance of the Sloan-Kettering surgical team — the exuberantly blunt Paul Russo, the mystically serene Manjit Bains and the calmly proficient Gerald Soff — Kevin survived to enjoy Christmas with his wife, Ellen, his three sons and his 15 crèches. I knew my favorite conservative was really sick when he stopped railing against the vast left-wing conspiracy. And I knew he was really well when he said he was ready to write his annual column. That’s when the second Christmas miracle occurred: Kevin actually has some critical things to say about Republicans. Here’s his political plum pudding:

It’s time for some sense and sensibility. With a field of nine candidates, the Republican product is too diluted. That’s the reason the polls have been so fluid. There are only two candidates with a chance to win the nomination: Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. The rest are sincere, nice people who “can’t light the candle,” as someone said of John Connally in 1980. You are excused. There’s only one who can beat Barack Obama. Romney was a governor and a businessman, and we will need that kind of expertise to pull us out of the president’s famous ditch. Newt is too volatile and has too much baggage.

In October, I joked that the Republicans should suspend their campaigns since the president was sinking so fast on his own. I thought David Axelrod was on the verge of urging the president to give a Jimmy Carter malaise speech. Scheduling 16 major debates in states that thirst to be first was an unforced error by the G.O.P. I kept waiting to see Kim Kardashian and Paula Abdul as moderators with Lady Gaga performing at halftime. Trust me, everything you need to know from the candidates can fit into four debates. What genius decided to take the focus away from the president and his dismal record? (I know the threshold for genius has been lowered. I have heard both Paul Begala and Tim Geithner called geniuses).

First of all, the Republican primary voter will not decide the general election. The independent voters, who deserted the Democrats in droves in the midterm elections and are poised to do so again, will be the determining factor. Republicans should be focused on who can win the general election, not who has the most muscular conservative DNA.

Second, let’s get the conversation back to the president and his job performance. It will be easy to benchmark since he left office after two years and nine months to campaign full time for the same job but this time as the Republican populist Teddy Roosevelt.

Third, in a game of chess, you do not try to capture the king on every move. You accumulate smaller victories with other pieces until the king is defenseless. The House voting down the payroll tax cut after Obama would have been forced to show his hand on the XL oil pipeline was a mistake. If you see the president’s approval rating going up, blame the Republican strategy.

The Tea Party has many strong points: fiscal sanity, orderly demonstrations and a penchant for cleanliness that the Occupy Wall Street group should try to emulate. But they must understand they are part of the Republican defense against the president. They cannot run around like the Knights Templar ready to die for their ideals. They compared themselves to the soldiers in “Braveheart.” Did any of them see the end of that movie? I recommend they watch “Patton” and adopt his credo, “Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

There are still plenty of things to be grateful for this holiday season: Nancy Pelosi breaking new ground with her befuddled appearance on “60 Minutes”; Eric Holder threatening to bring suit against states requiring a photo ID to vote (maybe we can text in unlimited votes like “American Idol”); Vice President Biden suggesting in 2009 that Jon Corzine should be the president’s go-to guy to get us out of the ditch (I guess Bernie Madoff wasn’t available) and contending that the Taliban is not our enemy; Jay Carney growing nearly as annoying as Robert Gibbs.

A lot is at stake in the next election: the Supreme Court, federal regulations on business, the American way of life. We should look at Europe (which the president so greatly admires) and ask if we want that to happen to us. In five years, it will be too late. If you think you’re better off now than you were four years ago, be sure to order “La Dolce Vita” and “The Fall of the Roman Empire” from Netflix.

I guess Kevin is real…  And there is a deep, deep streak of jackassery in the Dowd family.

Brooks and Nocera

Bobo has decided to tell us all about “Midlife Crisis Economics.”  He says the Obama administration used to like to compare today’s problems to those that led to the Great Depression. But they differ in many ways.  Well, to be truthful today’s problems may be more like the Panic of 1893, that followed The Gilded Age…  Mr. Nocera, in “Glass’s Road to Redemption,” says after years of making amends for his former career as a fabulist at The New Republic, Stephen Glass has earned the right to practice law.  Here’s Bobo:

The members of the Obama administration have many fine talents, but making adept historical analogies may not be among them.

When the administration came to office in the depths of the financial crisis, many of its leading figures concluded that the moment was analogous to the Great Depression. They read books about the New Deal and sought to learn from F.D.R.

But, in the 1930s, people genuinely looked to government to ease their fears and restore their confidence. Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.

According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections.

Members of the administration have now dropped the New Deal parallels. But they have started making analogies between this era and the progressive era around the turn of the 20th century.

Again, there are superficial similarities. Then, as now, we are seeing great concentrations of wealth, especially at the top. Then, as now, the professional class of lawyers, teachers and journalists seems to feel as if it has the upper hand in its status war against the business class of executives and financiers.

But these superficial similarities are outweighed by vast differences.

First, the underlying economic situations are very different. A century ago, the American economy was a vibrant jobs machine. Industrialization was volatile and cruel, but it produced millions of new jobs, sucking labor in from the countryside and from overseas.

Today’s economy is not a jobs machine and lacks that bursting vibrancy. The rate of new business start-ups was declining even before the 2008 financial crisis. Companies are finding that they can get by with fewer workers. As President Obama has observed, factories that used to employ 1,000 workers can now be even more productive with less than 100.

Moreover, the information economy widens inequality for deep and varied reasons that were unknown a century ago. Inequality is growing in nearly every developed country. According to a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, over the past 30 years, inequality in Sweden, Germany, Israel, Finland and New Zealand has grown as fast or faster than inequality in the United States, even though these countries have very different welfare systems.

In the progressive era, the economy was in its adolescence and the task was to control it. Today the economy is middle-aged; the task is to rejuvenate it.

Second, the governmental challenge is very different today than it was in the progressive era. Back then, government was small and there were few worker safety regulations. The problem was a lack of institutions. Today, government is large, and there is a thicket of regulations, torts and legal encumbrances. The problem is not a lack of institutions; it’s a lack of institutional effectiveness.

The United States spends far more on education than any other nation, with paltry results. It spends far more on health care, again, with paltry results. It spends so much on poverty programs that if we just took that money and handed poor people checks, we would virtually eliminate poverty overnight. In the progressive era, the task was to build programs; today the task is to reform existing ones.

Third, the moral culture of the nation is very different. The progressive era still had a Victorian culture, with its rectitude and restrictions. Back then, there was a moral horror at the thought of debt. No matter how bad the economic problems became, progressive-era politicians did not impose huge debt burdens on their children. That ethos is clearly gone.

In the progressive era, there was an understanding that men who impregnated women should marry them. It didn’t always work in practice, but that was the strong social norm. Today, that norm has dissolved. Forty percent of American children are born out of wedlock. This sentences the U.S. to another generation of widening inequality and slower human capital development.

One hundred years ago, we had libertarian economics but conservative values. Today we have oligarchic economics and libertarian moral values — a bad combination.

In sum, in the progressive era, the country was young and vibrant. The job was to impose economic order. Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated. Interest groups have emerged to protect the status quo. The job is to restore old disciplines, strip away decaying structures and reform the welfare state. The country needs a productive midlife crisis.

The progressive era is not a model; it is a foil. It provides a contrast and shows us what we really need to do.

Bobo, sweetie, the Progressive Era followed the Panic of 1893, and no matter how you do math the Great Depression wasn’t 100 years ago.  Don’t try historical analogies — you suck at them.  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

Early next week, a lawyer will file a brief with the California State Supreme Court, arguing that his client has the good moral character to be admitted to the California Bar. His client is Stephen Glass.

Yes, that Stephen Glass.

He is 39 now, nearly 14 years removed from the events that made him infamous. You remember those events, don’t you? In his early 20s, as a staff writer for The New Republic, Glass committed one of the most egregious journalistic hoaxes of all time, writing an astonishing 42 articles over a two-and-a-half-year span that were either partially or entirely fabricated. For The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Harper’s and others, he turned in articles that had made-up characters, invented dialogue and imaginary scenes. When the truth came out, it was a huge scandal; Glass’s journalism career was, quite properly, destroyed.

But should the rest of his life also be destroyed? That, apparently, is the view of the Committee of Bar Examiners, which vets bar applicants for the State Bar of California. Given how Glass has turned his life around (more about that in a minute), it is a little hard to understand its resistance. So far, the committee has lost in two separate judicial proceedings, but it continues to press on, making this last-ditch appeal to the California State Supreme Court. I e-mailed John P. McNicholas III, the committee chairman, to ask him why his group was being so petty and vindictive. He hasn’t written me back.

Glass wouldn’t speak to me for this column either. But the record that was assembled during the first judicial proceeding, which took place in the spring of 2010, sends a powerful, and even uplifting, message about how a troubled soul can turn his life around. Enrolled in Georgetown University Law Center when the scandal broke, Glass was unhireable as a lawyer when he got his degree. A sympathetic professor, Susan Low Bloch, helped him land a clerkship with a District of Columbia judge. Then he moved to New York where he passed the bar but withdrew his application when he learned he was going to be turned down. To support himself, he wrote a fictional account of his misdeeds. He underwent intensive psychotherapy and sought out those whom he had wronged to apologize. He fell in love, moved with her to California and took — and passed — the California Bar exam.

Once again, no one would hire him. But one lawyer, Paul Zuckerman, after first tossing his résumé into the trash, fished it out. “Maybe I should give this guy a second chance,” he later said he thought, and he brought Glass on as a law clerk. During the judicial proceeding, Zuckerman described Glass as one of the finest people he’s ever hired.

Zuckerman wasn’t alone. In all, 22 witnesses testified to Glass’s good character, including Professor Bloch, the judge he had clerked for and, most remarkably, Martin Peretz, who was the sole owner of The New Republic when Glass fabricated his stories and was deeply embarrassed by the scandal. “I always thought redemption was within his means because he was fundamentally a good kid,” Peretz told me.

Bloch pointed out that “everyone who has interacted with him since the scandal is on his side.” His only enemies are those who remain mired in the past, still angered by what he did. None of them have had any serious contact with him in the subsequent 14 years. Not long ago, Jack Shafer, the media critic for Reuters, wrote a scathing article about Glass’s effort to become a lawyer, which essentially accused him of being a whiny excuse-maker — just like he was back then. To my mind, that’s a serious misreading of the testimony, in which Glass seems to go out of his way to not make excuses for what he did.

At one point, Glass said that the scandal was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Yet he quickly added that it was also the best thing that ever happened to him, because it forced him to face up to his failings. This he has clearly done. People who know him tell me that he is “relentlessly honest.” Having once been a pathological liar, he now won’t tell even the tiniest of white lies.

We like to tell ourselves that we believe in the power of redemption. People can make mistakes — even big mistakes — and, in time, recover from them. Stephen Glass is someone who made a big mistake. The infamy of his misdeeds will follow him forever. But if anyone can be said to have redeemed himself by his subsequent actions, it is Glass.

It could be up to two years before his case is decided by the State Supreme Court, I hear. Here’s hoping he wins. Yes, he once did terrible things as a journalist. But that was a long time ago. The California Bar should be so lucky as to have him as a member.

 

Keller and Krugman

In “Putin’s Children” Mr. Keller has a question:  How many generations does it take to grow a democracy?  Prof. Krugman, in “Springtime for Toxics,” says the E.P.A. just did a very good thing in releasing new rules on mercury and air toxics for power plants. And, of course, Republicans are furious.  Here’s Mr. Keller:

In the waning days of the Soviet Union, I spent a lot of time in a cluster of apartment towers along the Moscow River, contemplating what seemed to me an essential question about the future of our cold-war adversary: Could Russia grow an authentic middle class? Not a privileged class, favored wards of the state, but independent achievers who would be the engine and the evidence of upward mobility.

The place on the river was called a youth living complex, the product of a classically harebrained Young Communist League scheme to ease a housing shortage. Young professionals at important state enterprises — in this case mainly scientists from a nuclear research institute and engineers from the plant that manufactured the Russian version of the space shuttle — were given months away from their jobs to labor as an overeducated communal construction crew. Each family put in hundreds of hours pouring concrete and installing drywall, and then moved into a precious new apartment. The theory was that, liberated from sharing their parents’ overcrowded flats, forged into a contented new community, they would devote themselves even more loyally to their high-priority jobs.

But this was 1991, a time of possibilities. Many of the families in my little microcosm moved into their new homes in the youth living complex “Atom” and promptly quit their state jobs to join the new private sector. I followed a sample of Atom families as they tried to figure out the novelty of a self-reliant life.

(Meanwhile one of their contemporaries, Vladimir Putin, was winding up his own formative experience in the ultimate bastion of the state, the K.G.B. Colonel Putin’s last assignment for the spy agency was conducting surveillance on students at Leningrad State University.)

My favorite Atom dweller was a brawny, idealistic engineer named Igor. While most new capitalists practiced some form of wheeling and dealing — importing jeans, computers, rock albums — Igor was one of the few who had set out to make it as a private manufacturer. His plan was brilliant. People were suddenly making money, but they regarded the new private banks with suspicion. Igor retooled an old factory to produce high-quality safes.

For Russia, it was a time of confused quest, a longing to be normalniye lyudi — normal people. Thousands, including a contingent from Atom, had poured into the streets to face down an attempted coup by hard-liners, and to celebrate their newfound power. But then what? Everything from the rules of the marketplace to the meaning of life had to be improvised on the still-festering ruins of a monstrous failed experiment. Rackets abounded. Mystics and healers and hypnotists attracted huge crowds. In their search for something to believe in, Atom residents invited a priest to give weekly instruction on their closed-circuit TV channel. One resident, seeking a more secular kind of fulfillment, hosted a free-love commune.

Flash forward a decade, halfway to the present. The new Russia was still a work in progress. That obscure K.G.B. colonel was a popular president. Putin provided prosperity enough, a paternalistic sense of order and a reassuring narrative of national pride. The price — unless you represented a real threat to the regime, in which case the price could be very high indeed — was bearable: an unspoken acceptance of the way things are, a small surrender of dignity. Shut up, get rich.

For many, the endearing confusion of the early ’90s had given way to disillusionment. Robin Hessman’s splendid documentary “My Perestroika,” released last year, follows five Moscow friends a little younger than my Atom focus group. The film captures the ambivalence of those who straddled the Soviet days and the new freedom. They live reasonably well, they are free to say what they think, but something, some larger purpose, is missing. “You know,” says Borya, a high school history teacher, who had been at the barricades in 1991, “the ideals that burned in a person’s heart in the early ’90s, they were profaned, and there was nothing left to fight for.”

At Atom, the closed-circuit priest was gone, and a shiny new Reebok health club had been installed, with tanning beds and rows of elliptical machines, a haven of self-improvement in a land where the actuarial charts had always belonged to vodka and tobacco. The Atom grade school had dropped many of its experimental programs (and its free-thinking principal) in favor of a cram-for-success curriculum. My microcosm had scattered. A few had left for Canada, or Israel, or the U.S. A former Young Communist League apparatchik, who had been so officious at meetings of the housing complex in its early days, had found his natural calling in the cynical world of arms dealing.

Igor the safe-maker and his wife, Tanya, had struggled to learn the business ropes in a country that had no business ropes. Their company expanded and prospered. They moved to a bigger apartment, bequeathing the Atom unit to a daughter and son-in-law. Igor drove a Mercedes S.U.V. But they were uneasy with the soul-sucking consumerism and the corruption around them. Their great consolation was that their two daughters had chosen cultural accomplishment over commercial ambition — Maria as a painter of religious icons, Katya as a classical pianist.

Flash forward another decade. When tens of thousands massed in Moscow this month to protest questionable parliamentary elections and Putin’s high-handed manner, the news reports characterized it as a revolt of the middle class. My first thought was to track down Igor, my model new middle-classnik.

He and Tanya live in London now. After 20 years of battling bureaucratic flimflam, corruption and the entitlement mentality of his own work force, he has given up on Russia, sold his business, and, at age 55, he is pursuing a master’s degree in design. He has little regard for politics or politicians, never had, but he watched the Moscow protests on the Internet and was pleased with what he saw. In the throngs — along with some diehards who still want to turn the clock back to despotism, and some liberals whose hopes of 20 years ago have been rekindled — Igor saw something that made him proud: educated, young professionals, apparently normalniye lyudi. Among them, he told me, was his daughter Maria.

A Russian journalist has dubbed them “the new angry ones.” They are successful, 30-ish urbanites, old enough to have sampled the wider world, too young to miss the comforting conformity of the Soviet experience, and too young to be afraid. They feel cheated and insulted by the Divine Right of Putin. They believe normal people deserve normal leaders.

It turns out that Russia grew a middle class, but that alone wasn’t enough to grow a democracy. For that, you need a generation born innocent. Borya, the disenchanted teacher from “My Perestroika,” told the filmmaker the other day that, no, he didn’t go to the latest protests. But his students did.

Putin seems clueless in his disdain, dismissing the protesters as tools of America, sneering that the white ribbons they wore resembled “condoms.” (When the throngs returned to the streets on Saturday, looking even more determined, the inevitable protest art featured Putin draped in a giant condom.)

It’s difficult to see yet a clear alternative to Putin. The contenders include a billionaire oligarch who is majority owner of the New Jersey Nets, Putin’s disenchanted former finance minister, a few old faces from 20 years ago, Communists, ultranationalists, reformers. Absent a consensus opposition leader, the odds are that Putin will prevail for another round. But Igor’s daughter and Borya’s students, the children of Putin’s own generation, are the light at the end of the long Soviet tunnel. Perhaps the lesson for the other new democracies being born around the globe is, it takes time: you can take people out of the system, but it’s not so easy to take the system out of the people.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Here’s what I wanted for Christmas: something that would make us both healthier and richer. And since I was just making a wish, why not ask that Americans get smarter, too?

Surprise: I got my wish, in the form of new Environmental Protection Agency standards on mercury and air toxics for power plants. These rules are long overdue: we were supposed to start regulating mercury more than 20 years ago. But the rules are finally here, and will deliver huge benefits at only modest cost.

So, naturally, Republicans are furious. But before I get to the politics, let’s talk about what a good thing the E.P.A. just did.

As far as I can tell, even opponents of environmental regulation admit that mercury is nasty stuff. It’s a potent neurotoxicant: the expression “mad as a hatter” emerged in the 19th century because hat makers of the time treated fur with mercury compounds, and often suffered nerve and mental damage as a result.

Hat makers no longer use mercury (and who wears hats these days?), but a lot of mercury gets into the atmosphere from old coal-burning power plants that lack modern pollution controls. From there it gets into the water, where microbes turn it into methylmercury, which builds up in fish. And what happens then? The E.P.A. explains: “Methylmercury exposure is a particular concern for women of childbearing age, unborn babies and young children, because studies have linked high levels of methylmercury to damage to the developing nervous system, which can impair children’s ability to think and learn.”

That sort of sounds like something we should regulate, doesn’t it?

The new rules would also have the effect of reducing fine particle pollution, which is a known source of many health problems, from asthma to heart attacks. In fact, the benefits of reduced fine particle pollution account for most of the quantifiable gains from the new rules. The key word here is “quantifiable”: E.P.A.’s cost-benefit analysis only considers one benefit of mercury regulation, the reduced loss in future wages for children whose I.Q.’s are damaged by eating fish caught by freshwater anglers. There are without doubt many other benefits to cutting mercury emissions, but at this point the agency doesn’t know how to put a dollar figure on those benefits.

Even so, the payoff to the new rules is huge: up to $90 billion a year in benefits compared with around $10 billion a year of costs in the form of slightly higher electricity prices. This is, as David Roberts of Grist says, a very big deal.

And it’s a deal Republicans very much want to kill.

With everything else that has been going on in U.S. politics recently, the G.O.P.’s radical anti-environmental turn hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. But something remarkable has happened on this front. Only a few years ago, it seemed possible to be both a Republican in good standing and a serious environmentalist; during the 2008 campaign John McCain warned of the dangers of global warming and proposed a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Today, however, the party line is that we must not only avoid any new environmental regulations but roll back the protection we already have.

And I’m not exaggerating: during the fight over the debt ceiling, Republicans tried to attach riders that, as Time magazine put it, would essentially have blocked the E.P.A. and the Interior Department from doing their jobs.

Oh, by the way, you may have heard reports to the effect that Jon Huntsman is different. And he did indeed once say: “Conservation is conservative. I’m not ashamed to be a conservationist.” Never mind: he, too, has been assimilated by the anti-environmental Borg, denouncing the E.P.A.’s “regulatory reign of terror,” and predicting that the new rules will cause blackouts by next summer, which would be a neat trick considering that the rules won’t even have taken effect yet.

More generally, whenever you hear dire predictions about the effects of pollution regulation, you should know that special interests always make such predictions, and are always wrong. For example, power companies claimed that rules on acid rain would disrupt electricity supply and lead to soaring rates; none of that happened, and the acid rain program has become a shining example of how environmentalism and economic growth can go hand in hand.

But again, never mind: mindless opposition to “job killing” regulations is now part of what it means to be a Republican. And I have to admit that this puts something of a damper on my mood: the E.P.A. has just done a very good thing, but if a Republican — any Republican — wins next year’s election, he or she will surely try to undo this good work.

Still, for now at least, those who care about the health of their fellow citizens, and especially of the nation’s children, have something to celebrate.

 

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd and Bruni

Mr. Kristof and The Moustache of Wisdom are off today.  The Grinch has brought us The Pasty Little Putz, nattering on about “The Cratchit Tax Credit.”  He suggests that what a stressed-out mom and dad really want for Christmas is some help.  Before you start thinking that he may have come to his senses let me tell you that as an example of someone with sterling ideas he suggests Ramesh Ponnuru.  In “A Victorian Christmas” MoDo says long before Newt Gingrich’s counterfactual novels and Dickensian proposals, Dickens himself was brilliantly exploring “what ifs” and class inequities.  In “Silent Night?  Not With Us” Mr. Bruni says that what says Christmas to him is a chorus of voices, all talking at once.  Here’s The Putz:

At Christmastime, we like to tell stories about resilient families. The Cratchits of “A Christmas Carol,” for instance, who subsist on love, hope and 15 shillings a week. The Baileys of Bedford Falls, who survive wars, bank runs and bankruptcies because they have friends, one another, and a guardian angel watching out for them. The first couple of the New Testament, who manage to cope with a supernatural pregnancy, a murderous king and the necessity of delivering a child in the bleak midwinter, half-out-of-doors and far from home.

These stories resonate in part because of how easily they could turn out differently. Not every Tiny Tim has Bob Cratchit as his father and a reformed Scrooge as his benefactor. Not every George Bailey realizes that he shouldn’t jump off the bridge when things look bleakest. And not every unexpectedly expectant mother has a St. Joseph standing by her.

Millions of Americans know this all too well, because the darker possibilities the Christmas stories hint at — divorce, abandonment, childhood suffering — are realities they have to live with every day. But that unhappy knowledge isn’t evenly distributed. In 21st-century America, the well-off and well-educated have the best odds of enjoying the domestic stability that the Yuletide stories celebrate, while the very people who most need resilient families — the Cratchits and Baileys, the working poor and the hard-pressed middle class — are less and less likely to have them.

This domestic dissolution plays a role in a host of socioeconomic ills: stagnating blue-collar wages, weakening upward mobility, stalling high school graduation rates, even the increase in juvenile obesity and diabetes. But it isn’t an issue that politicians of either party are particularly comfortable addressing. Liberals worry about seeming paternalistic and judgmental; conservatives recoil from the idea of increasing the government’s role in the most intimate of spheres. Thus America has a crisis of family life, but no family policy to speak of.

To some extent, the nervous politicians are right. There is no government program that can guarantee a happy childhood or a devoted spouse. (If you replaced Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the Angel Gabriel of the Gospels with a Health and Human Services bureaucrat, those stories would probably have a much grimmer ending.)

But public policy can still make a difference in the way we organize our private lives, and public institutions should be designed with existing patterns of social life in mind. Where mating and marrying are concerned, both our policies and our institutions are increasingly out of date: they’re built for a world in which two-parent, single-breadwinner families were a near-universal norm, and they don’t take enough account of the mass entrance of women into the work force, or the mounting economic pressures on the American family.

These pressures are strongest when children are young — the time when sustained parental attention can make the biggest difference to health, intelligence and life outcomes, but also the time when the juggling act for a two-earner (to say nothing of a single-parent) household is the most difficult and frenetic.

Not coincidentally, this is the period when many European nations have guaranteed extended parental leave: not the 12 weeks of unpaid time off in the Family and Medical Leave Act that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993, but a more robust span that often covers the entire first year of a child’s life. The attractions of this model inspired the Fox News anchor (and mother of two) Megyn Kelly, not normally a fan of government regulation, to accuse the United States of being “in the Dark Ages when it comes to maternity leave.”

But there are costs to the European approach. Government-guaranteed leave often gives less financial relief to a mother or father who is already at home full time. And Europe’s overall web of regulations and job protections makes the labor market more rigid and less accommodating to part-time work — which is the kind of work that mothers, especially, tend to want. (A recent survey of American parents found that 58 percent of married women with children preferred part-time to full-time work, compared with 20 percent of husbands.)

A more flexible alternative, championed by the conservative writers Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert Stein, would change the way we tax families, dramatically expanding the child tax credit in order to ease the burden on parents with young children. Their proposal would leave contemporary Baileys and Cratchits with more disposable income and more options without favoring one approach to parenting over another.

Obviously, neither generous parental leave nor an expanded child tax credit is a magic bullet for the problem of family breakdown. But if Democrats were championing the first idea and Republicans were championing the second, we would at least have the beginnings of a healthy conversation about family policy, instead of the conspicuous silence that surrounds the country’s biggest social crisis. And it’s hard to imagine a policy debate that’s better suited to the season.

The concept of having a healthy conversation with the current crop of Republicans goes beyond risible…  Here’s MoDo:

At the end of his life, Charles Dickens did not have great expectations for Christmas.

He had separated from his wife, describing his marriage as “blighted and wasted.” His mistress was not around. He was disappointed that his sons lacked his ambition. His final Christmas, he wrote a colleague, was painful and miserable.

“The Inimitable,” as he had christened himself when he was young and celebrated, was drained from traveling to give paid readings and suffering from such severe gout that he could not write clearly or walk well. He was confined to bed all Christmas Day and through dinner, bleak in his house.

Literature’s answer to Santa Claus, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes in “Becoming Dickens,” had always gravitated to the holiday.

“Christmas was always a time which in our home was looked forward to with eagerness and delight,” his daughter Mamie said.

Dickens would dance and play the conjurer. “My father was always at his best, a splendid host, bright and jolly as a boy and throwing his heart and soul into everything,” recalled his son Henry.

Douglas-Fairhurst wonders if this “inventor of Christmas” might have developed his “ruthless” determination to enjoy the day because of the traumatic year he spent as a child working in a rat-infested shoe-polish warehouse in London after his father went to prison for debts. Did England’s most famous novelist need “to recreate his childhood as it should have been rather than as it was?”

The biographer notes that Dickens, in his fiction, “rarely describes a family Christmas without showing how vulnerable it is to being broken apart by a more miserable alternative. In ‘Great Expectations’ it is the soldiers who burst into Pip’s home on Christmas Day, saving him from a dinner in which the only highlight is Joe slopping extra spoonfuls of gravy onto his plate. In ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood,’ the young hero goes missing on Christmas Eve, leaving behind several clues that he had been murdered by his uncle. Saddest of all, in ‘A Christmas Carol,’ Scrooge is forced by the Ghost of Christmas Past to observe his boyhood self left behind at school, and weeps ‘to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.’ ”

Douglas-Fairhurst points out that Dickens’s fiction teems with ifs, just-supposes and alternative scenarios, “what might have been and what was not.” He even wrote two different endings for “Great Expectations,” one where Estella and Pip don’t end up together and one where they seem to.

“Pause you,” Pip says, “and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

Dickens was rescued from the warehouse and sent back to school when his father got out of prison and wangled a Navy pension. But that year drove home to him how frighteningly random fate can be.

“I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond,” he once said.

His need to control his fate may have led to a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He routinely rearranged the furniture in hotel rooms, acknowledging that his “love of order” was “almost a disorder.”

Dickens — whose bicentenary will be celebrated on Feb. 7 — worked himself to death at 58, but he always feared obscurity was lurking.

In October 1843, he had the idea for “A Christmas Carol.” As Claire Tomalin writes in another new book, “Charles Dickens: A Life,” he told a friend “he had composed it in his head, weeping and laughing and weeping again” as he walked around London at night.

He had visited one of the “ragged schools,” set up in poor parts of London by volunteer teachers to educate homeless, starving and disabled pupils, and the novella, published that December, was his screed about the indifference of the rich toward those less fortunate.

Scrooge gets redeemed from an alternate life as a misanthrope, and Tiny Tim is saved from death. But two “wolfish” children, a boy named Ignorance and a girl named Want, are not rescued, but rather left to haunt readers’ consciences.

In his 1851 short story “What Christmas Is As We Grow Older,” Dickens makes the case that the holiday is the time to “bear witness” to our parallel lives, our “old aspirations,” “old projects” and “old loves.”

“Welcome, alike what has been, and what never was, and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly,” he wrote.

Maybe, he suggests, you end up better off without that “priceless pearl” who does not return your love. Maybe you don’t have to suppress the memory of deceased loved ones.

“Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you!” he wrote. “You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!”

Now here’s Mr. Bruni:

Pivoting from a life less loud into all the talk at my family’s Christmas gathering is like stepping off a plane from the wintry north into the heat of the tropics. I’m shocked for a second or two. Disoriented for several more. Then warmed and thrilled. Those are the feelings that last.

My brother Mark is talking, his thunderous voice scaled to be heard above the din. My brother Harry is talking, with even more force, to be heard above Mark. My sister, Adelle, and I can’t precisely match their volume and don’t care to try, but we have patience, determination. We wait for some slack between syllables — for little cracks in the great wall of talk — and shimmy in. We’ve got plenty to say ourselves.

Everyone does, my father and my siblings-in-law and my 11 nieces and nephews, except perhaps the one or two going through a quiet phase, which will end. It has to. In my family talking is like breathing, necessary for survival.

At the high point of this particular Christmas weekend there will be 19 of us under one roof — Harry’s — and we’ll make sound enough for double or triple that number. It’s fortunate that the houses in his suburb are set far apart. Otherwise neighbors might complain.

Not all families are like ours. I’ve noticed. In a restaurant just the other night, I observed a young man and two older people who were almost certainly his parents let minutes go by without a word spoken. They weren’t eating then, or absorbed in iPhones or BlackBerrys, and they didn’t seem to be stewing.

Had they somehow run out of things to say? Or was this an elective lull, a restorative pause that gave them more comfort than conversation? I didn’t know what to make of them and had to force myself to stop staring. They were that exotic to me.

And they made me realize that the part of Christmas I most look forward to isn’t the perfume of the tree, the overflow of food or our exchange of presents. It’s our chatter, copious and constant.

I have friends with storytelling skills vastly superior to Mark’s. He tends toward malapropism, using “dubious” as a compliment, and skips crucial details. But I’ve been listening to his inflections and cadences since they rose from the twin bed parallel to mine in our childhood home. None provide as powerful a reassurance that, for all that time alters or obliterates, there are threads of continuity. Some things stick and some people stay.

I have peers and colleagues with more considered assessments of what’s going on in Iowa or Egypt or some other part of the world than his or Dad’s or Harry’s or Adelle’s. But because I’ve been traveling my whole life with these four, their takes on the scenery interest me most. I know where they’re coming from and how they’ve evolved.

We talk about everything and nothing, devoting 15 minutes to a debate about what to call the odd shade of blue that an old house of ours was painted, 20 minutes to a discussion of the perfect martini. We talk over cards and over carbs, as soon as we wake up and until the moment we doze off, with the TV on and with the stereo playing. Talking is our default setting, and talking is our cardio.

I’ve been able to chart the growth of my nieces and nephews by their success at joining in. By age 4 or 5 they learn the ruse of seeming to be in distress as a way of stealing the microphone from whoever has been monopolizing it. By 6 or 7 they’re bold enough to try to interrupt outright. And by 11 or 12 they have the lung power to accomplish it. We get louder all the time.

We talk about the person who just left the room and then about the fact that we really shouldn’t do that and then about the need to say everything that needs saying before the person returns. And sometimes we talk too much, letting ancient grievances resurface or minor differences of opinion become major disputes. We needle. We provoke.

 

But even as we do, I understand that it’s not so terrible — that it is, in its way, another reflection of the stock we put in one another’s reactions and judgments. The bad talk, like the good talk, affirms our closeness. All of it’s a measure — the best barometer I know — of how much we treasure the audience at hand and how determined we are not to waste it.

When I return home to my apartment, the quiet is epic, like the exaggerated hush in one of those movies about the end of the world. But the phone rings soon enough. After days of nonstop talking, someone in the family has something more that he or she just has to say.

 

Nocera and Collins

Mr. Nocera addresses “The Big Lie,” and says this is why the myth lives on that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started the housing crisis.  Ms. Collins has a question in “Remember the Alamo:”  What’s the last political lesson of 2011 to be learned from Congress passing a two-month extension of a popular tax cut?  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

So this is how the Big Lie works.

You begin with a hypothesis that has a certain surface plausibility. You find an ally whose background suggests that he’s an “expert”; out of thin air, he devises “data.” You write articles in sympathetic publications, repeating the data endlessly; in time, some of these publications make your cause their own. Like-minded congressmen pick up your mantra and invite you to testify at hearings.

You’re chosen for an investigative panel related to your topic. When other panel members, after inspecting your evidence, reject your thesis, you claim that they did so for ideological reasons. This, too, is repeated by your allies. Soon, the echo chamber you created drowns out dissenting views; even presidential candidates begin repeating the Big Lie.

Thus has Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis. His partner in crime is another A.E.I. scholar, Edward Pinto, who a very long time ago was Fannie’s chief credit officer. Pinto claims that as of June 2008, 27 million “risky” mortgages had been issued — “and a lion’s share was on Fannie and Freddie’s books,” as Wallison wrote recently. Never mind that his definition of “risky” is so all-encompassing that it includes mortgages with extremely low default rates as well as those with default rates nearing 30 percent. These latter mortgages were the ones created by the unholy alliance between subprime lenders and Wall Street. Pinto’s numbers are the Big Lie’s primary data point.

Allies? Start with Congressional Republicans, who have vowed to eliminate Fannie and Freddie — because, after all, they caused the crisis! Throw in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which, on Wednesday, published one of Wallison’s many articles repeating the Big Lie. It was followed on Thursday by an editorial in The Journal making essentially the same point. Repetition is all-important to spreading a Big Lie.

In Wallison’s article, he claimed that the charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against six former Fannie and Freddie executives last week prove him right. This is another favorite tactic: He takes a victory lap whenever events cast Fannie and Freddie in a bad light. Rarely, however, has his intellectual dishonesty been on such vivid display. In fact, what the S.E.C.’s allegations show is that the Big Lie is, well, a lie.

Central to Wallison’s argument is that the government’s effort to encourage homeownership among low- and moderate-income Americans is what led to the crisis. Fannie and Freddie, which were required by law to meet certain “affordable housing mandates,” were the primary instruments of that government policy; their need to meet those mandates, says Wallison, is what caused them to dive so heavily into those “risky” mortgages. And because they were powerful forces in the housing market, their entry into subprime dragged along the rest of the mortgage industry.

But the S.E.C. complaint makes almost no mention of affordable housing mandates. Instead, it charges that the executives were motivated to begin buying subprime mortgages — belatedly, contrary to the Big Lie — because they were trying to reclaim lost market share, and thus maximize their bonuses.

As Karen Petrou, a well-regarded bank analyst, puts it: “The S.E.C.’s facts paint a picture in which it wasn’t high-minded government mandates that did [Fannie and Freddie] wrong, but rather the monomaniacal focus of top management on market share.” As I wrote on Tuesday, Fannie and Freddie, rather than leading the housing industry astray, got into riskier mortgages only after the horse was out of the barn. They were becoming irrelevant in the most profitable segment of the market — subprime. And that they couldn’t abide.

(The S.E.C., I should note, had its own criticism of my column, saying that I conflated its allegations regarding the lack of disclosure of subprime mortgages, with an entirely different set of charges it has brought regarding disclosure of so-called Alt-A loans. I still maintain that the S.E.C.’s charges are weak, and that the agency brought the case in part for political reasons: how better to curry favor with House Republicans than to go after former Fannie and Freddie executives?)

Three years after the financial crisis, the country would be well served by a real debate about the role of government in housing. Should the government be helping low- and moderate-income Americans own their own homes? If so, is there an acceptable level of risk? If not, how do we recast the American dream?

To have that debate, though, we need a clear understanding of what role the government’s affordable-housing goals did — and did not — play in the crisis. And that is impossible as long as the Big Lie holds sway.

Which, now that I think of it, may be the whole point of the exercise.

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

Well, what a relief.

Just in time for the holidays, Congress showed us it can work in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation to pass a two-month extension of a popular tax cut. On its own! With perhaps a small amount of prodding.

The payroll tax cut bill zipped through Congress on Friday, approved by a Senate with only two members present and then passed by a near-empty House in a five-minute session. Then everybody went away. Why can’t they do this all the time?

The House Republicans, who had tried to hold up the bill out of principle, only to be pummeled by everyone from John McCain to The Wall Street Journal editorial page, hunkered down for a seriously sulky Christmas.

“In the end, House Republicans felt like they were re-enacting the Alamo, with no reinforcements and our friends shooting at us,” said Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, one of the leaders of the anti-two-month-tax-cut rebellion.

Texans have strong feelings about the Alamo, which is perhaps why whenever we get a Texan president we also get a war. But this did seem to be a strange comment. Was Brady saying that the Mexican soldiers who were shooting at the Alamo were actually friends who just wanted to get home in time for a previously scheduled fund-raising party?

Or maybe Brady was expressing the hope that, like the defenders of the Alamo, the House Republicans would be remembered as valiant warriors by a nation prepared to forget that, at the time of the battle, there were quite a lot of smart people who thought that having this fight was a really terrible idea.

But I digress.

Our question today is: What lesson can we draw from all these Congressional high jinks? That creating policy in two-month increments is a good plan? The boat has already sailed on that one. Practically everything Congress does these days is in two-month increments. They can’t even get it together to do a normal budget for the Federal Aviation Administration.

No, I think the moral here is pretty clear. We have talked for nearly three years about how the Tea Party is terrorizing the Republican establishment, until the old country-club, deal-making model was verging on extinction. But it now appears that if the new populist right does something that actually endangers the well-being of the old, entitled right, the establishment will rise up and slap those little whippersnappers down faster than you can say Mitch McConnell.

That goes for the presidential nomination, too. The minute it began to look as if Newt Gingrich might actually win, Mitt Romney was flooded with money and endorsements. One Friends of Romney Super PAC has purchased about $2.8 million in Iowa TV ads. Everywhere you look in Iowa, there’s an evil, demented Newt on the screen. You would think he’d been cast as the new head zombie in “The Walking Dead.”

Gingrich, in response, could only whine. His campaign’s highlight of the week may have been the announcement that it was creating a “Pets With Newt” Web site to highlight the candidate’s love of animals.

“Pets With Newt” may be an attempt to remind Iowans that Mitt Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped to the roof of the car. This is clearly a weak point in the Mitt armor, which came up this week in a Wall Street Journal interview with the candidate. “Uh — love my dog. That’s all I got for you,” Romney responded.

In the same interview, Romney continued his long-running attack on Barack Obama as an enemy of the successful, predicting that the president would wage “a campaign of envy and class warfare.” To do his part in tamping down the envy problem, Romney is resisting requests that he show us his tax returns. (“Never say never, but I don’t intend to do so.”)

This is the song of the Republican establishment, which hateshateshates class warfare. Like when the nonrich start asking why people who make millions of dollars in annual income can’t accept a modest levy to pay for that payroll tax cut.

They won’t, and the White House and Senate Democrats long ago conceded that point in the negotiations with nonradical Republicans, who wrung their hands and said there was simply nothing they could do because any tax on the wealthy would cause the crazy Republican base to go … crazy.

They’re helpless! However, when the crazy base threatens to create a stalemate that makes the entire Republican Party look bad, or when the crazy base seems inclined to nominate an unelectable presidential candidate, thwap! It turns out that there’s life in the old dog yet.

Just keep him off the car roof.

 

Brooks and Krugman

In “The Sidney Awards, Part II” Bobo says another batch of stellar essays are named some of the very best of 2011 and round out a golden year of long-form journalism.  Prof. Krugman looks at “The Post-Truth Campaign” and says Mitt Romney is blazing new trails in politics, where not telling the truth doesn’t seem to have any consequences.  Here’s Bobo:

Book tours are lonely, yet after spending four months promoting his novel “Freedom,” Jonathan Franzen went to an island 500 miles off the coast of Chile to be alone. He got at least one thing out of it, a profound essay in The New Yorker called “Farther Away,” the winner of another of this year’s Sidney Awards.

Franzen’s theme is solitude. He writes about Robinson Crusoe, the emergence of the novel, the potentially isolating effect of the Internet, and the suicide of his friend, the writer David Foster Wallace.

“He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself,” Franzen writes of his friend. “To prove once and for all that he truly didn’t deserve to be loved, it was necessary to betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best, by killing himself at home and making them firsthand witness to his act.”

Wallace emerges as a person who defined the extreme end of the isolation spectrum. Franzen is a bit down the scale, which explains what is best in his writing (his incredible powers of observation) and what is worst (his coolness toward his own characters). Many people with writerly personalities share these traits. You can also find a few of them, oddly, in politics.

Many of the best public-policy essays of the year tackled the interconnected subjects of inequality, wage stagnation and the loss of economic dynamism. If anybody wants a deeper understanding of these issues, I’d recommend a diverse mélange of articles: “The Broken Contract” by George Packer in Foreign Affairs; “The Inequality That Matters” by Tyler Cowen in The American Interest; “The Rise of the New Global Elite” by Chrystia Freeland in The Atlantic; and “Beyond the Welfare State” in National Affairs by Yuval Levin.

Each essay has insights that complicate the familiar partisan story lines. Cowen, for example, notes that income inequality is on the way up while the inequality of personal well-being is on the way down. One hundred years ago, John D. Rockefeller lived a very different life than the average wage earner, who worked six days a week, never took vacations and had no access to the world’s culture. Today, both you and Bill Gates enjoy the Internet, important new pharmaceuticals and good cheap food.

Anybody who is on antidepressants, or knows somebody who is, should read Marcia Angell’s series “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” from The New York Review of Books. Many of us have been taught that depression arises, in part, from chemical imbalances in the brain. Apparently, there is no evidence to support that.

Many of us thought that antidepressants work. Apparently, there is meager evidence to support that, too. They may work slightly better than placebos, Angell argues, but only under certain circumstances. They may also be permanently altering people’s brains and unintentionally fueling the plague of mental illness by causing episodes of mania, for example. I wouldn’t consider Angell the last word on this, but it’s certainly a viewpoint worth learning about.

Speaking about medicine gone wrong, Ethan Gutmann had a chilling piece in The Weekly Standard called “The Xinjiang Procedure” about organ harvesting in China. Prisoners are executed by firing squads and then, as they are slowly dying, doctors are rushed in to harvest livers and kidneys. Gutmann spoke with doctors compelled to perform this procedure:

“Even as Enver stitched the man back up — not internally, there was no point to that anymore, just so the body might look presentable — he sensed the man was still alive. ‘I am a killer,’ Enver screamed inwardly. He did not dare to look at the man’s face again.”

GQ magazine had a very good year with several fine articles. One of them was “The Movie Set That Ate Itself” by Michael Idov. It is about the movie director Ilya Khrzhanovsky who set out to make a film about Stalinism. He took over a Ukrainian city, amassed a cast of thousands and had them live in his own totalitarian city. They were forbidden to utter words or use technologies that did not exist in 1952. He redid the plumbing pipes so the toilets would sound like toilets from 1952. Actors and technicians had to answer to his every whim.

Hundreds left or were purged from the movie project, but many more were sucked in by the totalitarian mind-set, snitching on confederates, living in fear. Idov ends up denouncing his own photographer, after Khrzhanovsky turns against him.

Every year there are more outstanding essays than I have space to mention, but this year’s selection process has been the hardest. The Internet is everywhere, but this is a golden age of long-form journalism, and I could have chosen 50 pieces as good as the ones above. Click on The Browser, Longform.org and Arts & Letters Daily for links to more. Tweets are fun, but essays you’ll remember.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”

How would this statement be received? I believe, and hope, that it would be almost universally condemned, by liberals as well as conservatives. Mr. Romney did once say that corporations are people, but he didn’t mean it literally; he supports policies that would be good for corporations and the wealthy and bad for the middle class, but that’s a long way from saying that he wants to introduce feudalism.

But now consider what Mr. Romney actually said on Tuesday: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others.”

And in an interview the same day, Mr. Romney declared that the president “is going to put free enterprise on trial.”

This is every bit as bad as my imaginary Obama statement. Mr. Obama has never said anything suggesting that he holds such views, and, in fact, he goes out of his way to praise free enterprise and say that there’s nothing wrong with getting rich. His actual policy proposals do involve a rise in taxes on high-income Americans, but only back to their levels of the 1990s. And no matter how much the former Massachusetts governor may deny it, the Affordable Care Act established a national health system essentially identical to the one he himself established at a state level in 2006.

Over all, Mr. Obama’s positions on economic policy resemble those that moderate Republicans used to espouse. Yet Mr. Romney portrays the president as the second coming of Fidel Castro and seems confident that he will pay no price for making stuff up.

Welcome to post-truth politics.

Why does Mr. Romney think he can get away with this kind of thing? Well, he has already gotten away with a series of equally fraudulent attacks. In fact, he has based pretty much his whole campaign around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn’t done and believing things he doesn’t believe.

For example, in October Mr. Romney pledged that as president, “I will reverse President Obama’s massive defense cuts.” That line presumably plays well with Republican audiences, but what is he talking about? The defense budget has continued to grow steadily since Mr. Obama took office.

Then there’s Mr. Romney’s frequent suggestion that the president has gone around the world “apologizing for America.” This is a popular theme on the right — but the so-called Obama apology tour is a complete fabrication, assembled by taking quotes out of context.

As Greg Sargent of The Washington Post has pointed out, there’s a common theme to these whoppers and a number of other things Mr. Romney has said: the strategy is clearly to portray the president as a suspect character, someone who doesn’t share American values. And since Mr. Obama has done and said nothing to justify this portrait, Mr. Romney just invents stuff to make his case.

But won’t there be some blowback? Won’t Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I’m afraid he may be right.

Oh, Mr. Romney will probably be called on some falsehoods. But, if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be “balanced,” which means that every time they point out that a Republican lied they have to match it with a comparable accusation against a Democrat — even if what the Democrat said was actually true or, at worst, a minor misstatement.

This isn’t an abstract speculation. Politifact, the project that is supposed to enforce truth in politics, has declared Democratic claims that Republicans voted to end Medicare its “Lie of the Year.” It did so even though Republicans did indeed vote to dismantle Medicare as we know it and replace it with a voucher scheme that would still be called “Medicare,” but would look nothing like the current program — and would no longer guarantee affordable care.

So here’s my forecast for next year: If Mr. Romney is in fact the Republican presidential nominee, he will make wildly false claims about Mr. Obama and, occasionally, get some flack for doing so. But news organizations will compensate by treating it as a comparable offense when, say, the president misstates the income share of the top 1 percent by a percentage point or two.

The end result will be no real penalty for running an utterly fraudulent campaign. As I said, welcome to post-truth politics.

 

Kristof and Collins

In “A New Kim.  A New Chance?” Mr. Kristof says while contemplating North Korea’s future, let’s remember some of the failed American policies that brought us to this fearful place.  Ms. Collins, in “Housebound for the Holidays,” says real congressmen don’t vacation, not when there is important business to do for the people!  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

On my first trip to North Korea in 1989, I made a nuisance of myself by randomly barging into private homes. I wanted to see how ordinary North Koreans actually live, and people were startled but hospitable.

The most surprising thing I found was The Loudspeaker affixed to a wall in each home. The Loudspeaker is like a radio but without a dial or off switch. In the morning, it awakens the household with propaganda. (In his first golf outing, Comrade Kim Jong-il shoots five holes-in-one!) It blares like that all day.

The Loudspeaker underscores that North Korea is not just another dictatorship but, perhaps, the most totalitarian country ever. Stalin and Mao were murderous but low-tech; the Kim family added complex systems of repression.

Anyone disabled is considered an eyesore, for example. So people with disabilities are often expelled from the capital, Pyongyang.

Government propaganda is shameless. During a famine, North Korean news media warned starving citizens against overeating by recounting the cautionary tale of a man who ate his fill, and then exploded.

Once in North Korea, I stopped in a rural area to interview two high school girls at random. They were friendly, if startled. So was I when they started speaking simultaneously and repeating political lines in perfect unison. They could have been robots.

When videos (of movies, music or religion) began to be smuggled in from China, police began to turn off the power to entire buildings. Then the police would go door to door and examine what video was stuck inside players. A smuggled tape could mean the dispatch of an entire family to a labor camp.

What do we make of this country? For Americans, a starting point should be to recognize some failures of American policy. A few lessons:

Don’t assume that the end of the regime is imminent.

I’ve been covering North Korea on and off since 1987, and outsiders have always been whispering about rumored uprisings or suggesting that the government is on its last legs. Yes, North Korea’s regime could collapse tomorrow — or it could stagger along for another 20 years. The “Great Successor” Kim Jong-un could outlast President Obama.

Don’t assume that everybody detests the regime.

All those North Koreans crying because of Kim Jong-il’s death? Their grief is probably sincere. In conversations with North Korean defectors, I’m struck by how many lambaste the Kim regime but add that their relatives left behind still believe in it — because they know nothing else. Many also are passionate nationalists, preferring a homegrown despot to any hint of foreign economic colonialism.

Faith and fear combine to keep people in line. In a book about North Korea, Bradley Martin tells how one of Kim Jong-il’s aides told his wife about his boss’s womanizing. The wife truly believed in the basic decency of the North Korean system and wrote to the leadership to protest the debauchery. The letter was passed on to Kim Jong-il, who brought the woman in front of a crowd and denounced her.

Her own husband then stepped forward, pleading to be allowed to execute her. This request was granted, and the husband then shot his wife to death.

Don’t try to isolate North Korea.

The West has reacted to North Korean’s nuclear program by sanctioning and isolating the country. But isolation has mostly backfired. It’s one of the things that keeps the Kim family in power, and we’re helping enforce it.

Moreover, economic pain is not going to destroy the regime. In the mid-1990s, perhaps one million people died in famine, and the regime was unhurt.

Our failures in North Korea are manifest. In 1994, we came close to war on the Korean Peninsula, averting it with a nuclear deal that rested on false hope: The Clinton administration thought the regime would collapse before the West had to deliver civilian nuclear reactors as its part of the agreement.

Confronted with evidence of cheating by North Korea, the Bush administration then backed out of the deal. The result was even more disastrous: North Korea accelerated its nuclear assembly line and accumulated enough plutonium for perhaps eight weapons.

American officials blame China for coddling North Korea, but at least Beijing has a strategy. It is to encourage the Kim regime to replicate the opening and reform policies that transformed China itself. These days, Chinese traders, cellphones, DVDs and CDs are already common in border areas of North Korea, doing more to undermine Kim rule than any policy of the United States.

There are no good solutions. But let’s take advantage of the leadership transition to try a dose of outreach. If we can inch toward diplomatic relations, trade and people-to-people exchanges, we’re not rewarding a monstrous regime. We just might be digging its grave.

Now here’s Ms. Collins:

Right now, you are probably asking yourself: What exactly is going on with Congress? What’s all this yelling about a tax increase? Also, are they shutting down the government again? Because I was really planning to spend my Christmas camping out in a national park.

Good news! Congress did not shut down the government this month. It was sort of dancing around the idea, but the country has grown so inured to this kind of behavior that nobody paid any attention.

Then our lawmakers moved on to a crisis over the payroll tax, unemployment compensation and Medicare. On which they totally dropped the ball.

As things stand now, on Jan. 1, doctors who treat Medicare patients will get a huge cut in pay and the state unemployment compensation systems will be thrown into chaos. People who have been out of work for more than half a year will start falling out of the system in a near-random fashion. Some of those who have been unemployed for 25 weeks will lose their benefits before others who have been collecting for 70.

Also, payroll taxes for Social Security will rise for everybody. That is really unfortunate, but the Medicare and unemployment compensation parts are worse.

On Tuesday, the House majority defeated a bipartisan Senate plan to resolve the problem. They framed the issue as a fight between hard-working Republicans and lazy Democrats/senators who were afraid to give up their vacations in order to stay in Washington for more stimulating debates.

“As a cardiothoracic surgeon, I often worked through the holidays!” said Representative Larry Bucshon of Indiana.

Representative Charles Boustany Jr. of Louisiana, another doctor, regaled the members with the story of a Christmas Eve when “I was getting ready to sit down for dinner with my family when I got called to see an 85-year-old Cajun gentleman, with a very large family, who had a ruptured aneurysm, and he was in shock. I spent the entire night operating on this man.”

“My three employees — Irv, Dirk and Larry — they’re all at work today!” said Representative Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican and the co-owner of Huizenga Gravel.

It does seem a little unfair to bring Irv, Dirk and Larry into the fight, because they probably are not required to spend their free time raising donations for the next election season.

This battle goes back to 2010, when President Obama made a deal to continue the dreaded Bush tax cuts in return for a yearlong payroll tax cut, which benefits lower-income workers, and extended federal benefits for the unemployed.

The House Republicans never loved the second part of the deal, and, in the spirit of the season, I will not suggest that this was because they only like tax cuts for rich people.

Anyhow, earlier this month, the House did pass a bill extending the tax cut for another year. Perhaps coincidentally, it was also packed with things that the Senate Democrats were bound to hate, from freezing the pay of federal employees to doing something to environmental regulations of boilers that I could not possibly explain to you if I had a week.

When the bill made its way to an unwelcoming Senate, a miracle occurred. Angels sang, a star rose in the east and the Democrats and Republicans worked out a compromise. This was, admittedly, an old-fashioned Congressional compromise that resembled the offspring of a wart hog and vampire bat. But it kept the status quo going for another two months.

Happiness reigned! Most of the Republican senators voted for the bill, and everybody started packing for vacation.

Alas, the compromise flamed the fiercest rancor and resentment that exists on Capitol Hill — the hatred of the House for the Senate. Really, no matter who’s in charge in Washington, the House hates the Senate. The House hated the Senate when James Monroe was in it.

The Republican House members had a meeting. According to The Washington Post, a number of members begged to be allowed to fight to the death for their original plan in the manner of the movie “Braveheart.” The idea that people were demanding that their leaders act like Mel Gibson should give you an idea of how out of control things had gotten.

So the House rejected the Senate compromise, while arguing that vacations are for sissies. “We are not afraid to vote!” cried Representative Allen West, a freshman Republican from Florida.

West was having an action-packed day, fending off a resolution condemning him for saying “if Joseph Goebbels was around, he’d be very proud of the Democrat Party because they have an incredible propaganda machine.”

People, did we not have an agreement that politicians were going to stop comparing each other to the Nazis?

Really, sometimes it seems as though nothing can ever get done. Even if you’ll settle for a mutant wart hog-vampire bat.