The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd and Bruni

Mr. Kristof and The Moustache of Wisdom are off today.  The Pasty Little Putz has decided to parade his ignorance about the Episcopal Church this morning.  He has what I’m sure he considers an important question:  “Can Liberal Christianity be Saved?”  He states that the more progressive the Episcopal Church becomes, the more it shrinks.  He’s profoundly full of crap on pretty much all levels.  In “The Boy Who Wanted to Fly” MoDo says that Rory Staunton always aimed for the stars. Before a strep infection, discovered too late, cut his life short, the 12-year-old from Queens soared.  Mr. Bruni looks at “Our Newly Lush Life” and says that in New York and other cities, there’s a verdure that defies the dark times.  Here’s The Putz:

In 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.

As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians. It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital.

Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic, have not necessarily thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.

But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2005 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)

Liberal commentators, meanwhile, consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a model for the future without reckoning with their decline. Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.

But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God … the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests that perhaps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.

Absent such a reconsideration, their fate is nearly certain: they will change, and change, and die.

Well, Putzy, at least the Episcopal Church isn’t going bankrupt from paying rape victims.  And if anyone wants real facts on the growth and/or decline in the Episcopal Church here’s the real information.  (.pdf file)  Next up we have MoDo:

Rory Staunton was always looking up.

As soon as he could walk, he wanted to fly. The exuberant freckle-faced redhead from Sunnyside, Queens, yearned to be up in the romantic night sky where, as the French pilot and poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, the stars are laughing.

His parents told him he’d have to wait until he was 16 to take flying lessons. But it’s hard to tell a determined 5-foot-9, 169-pound 12-year-old what to do.

He dreamed of being the next Captain Sullenberger, practicing on a flight simulator on his computer and studying global routes. He read and reread Sully’s memoir, thrilled to learn that the flier’s hair had once been red. He found a Long Island aviation school that would teach 12-year-olds.

On his 12th birthday, his parents shuddered and let Rory fly with an instructor.

How could you resist that sweet Irish face? Sure, Rory drove his parents nuts, sneaking downstairs late at night to gorge on episodes of “Family Guy,” and pretending to do his homework when he was really devouring political stories in The Times.

“He wasn’t the kid who looked at porn online, he looked at CNN online,” said his uncle, Niall O’Dowd, my friend who publishes several Irish publications in New York.

Rory protected underdogs against schoolyard bullies. He revered Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. And at the Garden School in Jackson Heights, he led a campaign to curb the thoughtless use of the word “retarded.”

“The last conversation I had with him, he got right in the face of my brother, Fergus, the government minister in Ireland with the mining portfolio, about fracking,” Niall recalled. “And he wrote the Swedish ambassador to North Korea asking for an explanation about why North Korea fed their big army while their people were dying of hunger.”

Rory was so roaring with life, it was impossible to believe how quickly life drained out of him. On Wednesday, March 28, he fell while playing in the school gym and scraped his elbow, opening a cut. As Dr. Jerome Groopman wrote in The New Yorker in 2008, the most aggressive superbug bacteria often lurk in gyms and on artificial turf.

The following Sunday, Rory died of septic shock from a strep infection, his parents curled around his body in the hospital bed.

Orlaith and Ciaran Staunton are Irish immigrants who embodied the American dream. Ciaran owns O’Neill’s bar on Third Avenue, where Rory made his first visit at 3 days old, and the Molly Blooms pub in Queens.

Every parent’s nightmare unfolded at warp speed, as the Web site Everyday Health reported and as Jim Dwyer heartbreakingly revealed in Thursday’s Times. Rory might have been saved by a swift dose of antibiotics but instead perished in a perfect storm of false assumptions, overlooked data and overburdened doctors.

Despite the cut, severe leg pain, blotchy skin and other clues pointing to sepsis, Rory’s pediatrician surmised that the vomiting, 102-degree fever, 140 pulse and 36 breaths a minute spelled a stomach bug and sent him to the NYU Langone Medical Center emergency room. Doctors there discharged Rory with an antinausea drug, even though his vital signs were alarming. The lab tests that were ordered came back three hours later showing abnormal production of white blood cells, a sign that infection could be raging, but that red flag was ignored.

“Nobody said anything that night,” his mother told Dwyer. “None of you followed up the next day on that kid, and he’s at home, dying on the couch?”

By Friday, Rory’s body was covered with blue streaks, and a touch made him scream. When Ciaran reached the pediatrician, she advised going back to the E.R. Rory was put in intensive care, where doctors valiantly tried to save his life, even suggesting amputating his nose and toes. But he was turning purple and black.

“For anyone that has carried their son’s or daughter’s coffin, it’s unnatural,” Ciaran told Sean O’Rourke on Friday on RTE, the Irish radio network. “A child who loses a parent becomes an orphan. If a man and wife lose each other, they become widow or widower. It’s so unnatural, there isn’t even a word for families who lose a child.”

Rory’s idol, Sully Sullenberger, was touched and left a message on the child’s tribute page. The hero of the Hudson is now an advocate for applying “lessons learned in blood” in aviation safety to patient safety.

“If something good comes from Rory’s death, it will be that we realize we have a broken system,” he told me. “Patient care is so fragmented. For the most part, medical professionals aren’t taught these human skills that some deride as ‘soft skills.’ So there’s insufficient sharing of information and ineffective communication.

“Some in the medical field look upon these deaths as an unavoidable consequence of giving care. But they’re inexcusable and unthinkable.”

Rory is up there now, with the laughing stars. But even before he got to heaven, he knew, as Saint-Exupéry wrote, that “One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

And last but not least we have Mr. Bruni:

Whenever you doubt that the future can improve upon the past or that government can play a pivotal role in that, consider and revel in the extraordinary greening of New York.

This city looks nothing — nothing — like it did just a decade and a half ago. It’s a place of newly gorgeous waterfront promenades, of trees, tall grasses and blooming flowers on patches of land and peninsulas of concrete and even stretches of rail tracks that were blighted or blank before. It’s a lush retort to the pessimism of this era, verdant proof that growth remains possible, at least with the requisite will and the right strategies.

The transformation of New York has happened incrementally enough — one year the High Line, another year Brooklyn Bridge Park — that it often escapes full, proper appreciation. But it’s a remarkable, hopeful stride.

It’s also emblematic of a coast-to-coast pattern of intensified dedication to urban parkland. While so much of American life right now is attended by the specter of decline, many cities are blossoming, with New York providing crucial inspiration.

“It represents a great example because it’s our largest urban area in America,” said Ken Salazar, the United States secretary of the interior, on the phone Friday, suggesting that if the Big Apple can carve out green amid its gray, any city can. Salazar plans to visit New York on Tuesday to address an international conference, already under way, called “Greater & Greener: Re-Imagining Parks for 21st Century Cities.”

The location of the conference in New York pays deliberate tribute to the progress this city has made, much of it under the Bloomberg administration, which followed through on plans it inherited, expanding some of them, and hatched many of its own.

While Mayor Bloomberg has suffered frustrations and failures aplenty in his bids, say, to improve public education and relieve congestion in Midtown Manhattan, he has had the greenest of thumbs. One of the principal legacies of his long mayoralty will be a city that, in certain charmed spots on certain charmed days, can feel as relaxed and breezy and kissed by nature as one of those ecologically vain enclaves of the Pacific Northwest. To the bustle of traffic, he has added the rustle of more trees, byways for bicycles, perches with exquisite views.

“Parks were on the front burner for this mayor and for Patti Harris, the deputy mayor, and I think that’s unique in this city’s history,” said Adrian Benepe, who will soon step down after 10 years as Bloomberg’s parks commissioner.

“Great things happened under Mayor La Guardia, largely because of the Works Progress Administration and Robert Moses’s skill in using those funds, but I think, uniquely, this mayor has not just liked parks but understood their value in so many different ways,” Benepe said, adding that Bloomberg embraced “the belief that a city could and should be beautiful and well designed.”

I’D dismiss those sentiments as pure sycophancy or self-congratulation but for several factors. One, Benepe readily volunteers that some of what Bloomberg gets credit for was set in motion by previous mayors or championed in particular by George Pataki, a fervent parks booster, back when he was governor.

Two, Benepe’s praise for Bloomberg is echoed by that of many people outside of city government. Three, it’s consistent with my own grateful observations. I’ve lived in this city on and off for 25 years, and I’ve never felt as called to the outdoors or as rewarded by my time there as I do now.

An astonishing fraction of Manhattan’s waterfront, both on the Hudson and East Rivers, is now punctuated with landscaped piers, dotted with benches and traced by bike and foot paths. And Brooklyn Bridge Park, for those who haven’t seen it, is a revelation, with its panorama of downtown Manhattan, the New York Harbor and Lady Liberty.

“It is remarkable — remarkable — that the city made this investment,” said Michael Van Valkenburgh, a landscape architect whose firm designed the park, which cost more than $350 million. The city contributed nearly two-thirds of that. “There’s a profound amount of interest and activity right now in making and remaking urban parks. I think it’s because we are reinvested in the idea of living in cities.”

Just as encouraging and instructive is the way New York has come up with the necessary money for new and existing parks. The High Line, built mostly with public funds, is maintained primarily with private ones. The plan for Brooklyn Bridge Park is for its operation and upkeep to be paid for by assessments on the real estate developed around it.

Riverside Park South — that stunning braid of waterfront plazas, paths and piers off the West 60s in Manhattan — was what the developers of new residential properties nearby owed the city in return for permission to build. That arrangement long predated Bloomberg’s mayoralty, but under his administration a similar arrangement will give rise to waterfront parkland in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Bloomberg’s record when it comes to parks isn’t unblemished. Holly M. Leicht, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy group, said that the creation of new parks has not always been matched by sufficient care for old ones. “There’s certainly a disparity in conditions,” she said.

But the city has, to its credit, lavished money on parks in all boroughs, not just Manhattan and Brooklyn. One of its most ambitious projects is the conversion of Fresh Kills Landfill, on Staten Island, into Freshkills Park, which will be almost three times the size of Central Park.

The New York story is a national one. In the center of Oklahoma City, a revitalized park complex, Myriad Botanical Gardens, recently took root. In downtown Houston, there’s Discovery Green. Dallas is building a park on a deck over a downtown freeway, and Los Angeles is looking at how to gussy and green up an old concrete river bed.

“We’re living in an era of re-urbanization,” said Catherine Nagel, executive director of the City Parks Alliance, which is sponsoring the conference in New York. And the increased population density means that “we need green space,” she said.

Amazingly, we’re getting it: because citizens have demanded as much; because governments have made it a priority; because public and private partnerships have been cultivated. New York is the bright flower of all that.

 

Brooks, Nocera and Bruni

Bobo’s concerned.  Bobo’s concern trolling.  In “The Opportunity Gap” he gurgles that in a year consumed by the inequality problem, one demographic has gone largely unreported: our children. He thinks Robert Putnam sheds new light.  It’s classic Bobo.  He’s still annoyed that (poor) people are spawning without being married…  In “Housing’s Last Chance?” Mr. Nocera says eminent domain might be the answer to the foreclosure crisis. Consider the situation in San Bernardino County, California.  Mr. Bruni, in “Love Among the Spuds,” says a lesbian congresswoman tests the soil in Wisconsin.  Here’s Bobo:

Over the past few months, writers from Charles Murray to Timothy Noah have produced alarming work on the growing bifurcation of American society. Now the eminent Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his team are coming out with research that’s more horrifying.

While most studies look at inequality of outcomes among adults and help us understand how America is coming apart, Putnam’s group looked at inequality of opportunities among children. They help us understand what the country will look like in the decades ahead. The quick answer? More divided than ever.

Putnam’s data verifies what many of us have seen anecdotally, that the children of the more affluent and less affluent are raised in starkly different ways and have different opportunities. Decades ago, college-graduate parents and high-school-graduate parents invested similarly in their children. Recently, more affluent parents have invested much more in their children’s futures while less affluent parents have not.

They’ve invested more time. Over the past decades, college-educated parents have quadrupled the amount of time they spend reading “Goodnight Moon,” talking to their kids about their day and cheering them on from the sidelines. High-school-educated parents have increased child-care time, but only slightly.

A generation ago, working-class parents spent slightly more time with their kids than college-educated parents. Now college-educated parents spend an hour more every day. This attention gap is largest in the first three years of life when it is most important.

Affluent parents also invest more money in their children. Over the last 40 years upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their kids’ enrichment activities, like tutoring and extra curriculars, by $5,300 a year. The financially stressed lower classes have only been able to increase their investment by $480, adjusted for inflation.

As a result, behavior gaps are opening up. In 1972, kids from the bottom quartile of earners participated in roughly the same number of activities as kids from the top quartile. Today, it’s a chasm.

Richer kids are roughly twice as likely to play after-school sports. They are more than twice as likely to be the captains of their sports teams. They are much more likely to do nonsporting activities, like theater, yearbook and scouting. They are much more likely to attend religious services.

It’s not only that richer kids have become more active. Poorer kids have become more pessimistic and detached. Social trust has fallen among all income groups, but, between 1975 and 1995, it plummeted among the poorest third of young Americans and has remained low ever since. As Putnam writes in notes prepared for the Aspen Ideas Festival: “It’s perfectly understandable that kids from working-class backgrounds have become cynical and even paranoid, for virtually all our major social institutions have failed them — family, friends, church, school and community.” As a result, poorer kids are less likely to participate in voluntary service work that might give them a sense of purpose and responsibility. Their test scores are lagging. Their opportunities are more limited.

A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to create this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were abandoned, meaning more children are born out of wedlock. Their single parents simply have less time and resources to prepare them for a more competitive world. Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many parents are too stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to their children.

Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic, intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.

The political system directs more money to health care for the elderly while spending on child welfare slides.

Equal opportunity, once core to the nation’s identity, is now a tertiary concern. If America really wants to change that, if the country wants to take advantage of all its human capital rather than just the most privileged two-thirds of it, then people are going to have to make some pretty uncomfortable decisions.

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.

Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class divisions and more time trying to remedy them — less time calling their opponents out of touch elitists, and more time coming up with agendas that comprehensively address the problem. It’s politically tough to do that, but the alternative is national suicide.

I just can’t wait until Charles Pierce tees this one up.  Maybe this time poor Moral Hazard will bite Bobo…  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

There are few counties in America in as rough shape as San Bernardino County in California. During the housing bubble, the good times were very good. But then came the bust.

Today, San Bernardino County has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation: 11.9 percent. Home prices have collapsed. Astonishingly, every second home is underwater, meaning the homeowner owes more on the mortgage than the house is worth. It is well documented that underwater mortgages have a high likelihood of defaulting — and, eventually, being foreclosed on. It has also been clear for some time that the best way to keep troubled homeowners in their homes is by reducing the principal on their mortgages, thus lowering their debt burden and more closely aligning their mortgage with the actual value of the home.

Which is why Greg Devereaux, the county’s chief executive officer, found himself listening intently when the folks from Mortgage Resolution Partners came knocking on his door. They had spent the previous year kicking around an intriguing idea: have localities buy underwater mortgages using their power of eminent domain — and then write the homeowner a new, reduced mortgage. It’s principal reduction using a stick instead of a carrot.

I know. When you first hear this idea, it sounds a little crazy. Eminent domain to take a mortgage? But the more closely you look at it, the more sense it starts to make. It would be a way to break the logjam that keeps mortgages in mortgage-backed bonds — securitizations — from being modified. It could prevent foreclosures. And it could finally stabilize housing prices.

The core issue that Mortgage Resolution Partners is trying to solve is what might be called the securitization problem. Bundling mortgages into securities and selling them to investors was, initially, a wonderful idea because it greatly expanded the amount of capital available for homeownership. But the people who wound up owning the mortgages — investors — were diffuse, often with conflicting interests, while the mortgages were managed by servicers or trustees who didn’t actually own them. And the securitization contracts never anticipated that people might need to modify. So it has been nearly impossible to modify mortgages stuck in securitizations.

It turns out, however, that there is nothing to prevent a government entity from using eminent domain to acquire a mortgage. “Eminent domain has existed for centuries,” said Robert Hockett, a law professor at Cornell who has served as an adviser to Mortgage Resolution Partners. “And it is applicable to any kind of property, including a mortgage.” What matters, Hockett continued, is two things: is the entity paying fair value for the property, and is it for a legitimate public purpose?

Can there be any doubt that keeping people in their homes constitutes a legitimate public purpose? “This is a yoke around the American economy,” said Steven Gluckstern, an entrepreneur with a varied career in insurance and finance who is the chairman of Mortgage Resolution Partners. “When people are underwater, their behavior changes. They stop spending. There are 12 million homes that are underwater,” he added. “Is the answer to really just let them get foreclosed on? Or wait for housing prices to rise?” According to Gluckstern, the fact that the foreclosure crisis is continuing is precisely why housing prices aren’t rising — despite some of the lowest interest rates in history.

As for fair value, since the home has dropped dramatically in value, the mortgage is worth a lot less than its face value. On Wall Street, in fact, traders are buying securitized mortgage bonds at a steep discount — reflecting the true value of the mortgages they’re buying. Yet the homeowner remains saddled with a mortgage that is unrealistically high. The plan calls for the county to buy mortgages at a steep, but fair, discount to its face value, and then to offer the homeowner a new mortgage that reflects much, though not all, of that discount. (Fees and costs would be paid for by the spread.) The money to buy the mortgages would come from investors; indeed, Mortgage Resolution Partners is in the process of raising money.

The securitization industry is up in arms about this proposal. In late June, after the plan was leaked to Reuters, some 18 organizations, including the Association of Mortgage Investors, wrote a threatening letter to the San Bernardino board of supervisors claiming that the plan would inflict “significant harm” to homeowners in the county. For his part, Devereaux insists that no final decision has been made. But, he says, “this is the first idea that anyone has approached us with that has the potential to have a real impact on our economy.” Other cities are watching closely to see what happens in San Bernardino.

We’re four years into a housing crisis. Nothing has yet worked to stem the terrible tide of foreclosures. It’s time to give eminent domain a try.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni, who’s in Plover, Wisconsin:

Tammy Baldwin, who has a very real chance of becoming the first openly gay or lesbian person elected to the United States Senate, stood with a 73-year-old potato farmer in his fields here the other day and asked him: “How hot am I?”

For the previous half-hour, the farmer had been boastfully showing Baldwin, 50, his equipment: the sorting machine, the stacking machine. And now, in response to her question, he nudged his thermometer close to her. I do mean thermometer, an infrared one, with which he’d just determined that the temperature of the dirt on this scorching July afternoon was 136 degrees.

He took a reading of Baldwin’s skin, which was a crackling 101.

“Wow,” she said, repeating a syllable that was getting a thorough workout as she deftly played a social role as traditional as any: the attractive younger woman stroking the older man’s pride. Her sexual orientation was irrelevant.

Because he didn’t care about it? Or didn’t even know? I had just a few minutes to chat with him before she and a few aides, doing a campaign swing through rural Wisconsin, arrived, and I got the sense that he was familiar only with her politics, the populist tone of which he said he liked.

“And the lesbian part?” wasn’t a phrase I instantly blurted out. The lesbian part shouldn’t be the deciding factor. And to judge from what I observed while shadowing her one day last week, it won’t be.

Baldwin, a Democrat currently serving her seventh term in the House, won’t know until mid-August which of four Republican aspirants she’ll face and precisely what kind of fight she’s in for.

But I don’t think its outcome will be governed by whom and how she loves. Not in 2012. Not with all the change afoot.

Look at the last few weeks, even the last few days. The high-profile wedding in the news over the weekend was of the retiring Congressman Barney Frank and his male partner. The high-profile wedding the weekend before that was of the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and his male partner.

A male hip-hop star just came out; a prominent pray-away-the-gay advocate just conceded that sexual orientation is Psalms-resistant; Google just announced that it would promote gay rights worldwide, even in countries where homosexual acts are now criminal.

That’s not to mention Anderson Cooper’s recent acknowledgment that he’s gay, which elicited more yawns than gasps. The reaction befit a world in which Ellen DeGeneres is a pitchwoman not only for CoverGirl but also for J.C. Penney, whose catalogs this year included same-sex couples.

The specific issue of same-sex marriage still provokes fierce disagreement. But even factoring that in, the gay rights movement inexorably closes in on its real goal, which is not — as some opponents believe — for everyone to be talking incessantly about homosexuality. Among ourselves we don’t talk incessantly about it, trust me. We talk about dinner, diets and, during a summer like this, air-conditioning. We’re hot all right, but in the same weary, sweaty sense as everyone else.

The goal is for talking about homosexuality to be largely unnecessary. The goal is for the presence, legitimacy and equal rights of gays to be givens.

In 1998, Baldwin became the first openly gay or lesbian non-incumbent candidate elected to Congress. Four years earlier, Wisconsinites in a different district re-elected Steve Gunderson, a longtime Republican congressman, after learning of his homosexuality. He retired after that term.

For most of Baldwin’s congressional career she was coupled, but the two women broke up in 2010. During an interview late last year, she confirmed for me that she was still single.

When I asked last week if that status had changed, she laughed: “During a U.S Senate campaign?” She didn’t mean that dating was politically risky. She meant it was time-consuming.

Before entering the Senate race, she had research done on her vulnerabilities. It suggested that her sexual orientation wouldn’t be a useful weapon in attacks against her, she said.

Only once as I shadowed her did it come up, when a supporter sought advice on how to discuss it with others. She told him to focus their attention on what the election was really about: economic opportunity, security and fairness.

Those were the main topics covered when she mingled with voters outside a Curves gym in the town of Friendship and, later, inside a pub in Nekoosa.

In Plover, during her meet-and-greet with the farmer, the conversation turned to spuds. He told her his services were always available — a phone call away — should she need tuber tutelage.

“Remember Dan Quayle,” he said, recalling how the former vice president never lived down his “potatoe” misspelling. “If you’ve got the wrong information, it can hit you real hard.”

How delicious. He surveyed the possible tripwires on her path into history, and all he saw were gratuitous vowels.

 

Dowd and Friedman

In “The Constant Wife” MoDo says if only “Sarge” had lived up to her nickname. Why was Dottie Sandusky, like the rest of the Penn State community, so oblivious?  Gee, MoDo, I don’t know.  Maybe those vast, rolling tracts of football cash?  The Moustache of Wisdom is beating his little tin drum about his fantasy of a “serious, centrist third-party challenger” again.  In “Wasting Warren Buffett” he says there is something seriously lacking in the current campaigns from President Obama and Mitt Romney.  Here’s MoDo, who’s in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania:

Her nickname is “Sarge.”

“I’m strict,” Dottie Sandusky told the court with a proud tilt of her chin. “I like for things to go in a certain way. We expect a lot from our kids.”

Yet the main question about Sarge is why she was so lax.

The 69-year-old grandmother, married to Jerry Sandusky for 45 years, “46 in September,” came to court on Tuesday while defense lawyers debated whether to risk putting her husband on the stand. The coach who excelled in defense has put up a negligible one in court.

Dottie, a small, pert woman with short gray hair and a lime-green sweater, arrived at the trial of her husband as an object of fascination. She embodies the grim mystery at the center of “this drama,” as one of her friends sardonically calls it: How could everyone in the community, including those who seemed to represent the highest ideals, like Dottie Sandusky and Joe Paterno, turn a blind eye to Jerry Sandusky’s aberrant and abhorrent behavior toward vulnerable boys? If the prosecution is right, he is an emotional sociopath who conducted a serial crime spree quite openly at Penn State and in his own home.

On the stand, Mrs. Sandusky saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke only a little evil — against the cherubic-looking boy, now a tightly coiled 28-year-old, who was the most intense rival for her husband’s attentions 15 years ago, getting what he called “creepy love letters” from his predatory “father figure.”

“He was very demanding,” she said of the boy. “And he was very conniving. And he wanted his way, and he didn’t listen a whole lot.”

The accuser had testified that on a trip to the Alamo Bowl in 1999, as Jerry threatened to send him home if he would not perform oral sex in the bathroom, Dottie had come to the edge of the bathroom and called out “What are you doing in there?” before disappearing again after a brief talk with her husband.

Dottie gave a different version. She said that they were staying in an efficiency apartment, with a cot for the boy. She came in one day and Jerry and the boy were in the bathroom area, clothed, having a fight because the boy was refusing to go to a football luncheon for which Sandusky had already bought a $50 ticket.

“He was yelling,” she said of her husband, adding: “I know Jerry was mad the way he looked. He said, ‘We did this for you. You’ve got to do this.’ ” She added with irritation that “we had to pay for his airline ticket; we had to pay for his food,” even though they had expenses for their “own” children and grandchildren.

She did not seem to find it odd that her husband was acting emotional, lavishing gifts and doting on a child “like his girlfriend,” as the grown-up accuser testified. (He noted that Mrs. Sandusky was “kind of cold,” treating the fatherless boys like they were “Jerry’s kids.”)

Mrs. Sandusky seemed to wilt a bit and steel herself as she was shown pictures of the fresh-faced boys who grew up into messed-up men, taken at the age when the abuse allegedly happened — handsome kids whose blue-collar working moms were thrilled to have the famous Jerry Sandusky take the boys on outings and overnights. As Dottie talked, her husband looked away from her, toward the pictures of the boys, for prolonged stretches.

Sounding a little acidic, as though she were describing a romantic rival, she said of one boy: “He was a charmer. He knew what to say and when to say it.”

She was dutifully loyal about her husband but did not express outrage about the charges.

Their life, she said, was “rough because Jerry, he was not around a lot.” When the young couple realized they couldn’t have children, they adopted six. He would come home at 6:30 p.m., “spend an hour or so with the kids, then disappear up to his study to work.”

Asked about the testimony of one accuser that she was in the house when he screamed for help, as Sandusky raped him in the basement, she said she never heard any yelling and denied, as the young man had suggested, that the basement must be soundproof.

Asked about her hearing by her husband’s lawyer, she replied: “I think it’s pretty good.”

She said she did notice some oddly clingy behavior by one boy, who ran across the room while they were watching TV to jump into a La-Z-Boy with Jerry, and who also ran across the gym at a wrestling match to hug Jerry.

Pressed by the prosecutor about those trips by her husband to the basement — the bearlike Sandusky would “crack” the back of the slight boys in bed, an ominous foreplay — she said primly: “He would go down and say good night,” adding, “I didn’t go down and tuck ’em in.”

I need a shower.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Watching this campaign unfold reaffirms how much it would have benefitted from a serious, centrist third-party challenger. It would have been so clarifying to have an independent voice calling out Mitt Romney for running a campaign that consists of decrying the last three and a half years of the Obama presidency, while offering to reinstate the very same failed policies that made the eight years of George W. Bush a disaster that President Obama has spent most of his time cleaning up. And it would have been equally clarifying to have an independent challenger calling out Obama for failing to put a credible, specific economic plan on the table — at the scale of our problem — but relying instead on a campaign that amounts to a series of discrete appeals to each of the Democratic Party constituencies. It feels like a ground war with no air cover.

But there will be no third-party candidate, so the only hope is getting Obama to raise his game. To do that, the president needs to recognize just how badly he wasted Warren Buffett — using him for a two-week, wedge-issue sugar high.

Obama got Buffett to endorse the “Buffett Rule” — a minimum tax rate of 30 percent for any individual who makes more than $1 million a year so that all millionaires have to pay a higher tax rate than their secretaries. The plan had no chance of passing, would have made only a small dent in the deficit and was rightly decried by experts as a gimmick that only diverted attention from what we really need: comprehensive tax reform that can substantially raise revenue in a fairer manner. The Buffett Rule has largely faded away.

What a waste of Warren Buffett’s credibility.

Buffett is a businessman out to make a profit. But he is respected by many as a straight-talking nonpartisan — someone who can “call the game.” What the president should have done is follow the advice of the Princeton University economist and former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, namely lay out a specific “three-step rehab program for our nation’s fiscal policy.” Call it the Obama Plan; it should combine a near-term stimulus on job-creating infrastructure, a phase-in, as the economy improves, of “something that resembles the 10-year Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan — which would pay for the stimulus 15-20 times over” and a specific plan to “bend the health care cost-curve downward.” Obama has already offered the first; he still has not risen to the second and the third would be an easy extension of his own health care plan.

Obama needs a second look from independents who could determine this election. To attract that second look will require a credible, detailed recovery plan that gets voters to react in three ways: 1) “Now that sounds like it will address the problem, and both parties are going to feel the pain.” 2) “That plan seems fair: the rich pay more, but everyone pays something.” 3) “Wow, Obama did something hard and risky. He got out ahead of Congress and Romney. That’s leadership. I’m giving him a second look.”

I’d bet anything that if the president staked out such an Obama Plan, Buffett and a lot of other business leaders would endorse it. It would give the G.O.P. a real problem. After all, what would help Obama more right now: Repeating over and over the Buffett Rule gimmick or campaigning from now to Election Day by starting every stump speech saying: “Folks, I have an economic plan for America’s future that Warren Buffett and other serious business leaders endorse — and Mitt Romney doesn’t.”

Obama loyalists often say: “Those Republicans are so bad. They’ve tried to block us at every turn.” Yes, the G.O.P. has tried to stymie Obama; it’s been highly destructive. But the people who keep pointing that out don’t have an answer for the simplest next question: Why have they gotten away with it?

My view: It’s because too many Americans in the center-left/center-right do not feel in their guts that Obama is leading — is offering an economic plan at the scale of the problem that has a chance for bipartisan support and that makes them want to get up out of their chairs and do battle. Our situation is different from four years ago; people want to know the president has a plan for getting out of this mess.

When the Grand Bargain talks with John Boehner fell apart, Obama retreated to his base when he should have rallied the center by laying out — in detail — the Grand Bargain the country needs. That would have forced Romney to speak in detail about his plan — the Paul Ryan plan — and reveal it for what it is: a radical plan that few Americans would embrace if they understood it.

Then people would see a real choice: a tough-minded-but-centrist plan with real bipartisan support versus a radical plan to gut Medicare, give more tax cuts to the already wealthy and drastically shrink discretionary spending so eventually nothing is left for education, veterans, roads, research, the F.B.I. or the poor.

And the morning after that happens — when Warren Buffett endorses the Obama Plan, not just the Buffett Gimmick — the president will have his mojo back.

 

The Pasty Little Putz, Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Bruni

Oh, fergawdsake.  In “A Little Bit Indian” The Pasty Little Putz tries to ‘splain to us why Elizabeth Warren’s embarrassment is a scandal for academia.  Of course he has nothing at all to say about Marco Rubio and his little re-invention problems.  Of course, IOKIYAR.  In “Here Comes Nobody” MoDo says suffocating debate and resisting modernity, the Catholic Church shrinks its appeal.  Rather like the Republicans, not that I’m so sure that they should welcome the comparison.  The Moustache of Wisdom asks “Do You Want The Good News First?” and says a visit to the innovation hubs of Seattle and Silicon Valley stirred both excitement and dread. Here’s why.  Mr. Kristof also has a question:  “Are You Safe on That Sofa?”  He says flame retardants illuminate everything that’s wrong with our money-driven politics.  Mr. Bruni, in “Of Bile and Billionaires,” says a tycoon’s ditched plan is a scary vision of meanness run amok in politics today.  It’s interesting that the Times is playing rather fast and loose with its comments today.  They’re closed on The Putz and MoDo after some comments for each, unavailable for Mr. Kristof, and available for The Moustache of Wisdom and Mr. Bruni.  I wonder what it is that they don’t want to hear?  Here’s The Putz:

“I still have a picture on my mantel and it is a picture my mother had before that — a picture of my grandfather. And my Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a thousand times [and] remarked that he — her father, my papaw — had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do. … Being Native American has been part of my story, I guess, since the day I was born.”

— Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts, trying to explain why she identified herself as a “minority” law professor in the 1980s and 1990s.

IT happens in a lot of American families. My maternal great-grandfather was born on a Maine island in the 1880s, in the days when Penobscot Indians still rode birch-bark canoes from their inland reservation to the coast for their annual clambake. I always had the definite idea that he had Indian blood himself — maybe Penobscot, maybe Abenaki, maybe another New England tribe. In the photographs I have of him, he certainly looks the part, with a profile suited for an Indian Head penny.

My great-grandfather left an autobiography behind, though (that’s how I know about the canoes and the clambake), and I went back to it recently and couldn’t find even a hint of an Indian connection: just a typical old New England genealogy, mostly English families with some Irish woven in. This would have been immensely disappointing to my 10-year-old self, since I can remember telling friends in American history class, with an air of authority, that I was almost certainly one sixteenth Native American, or at the very least one thirty-second.

It seems that Elizabeth Warren may turn out to be similarly disappointed, after the New England Genealogical Society acknowledged last week that there’s no firm evidence of her great-great-grandmother being Cherokee.

That supposed ancestral tie was what inspired the professor-turned-Senate candidate to identify as an ethnic minority in law school directories early in her career. More important, it was what inspired The Harvard Crimson to refer to Warren as Harvard Law School’s “one tenured minority woman” and The Fordham Law Review to cite her as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color” during the mid-1990s debates over faculty diversity.

Now that same claim — and her clumsy, “my grandfather had high cheekbones” attempts to defend it — has become perhaps the biggest obstacle in her quest to reclaim Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat for liberalism.

The whole story has a tragicomic, Nathaniel Hawthorne meets “Curb Your Enthusiasm” feel. It’s easy to imagine Warren originally checking a box more on a whim than out of any deep determination to self-identify as Cherokee. (She didn’t use the minority-applicant program when applying to Rutgers, where she attended law school, and she identified as “white” during an early teaching job at the University of Texas.) Then it’s easy to imagine her embarrassment when the diversity wars of the 1990s made that whimsical choice something from which she couldn’t dissociate herself without intense public awkwardness. Those wars faded, she no longer listed herself as a Native American, she thought the whole thing was behind her … until she went into politics, where no secret stays buried.

The appropriate response to such a tale is probably sympathy rather than scorn. What does deserve scorn, though, is the academic culture in which an extremely distant connection to a Cherokee ancestor ends up being touted by a law school as proof of its commitment to diversity.

A diverse faculty and campus can be a laudable goal. But the point is to build academic communities that actually contain a wide variety of experiences and perspectives, not to wax self-congratulatory because you’ve met a set of ethnic quotas. The story of Elizabeth Warren, “woman of color,” represents a reductio ad absurdum of the latter tendency, which has been all too prevalent in elite universities — giving us affirmative-action programs that benefit West Indian immigrants more than the descendants of slaves, and faculties that include a wider range of skin tones than of political and religious views.

The irony is that Warren herself probably did make Harvard more diverse, since she grew up the daughter of a janitor in Oklahoma — not a typical background, to put it mildly, for Ivy League students and faculty today. But under the academy’s cramped definitions, it was her grandfather’s Cherokee cheekbones, not her blue-collar roots, that led to her citation as a supposed trailblazer.

That isn’t a serious approach to academic diversity, and in an emerging majority-minority America (already visible in the latest Census birth statistics) where almost everyone will be 1/8 something-or-other, it will be an increasingly untenable one as well.

For many colleges and universities, then, this contretemps represents a timely gift: a chance to think anew about these issues, before the pursuit of a cosmetic diversity leaves them looking as ridiculous as poor Elizabeth Warren does today.

Here’s MoDo:

I always liked that the name of my religion was also an adjective meaning all-embracing.

I was a Catholic and I wanted to be catholic, someone engaged in a wide variety of things. As James Joyce wrote in “Finnegans Wake:” “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody.’ ”

So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting.

It was tough to top the bizarre inquisition of self-sacrificing American nuns pushed by the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law. Law, the former head of the Boston archdiocese, fled to a plush refuge in Rome in 2002 after it came out that he protected priests who molested thousands of children.

But the craziness continued when an American priest, renowned for his TV commentary from Rome on popes and personal morality, admitted last week that he had fathered a child with a mistress.

The Rev. Thomas Williams belongs to the Legionaires of Christ, the order founded by the notorious Mexican priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, a pal of Pope John Paul II who died peppered with accusations that he sexually abused seminarians and fathered several children and abused some of them.

The latest kooky kerfuffle was sparked by the invitation to Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, to speak at a graduation ceremony at Georgetown University on Friday. The silver-haired former Kansas governor is a practicing Catholic with a husband and son who graduated from Georgetown. But because she fought to get a federal mandate for health insurance coverage of contraceptives and morning-after pills, including at Catholic schools and hospitals, Sebelius is on the hit list of a conservative Catholic group in Virginia, the Cardinal Newman Society, which militates to bar speakers at Catholic schools who support gay rights or abortion rights.

The Society for Truth and Justice, a fringe Christian anti-abortion group, compared Sebelius to Himmler, and protesters showed up on campus to yell at her for being, as one screamed, “a murderer.”

“Remember, Georgetown has no neo-Nazi clubs or skinhead clubs on campus, nor should they,” Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, said on Fox News. “But they have two — two! — pro-abortion clubs at Georgetown University. Now they’re bringing in Kathleen Sebelius. They wouldn’t bring in an anti-Semite, nor should they. They wouldn’t bring in a racist, nor should they. But they’re bringing in a pro-abortion champion, and they shouldn’t.”

Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl called the invitation “shocking” and upbraided the Georgetown president, John DeGioia. But DeGioia, who so elegantly defended the Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke against Rush Limbaugh’s nasty epithets, stood fast against dogmatic censorship.

Speaking to the graduates, Sebelius evoked J.F.K.’s speech asserting that religious bodies should not seek to impose their will through politics. She said that contentious debate is a strength of this country, adding that in some other places, “a leader delivers an edict and it goes into effect. There’s no debate, no criticism, no second-guessing.”

Just like the Vatican.

Twenty-eight years ago, weighing a run for president, Mario Cuomo gave a speech at Notre Dame in which he deftly tried to explain how officials could remain good Catholics while going against church dictums in shaping public policy.

“The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman,” he said.

I called Cuomo to see if, as his son Andrew weighs running for president, he felt the church had grown less tolerant.

“If the church were my religion, I would have given it up a long time ago,” he said. “All the mad and crazy popes we’ve had through history, decapitating the husbands of women they’d taken. All the terrible things the church has done. Christ is my religion, the church is not.

“If they make the mistake of saying that a politician has to put the church before the Constitution on abortion or other issues, there will be no senators or presidents or any other Catholics in government. The church would be wiser to take the path laid out for us by Kennedy than the path laid out for us by Santorum.”

Absolute intolerance is always a sign of uncertainty and panic. Why do you have to hunt down everyone unless you’re weak? The church doesn’t seem to care if its members’ beliefs are based on faith or fear, conviction or coercion. But what is the quality of a belief that exists simply because it’s enforced?

“To be narrowing the discussion and instilling fear in people seems to be exactly the opposite of what’s called for these days,” says the noted religion writer Kenneth Briggs. “All this foot-stomping just diminishes the church’s credibility even more.”

This is America. We don’t hunt heresies here. We welcome them.

Next up is The Moustache of Wisdom:

I’ve spent the last week traveling to two of America’s greatest innovation hubs — Silicon Valley and Seattle — and the trip left me feeling a combination of exhilaration and dread. The excitement comes from not only seeing the stunning amount of innovation emerging from the ground up, but from seeing the new tools coming on stream that are, as Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos, put it to me, “eliminating all the gatekeepers” — making it easier and cheaper than ever to publish your own book, start your own company and chase your own dream. Never have individuals been more empowered, and we’re still just at the start of this trend.

“I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere,” said Bezos. Thanks to cloud computing for the masses, anyone anywhere can for a tiny hourly fee now rent the most powerful computing and storage facilities on Amazon’s “cloud” to test any algorithm or start any company or publish any book. Start-ups can even send all their inventory to Amazon, and it will do all the fulfillment and delivery — and even gift wrap your invention before shipping it to your customers.

This is leading to an explosion of new firms and voices. “Sixteen of the top 100 best sellers on Kindle today were self-published,” said Bezos. That means no agent, no publisher, no paper — just an author, who gets most of the royalties, and Amazon and the reader. It is why, Bezos adds, the job of the company leader now is changing fast: “You have to think of yourself not as a designer but as a gardener” — seeding, nurturing, inspiring, cultivating the ideas coming from below, and then making sure people execute them.

The leading companies driving this trend — Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, LinkedIn, Zynga and Twitter — are all headquartered and listed in America. Facebook, which didn’t exist nine years ago, just went public at a valuation of nearly $105 billion — two weeks after buying a company for $1 billion, Instagram, which didn’t exist 18 months ago. So why any dread?

It’s because we’re leaving an era of some 50 years’ duration in which to be a president, a governor, a mayor or a college president was, on balance, to give things away to people; and we’re entering an era — no one knows for how long — in which to be a president, a governor, a mayor or a college president will be, on balance, to take things away from people. And if we don’t make this transition in a really smart way — by saying, “Here are the things that made us great, that spawned all these dynamic companies” — and make sure that we’re preserving as much of that as we can, this trend will not spread as it should. Maybe we could grow as a country without a plan. But we dare not cut without a plan. We can really do damage. I can lose weight quickly if I cut off both arms, but it will surely reduce my job prospects.

What we must preserve is that magic combination of cutting-edge higher education, government-funded research and immigration of high-I.Q. risk-takers. They are, in combination, America’s golden goose, laying all these eggs in Seattle and Silicon Valley. China has it easy right now. It just needs to do the jobs that we have already invented, just more cheaply. America has to invent the new jobs — and that requires preserving the goose.

Microsoft still does more than 80 percent of its research work in America. But that is becoming harder and harder to sustain when deadlock on Capitol Hill prevents it from acquiring sufficient visas for the knowledge workers it needs that America’s universities are not producing enough of. The number of filled jobs at Microsoft went up this year from 40,000 to 40,500 at its campus outside Seattle, yet its list of unfilled jobs went from 4,000 to almost 5,000. Eventually, it will have no choice but to shift more research to other countries.

It is terrifying to see how budget-cutting in California is slowly reducing what was once one of the crown jewels of American education — the University of California system — to a shadow of its old self. And I fear the cutting is just beginning. As one community leader in Seattle remarked to me, governments basically do three things: “Medicate, educate and incarcerate.” And various federal and state mandates outlaw cuts in medicating and incarcerating, so much of the money is coming out of educating. Unfortunately, even to self-publish, you still need to know how to write. The same is happening to research. A new report just found that federal investment in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health has decreased almost every year since 2003.

When we shrink investments in higher education and research, “we shoot ourselves in both feet,” remarked K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company. “Our people become less skilled, so you are shooting yourself in one foot. And the smartest people from around the world have less reason to come here for the quality education, so you are shooting yourself in the other foot.”

The Labor Department reported two weeks ago that even with our high national unemployment rate, employers advertised 3.74 million job openings in March. That is, in part, about a skills mismatch. In an effort to overcome that, and help fill in the financing gap for higher education in Washington State, Boeing and Microsoft recently supported a plan whereby the state, which was cutting funding to state universities but also not letting them raise tuition, would allow the colleges to gradually raise rates and the two big companies would each kick in $25 million for scholarships for students wanting to study science and technology or health care to ensure that they have the workers they need.

This is not a call to ignore the hard budget choices we have to make. It’s a call to make sure that we give education, immigration and research their proper place in the discussion.

“Empowering the individual and underinvesting in the collective is our great macro danger as a society,” said the pollster Craig Charney. Indeed, it is. Investment in our collective institutions and opportunities is the only way to mitigate the staggering income inequalities that can arise from a world where Facebook employees can become billionaires overnight, while the universities that produce them are asked to slash billions overnight. As I’ve said, nations that don’t invest in the future tend not to do well there.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

If you want a case study of everything that is wrong with money politics, this is it.

Chances are that if you’re sitting on a couch right now, it contains flame retardants. This will probably do no good if your house catches fire — although it may release toxic smoke. There is growing concern that the chemicals are hazardous, with evidence mounting of links to cancer, fetal impairment and reproductive problems.

For years, I’ve written about this type of chemical, endocrine disruptors, but The Chicago Tribune has just published a devastating investigative series called “Playing With Fire” that breaks vast new ground. It is superb journalism.

It turns out that our furniture first became full of flame retardants because of the tobacco industry, according to internal cigarette company documents examined by The Tribune. A generation ago, tobacco companies were facing growing pressure to produce fire-safe cigarettes, because so many house fires started with smoldering cigarettes. So tobacco companies mounted a surreptitious campaign for flame retardant furniture, rather than safe cigarettes, as the best way to reduce house fires.

The documents show that cigarette lobbyists secretly organized the National Association of State Fire Marshals and then guided its agenda so that it pushed for flame retardants in furniture. The fire marshals seem to have been well intentioned, but utterly manipulated.

An advocacy group called Citizens for Fire Safety later pushed for laws requiring fire retardants in furniture. It describes itself as “a coalition of fire professionals, educators, community activists, burn centers, doctors, fire departments and industry leaders.”

But Citizens for Fire Safety has only three members, which also happen to be the three major companies that manufacture flame retardants: Albemarle Corporation, ICL Industrial Products and Chemtura Corporation.

Citizens for Fire Safety paid a prominent Seattle physician, Dr. David Heimbach, who testified in some states in favor of flame retardants. Dr. Heimbach, the former president of the American Burn Association, told lawmakers stories of children who had burned to death on cushioning that lacked flame retardants.

According to The Tribune, Dr. Heimbach made these stories up. Dr. Heimbach told me that the stories were real, with details changed to protect the survivors’ privacy. He said he testified for flame retardants because he believed in them, not because of money he received.

The problem with flame retardants is that they migrate into dust that is ingested, particularly by children playing on the floor. R. Thomas Zoeller, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts, told me that while there have been many studies on animals, there is still uncertainty about the impact of flame retardants on humans. But he said that some retardants were very similar to banned PCBs, which have been linked to everything from lower I.Q. to diabetes, and that it was reasonable to expect certain flame retardants to have similar consequences.

“Despite all that we have learned about PCBs, we are making the same mistakes with flame retardants,” he said.

Linda Birnbaum, the top toxicologist at the National Institutes of Health, put it to me this way: “If flame retardants really provided fire safety, there would be reason for them in certain circumstances, like on an airplane. But there’s growing evidence that they don’t provide safety and may increase harm.”

Arlene Blum, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “For pregnant women, they can alter brain development in the fetus.” Her research decades ago led to the removal of a flame retardant, chlorinated Tris, from children’s pajamas. But chlorinated Tris is still used in couches and nursing pillows (without any warning labels).

The European Union has banned one common flame retardant, Deca BDE, and has generally been more willing to regulate endocrine disruptors than the United States. Why the difference?

“The money is jingling,” notes Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat of New Jersey. Lautenberg has introduced legislation, the Safe Chemicals Act, that would tighten controls — but it has gotten nowhere.

It’s not easy for a democracy to regulate technical products like endocrine disruptors that may offer great benefits as well as complex risks, especially when the hazards remain uncertain. A generation ago, Big Tobacco played the system like a violin, and now Big Chem is doing the same thing.

This campaign season, you’ll hear fervent denunciations of “burdensome government regulation.” When you do, think of the other side of the story: your home is filled with toxic flame retardants that serve no higher purpose than enriching three companies. The lesson is that we need not only safer couches but also a political system less distorted by toxic money.

•

A correction: My column on Thursday misstated the hometown of Paulina Puskala. It is Marquette, Mich.

Last but not least, we have Mr. Bruni:

Now we know what, in today’s warped political economy, $10 million buys you: a hit job spectacular not only in its cynicism but also in its idiocy.

As Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg reported last week in The Times, a politically agitated billionaire (these days, there don’t seem to be any other kind) was considering forking over that much for an advertising campaign that would have dusted off the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and tried to fashion him anew into a noose for Barack Obama.

But while such a campaign would have been eaten up by many established Obama opponents already bloated with hostility toward him, it would have nauseated most swing voters, who are poised to decide the presidential contest of 2012. Beyond which, these voters have had three and a half years of Obama’s actual presidency, as opposed to his bright promises and others’ dark prophecies, to decide whether he’s a closet black radical, as the advertising campaign would have insinuated, or a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln,” which is how it would have described his self-presentation in 2008.

A moment’s pause and a measure of sorely needed levity are in order, to contemplate what a metrosexual Abe Lincoln might look like. Tidier beard, for sure. Better manscaping all in all. Maybe some mole removal. Lose the top hat. Less Potomac, more Provincetown.

But back to business: these Wright ads, now shelved forevermore, would more likely have buoyed than torpedoed the president, because swing voters — who swung for Obama once already — don’t want to be told that they were duped in 2008. They still have some emotional investment in his narrative, and in many cases maintain affection and respect for the man himself. That’s why his re-election prospects and approval ratings aren’t as bad as they might be, given our prolonged economic doldrums and the unpopularity of health care reform.

And he’s a cooler, more charismatic cat than Mitt Romney, whose wisest supporters know that a contest stressing jobs is better for their candidate than a contest stressing personality and emotions.

Joe Ricketts, the billionaire who contemplated a wrongful use of Wright, apparently didn’t get that memo. Perhaps he was distracted by the baseball team his family owns, the Chicago Cubs, or his bison, herds of which he keeps in Wyoming. Rich people collect the darnedest things.

In any case he went rogue, like a missile or a Palin, and in doing so illustrated two disturbing, corrosive dynamics in our political culture right now.

The first is the seemingly metastasizing ranks of magnates with itchy millions and the desire to single-handedly bankroll certain candidates or initiatives. They’re exemplified by Sheldon Adelson, who saw no better use for his wealth than stringing out Newt & Callista’s Execrable Adventure long past the point of box-office viability.

And they’re emboldened, perhaps, by a freewheeling climate around campaign spending right now. In the wake of Citizens United, super PACs could turn out to be the new Gulfstream jets. No tycoon is complete without one.

It’s fascinating how things have evolved and spun out of control. In the quaint old days of Lee Atwater and his disciples, a candidate’s team nudged outside players to do dirty work that it didn’t want its own fingerprints on. The Ricketts saga raises the specter of outside players actually volunteering for even dirtier work that a candidate’s team has no desire for and can’t wrestle control of. The Swift Boat has a motor and mind of its own.

And what nasty waves it makes. That’s the second issue here. A memo prepared for Ricketts expressed frustration that voters “still aren’t ready to hate this president.” Note the word choice in that thought and the goal telegraphed by it. Voters aren’t to be persuaded that Obama lacks the proper skills and plan. They’re to be pumped full of unalloyed disdain for him.

THAT’S how too many campaigns and legislative battles are waged these days: with bile instead of reason, catcalls in place of conversation, and the basest of instincts.

Your opponent isn’t just ill informed. He or she is an idiot.

Your opponent isn’t just wrongheaded. He or she is evil incarnate.

Under Mitt Romney’s leadership, Bain Capital didn’t just close a Kansas City steel mill. “Like a vampire,” it “sucked the life” from the enterprise and those involved in it, according to a former worker whom the Obama campaign chose to showcase in a TV ad it ran on Wednesday night.

There’s a take-no-prisoners approach that does take prisoners: all of us, incarcerated in a system whose crippling partisanship is fueled in part by the hyperbolic language, bellicose tactics and Manichaean tone of candidates and their handlers.

And while there was slander aplenty in our politics past, it wasn’t amplified quite as loudly or spread quite as ferociously as it is by the fight club of today’s hyped-up news outlets, many of which run on the adrenaline of insults and recruit partisan voices to beckon partisan audiences. Turning to Fox News or the Daily Caller, unshakable conservatives can marinate in their contempt for liberals. Turning to MSNBC or the Daily Kos, unshakable liberals can repay the favor.

And the swing voters are turned off. Many of them recoil from meanness run amok and cynicism on steroids, which is why Ricketts’s redeployment of Wright would have been such folly. They want someone to make them feel calmer and more confident, not anxious and gross.

Worth noting: Rob Portman, the Ohio senator mentioned frequently these days as a front-runner for the Republican vice-presidential nomination, won his 2010 race, in a state whose other senator is a Democrat, by 18 points. Yes, it was an excellent year for Republicans, but not quite that excellent for all of them.

He didn’t do it with runaway charisma (though a financial advantage certainly helped). He did it in his steady, subdued manner. In fact the rap on him as a potential running mate for Romney is that he’s too boring.

Maybe so. But there are clearly voters out there who are interested in turning down the heat on our political discourse. Flamethrowers like Ricketts are the last thing they want. And the last thing we need.

Keller and Krugman

Mr. Keller has decided to look at “Tyler and Trayvon.”  He says the tragic deaths of two teenagers raise questions about hate-crime laws and our urge to fix the human race.  Want a taste?  He says “The shooting of Trayvon Martin has become a cause before it is even a case.”  Way to miss the point completely, Mr. Keller.  The shooting of Trayvon Martin is a cause precisely because it is NOT a case.  And this dude was the executive editor of the New York Effing Times…  Prof. Krugman looks at “Pink Slime Economics” and says the Republican budget, with its secret plans to close mystery loopholes, may be the most fraudulent ever.  Here’s the former Executive Editor strutting his stuff:

In 2009 President Obama signed a federal bias crimes law named for the victims of two gruesome 1998 atrocities: the young gay man who was tortured, lashed to a fence and left to die; and the black man chained to the back of a pickup by white supremacists and dragged until he was dismembered. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act joined a 40-year accumulation of statutes declaring that crimes committed with a mind full of racial spite or anti-Semitism or homophobic hatred should be punished more severely than identical crimes committed for greed or vengeance.

Today the notion is embedded in our culture. Almost every state has some variety of hate crime law. The most recent F.B.I. count, for 2010, reports 6,628 “criminal incidents” involving bias — instances where local authorities judged that the offender was motivated by hatred of a particular group. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld disparate penalties for bias crimes in 1993. The A.C.L.U., after years of resisting, endorsed a hate crime bill in 2005.

But the fact that it is constitutional and commonplace does not quiet the nagging sense that hate crime legislation resembles something from an Orwell dystopia. Horrific crimes deserve stern justice, but don’t we want to be careful about criminalizing a defect of character? Because our founders believed that democracy requires great latitude for dissent, America, virtually alone in the developed world, protects the right to speak or publish the most odious points of view. And yet the government is authorized to punish you for thinking those vile things, if you think them in the course of committing a crime.

The issue is back with us thanks to the heartbreaking deaths of two teenagers. One is Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate surreptitiously, briefly, video-streamed him kissing another man. The other is Trayvon Martin, the black Florida youngster shot dead by a neighborhood watch volunteer. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, was convicted not only of invading Clementi’s privacy and intimidating him, but of acting with an anti-gay bias that could add up to 10 years of prison to his sentence. The shooter in the Trayvon Martin case, George Zimmerman, has not been charged with anything, but politicians are already slinging the h-word.

If the idea of criminalizing hatred makes you queasy, as I think it should, these two cases will not settle your stomach.

Anyone who followed the Rutgers trial closely — or read Ian Parker’s absorbing investigation of the two roommates in The New Yorker — is likely to conclude that Ravi is arrogant, mouthy and insensitive, but not a malicious homophobe. Clementi was an openly gay, socially awkward, complicated 18-year-old, who killed himself for reasons we don’t know. My reading of the case is that the jury seized on those handy bias statutes in a clumsy attempt to punish somebody for a death that remains unexplained. It’s not a great reach to say that Ravi faces up to 10 years in prison for being a jerk.

The shooting of Trayvon Martin has become a cause before it is even a case. It’s natural to admire the resolute grace of his grieving parents and to endorse their demand for answers Florida authorities have been slow to provide. It’s commendable to shine the lamp of shame on Florida’s absurdly permissive gun laws. (This, remember, is the state that tried last year to make it a crime for doctors to talk to patients about the dangers of guns in the home.) But fashioning a narrative from the hate-crimes textbook — bellowing analogies to the racist nightmares of Birmingham and Selma, as the reliably rabble-rousing Reverend Sharpton has done — is just political opportunism. This is the kind of demagoguery that could prejudice a prosecution, or mobilize a mob. Is it not creepy, by the way, that Spike Lee was tweeting the suspected home address of George Zimmerman? As if to say, “Go get him!” (Lee sent apologies and a check to the elderly couple who were scared from their home because, oops, the tweet gave the wrong address. But apparently it’s O.K. to terrorize Zimmerman.)

If the trial of Dharun Ravi illustrates how readily hate crime laws can be abused by juries, the death of Trayvon Martin shows how easily they become pitchforks for showboating politicians.

The anguishing cases of Tyler and Trayvon sent me back to the earlier debates over hate crimes. It is an abundant literature packed with historical analogies, philosophical hair-splitting, political posturing and interesting digressions.

Many of the justifications for anti-hate laws seem to me to fall short: bias crimes terrorize more than the immediate victim; yes, but so does a mugger who frequents a particular neighborhood. We must protect the most vulnerable; fine, then why not assign extra penalties for criminals who prey on the poor, children, or — as a few prosecutors have done — the elderly? Racism and other prejudices are especially offensive motives; worse than sadism, or pedophilia?

Back in 2001, Heidi M. Hurd, a professor who comingles law and philosophy, wrote an article entitled “Why Liberals Should Hate ‘Hate Crime Legislation.’ ” The thesis sounded contrarian; hate crime laws evolved out of a great liberal cause — civil rights — and have been propelled by activists and politicians most of us would call liberal. Hurd, though she is a Democrat, was referring not to the contemporary political left but to traditional, John-Locke-and-John-Stuart-Mill liberalism, which holds that the state is licensed to temper bad behavior, not to perfect human nature. Hate crime laws, she wrote, crossed that line: “The law now regulates not only what we do, but who we are.”

There is nothing novel about the law taking into account a criminal’s state of mind; one of the prerequisites for a conviction under common law is “mens rea” — a guilty mind, malice aforethought, criminal intent. The law also recognizes gradations of guilty purpose. A premeditated killing is more punishable than one committed in the heat of the moment, which is worse than a killing that results from negligence. New York law compounds the punishment if you kill someone to prevent him from being a witness.

The distinction Hurd makes — convincingly, I think — is that when you penalize intent you are punishing matters of choice. One can choose not to pull the trigger, not to throw the rock, not to steal the purse.

“You can’t choose not to be prejudiced or biased — at least not willy-nilly, on the spot,” she told me, when I called her the other day at the University of Illinois. “We pass moral judgments all the time against bigots and chauvinists and homophobes and so forth. But this is a question not of what we should morally blame people for, but of what we should deprive them of liberty for.”

In her criminal law class, Hurd teaches the cases of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, and says that every time she confronts those monstrous crimes a part of her wonders, “Why don’t we use the power of the state to make people less evil?” But, as she points out, those were both crimes eligible for the death penalty. “What are you going to do, kill somebody twice?”

In most cases, hate crime laws take offenses that would carry more modest sentences — assault, vandalism — and ratchet up the penalty two or three times because we know, or think we know, what evil disposition lurked in the offender’s mind. Then we pat ourselves on the back. As if none of us, pure and righteous citizens, ever entertained a racist thought or laughed at a homophobic slur.

Bias laws are widely accepted. They are understandable. They are probably here to stay. But they seem to me a costly form of sanctimony.

I suppose if you’re an isolated, rich, white, male MOTU bias laws can be seen as santimonious.  But that statement tells us a great deal about Mr. Keller, more than I really cared to learn.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

The big bad event of last week was, of course, the Supreme Court hearing on health reform. In the course of that hearing it became clear that several of the justices, and possibly a majority, are political creatures pure and simple, willing to embrace any argument, no matter how absurd, that serves the interests of Team Republican.

But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.

And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)

So what are we to make of this proposal? Mr. Gleckman calls it a “mystery meat budget,” but he’s being unfair to mystery meat. The truth is that the filler modern food manufacturers add to their products may be disgusting — think pink slime — but it nonetheless has nutritional value. Mr. Ryan’s empty promises don’t. You should think of those promises, instead, as a kind of throwback to the 19th century, when unregulated corporations bulked out their bread with plaster of paris and flavored their beer with sulfuric acid.

Come to think of it, that’s precisely the policy era Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are trying to bring back.

So the Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.

To be sure, we’ve had irresponsible and/or deceptive budgets in the past. Ronald Reagan’s budgets relied on voodoo, on the claim that cutting taxes on the rich would somehow lead to an explosion of economic growth. George W. Bush’s budget officials liked to play bait and switch, low-balling the cost of tax cuts by pretending that they were only temporary, then demanding that they be made permanent. But has any major political figure ever premised his entire fiscal platform not just on totally implausible spending projections but on claims that he has a secret plan to raise trillions of dollars in revenue, a plan that he refuses to share with the public?

What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that this is what happens when extremists gain complete control of a party’s discourse: all the rules get thrown out the window. Indeed, the hard right’s grip on the G.O.P. is now so strong that the party is sticking with Mr. Ryan even though it’s paying a significant political price for his assault on Medicare.

Now, the House Republican budget isn’t about to become law as long as President Obama is sitting in the White House. But it has been endorsed by Mr. Romney. And even if Mr. Obama is reelected, the fraudulence of this budget has important implications for future political negotiations.

Bear in mind that the Obama administration spent much of 2011 trying to negotiate a so-called Grand Bargain with Republicans, a bipartisan plan for deficit reduction over the long term. Those negotiations ended up breaking down, and a minor journalistic industry has emerged as reporters try to figure out how the breakdown occurred and who was responsible.

But what we learn from the latest Republican budget is that the whole pursuit of a Grand Bargain was a waste of time and political capital. For a lasting budget deal can only work if both parties can be counted on to be both responsible and honest — and House Republicans have just demonstrated, as clearly as anyone could wish, that they are neither.

Many of us have known that for years.

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo is concern trolling again.  In “A Moderate Conservative Dilemma” he gurgles that Nathan Fletcher, a San Diego mayoral candidate, left the Republican Party to become an independent. He represents a nationally important test case.  Bobo should actually finally admit that all the current Republicans are stark raving insane.  In “Broccoli and Bad Faith” Prof. Krugman says this week’s Supreme Court hearings on the health care law seemed to suggest that some justices were embracing any argument they could use to kill reform.  What a surprise…  Who’d have thunk it?  Here’s Bobo:

Nathan Fletcher was raised in Arkansas, played college baseball in California and enlisted in the Marines as a reserve in 1997. He saw combat in 2004, based in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq.

One day Fletcher’s unit went to relieve a convoy and was, in turn, ambushed by insurgents with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire. According to his military records, the unit “attempted to break through the enemy line of resistance several times in order to relieve the convoy, each time coming under heavy, sustained fire, during which Sergeant Fletcher never wavered in his determination to engage the enemy.”

As detailed in fine reporting by Craig Gustafson of The San Diego Union-Tribune, Fletcher was awarded an achievement medal with a Combat “V” for Valor.

But the war on terror is different from other wars. As an intelligence officer, Fletcher didn’t spend most of his time, in Iraq and later around Somalia, shooting at a faraway enemy. He spent it meeting with locals, providing city services, establishing relationships with people completely unlike himself.

He was good at it. In a 2006 report, his commanding officer wrote that Fletcher “is one of the finest Marines, regardless of rank, I have worked with in over 25 years of service to our corps.”

Fletcher already had political ambitions while he was in the Marines. But he came back from his 10 years in the corps with other attributes. First, survivor’s guilt. The fact that he had survived while others did not gave him a strong sense that he should make the rest of his life count for something. Second, he absorbed the military’s spirit of can-do pragmatism. Third, he is impatient with military metaphors applied to politics.

He ran for the California State Legislature and won. His legislative career was an extension of his intelligence work — meeting with people unlike himself and trying to strike arrangements. He championed a bipartisan law rewriting the state’s sex crimes legislation to be consistent with the latest research.

He was one of very few Republicans willing to negotiate with Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, over a tax reform plan. He gave an impassioned speech against “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He became friends with the Democratic speaker.

Fletcher is tall, good-looking, smart, polished (maybe too much so) and moderate. An article in The Sacramento Bee touted him as a rising Republican star, the kind of Republican who could get elected statewide. It didn’t hurt that his wife has worked for George W. Bush and other Republicans.

The next step was obvious: Run for mayor of San Diego. The city has a tradition of electing pragmatic center-right Republicans. Fletcher ran on some conservative ideas — pension reform and fiscal conservatism — and some less conventionally conservative ones — open space, bike paths and environmental policies. He’s also for comprehensive immigration reform.

He was endorsed by Paul Jacobs, the chairman and chief executive of Qualcomm. Both Mitt and Ann Romney, who have a place in San Diego, maxed out to his campaign, giving $500 each.

But as Scott Lewis of voiceofsandiego.org has detailed, the San Diego Republican Party has moved sharply right recently. A group of insurgents have toppled the old city establishment. As Lewis wrote, “The Republican Party has gone through a fantastically effective effort to enforce conformity around its principles.”

The G.O.P. central committee and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, an activist group, spurned Fletcher in the mayor’s race, endorsing the more orthodox conservative, Councilman Carl DeMaio. The councilman already had much higher name identification, and this endorsement gives him a huge structural advantage. Individual candidates can only raise money in $500 chunks, but a party can raise unlimited money and funnel it to the candidate of its choice.

On Wednesday, in a move reflecting long-term disillusionment and in an effort to shake up the campaign, Fletcher said he is leaving the Republican Party. He is becoming an independent. In his announcement video, he railed against the strategy he saw in both parties — the unwillingness to negotiate with the other side to keep it from being able to take credit for any accomplishment.

He declared, “I believe it’s more important to solve a problem than to preserve that problem to use on a campaign. I am willing to work or share or give all the credit to someone if the idea is good. I don’t believe we have to treat people we disagree with as an enemy. I’ve fought in a war. I have seen the enemy. We don’t have enemies in our political environment here.”

Fletcher is the decided underdog in the June 5 voting. But he represents a nationally important test case. Can the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who were trained to be ruthlessly pragmatic, find a home in either political party? Can center-right moderates find a home in the G.O.P., even in coastal California? As the two parties become more insular, is it possible to mount an independent alternative?

Put a sock in it, Bobo, until you can admit your side of the equation is barking mad.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Nobody knows what the Supreme Court will decide with regard to the Affordable Care Act. But, after this week’s hearings, it seems quite possible that the court will strike down the “mandate” — the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance — and maybe the whole law. Removing the mandate would make the law much less workable, while striking down the whole thing would mean denying health coverage to 30 million or more Americans.

Given the stakes, one might have expected all the court’s members to be very careful in speaking about both health care realities and legal precedents. In reality, however, the second day of hearings suggested that the justices most hostile to the law don’t understand, or choose not to understand, how insurance works. And the third day was, in a way, even worse, as antireform justices appeared to embrace any argument, no matter how flimsy, that they could use to kill reform.

Let’s start with the already famous exchange in which Justice Antonin Scalia compared the purchase of health insurance to the purchase of broccoli, with the implication that if the government can compel you to do the former, it can also compel you to do the latter. That comparison horrified health care experts all across America because health insurance is nothing like broccoli.

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate — the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has.

There are at least two ways to address this reality — which is, by the way, very much an issue involving interstate commerce, and hence a valid federal concern. One is to tax everyone — healthy and sick alike — and use the money raised to provide health coverage. That’s what Medicare and Medicaid do. The other is to require that everyone buy insurance, while aiding those for whom this is a financial hardship.

Are these fundamentally different approaches? Is requiring that people pay a tax that finances health coverage O.K., while requiring that they purchase insurance is unconstitutional? It’s hard to see why — and it’s not just those of us without legal training who find the distinction strange. Here’s what Charles Fried — who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.”

Indeed, conservatives used to like the idea of required purchases as an alternative to taxes, which is why the idea for the mandate originally came not from liberals but from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation. (By the way, another pet conservative project — private accounts to replace Social Security — relies on, yes, mandatory contributions from individuals.)

So has there been a real change in legal thinking here? Mr. Fried thinks that it’s just politics — and other discussions in the hearings strongly support that perception.

I was struck, in particular, by the argument over whether requiring that state governments participate in an expansion of Medicaid — an expansion, by the way, for which they would foot only a small fraction of the bill — constituted unacceptable “coercion.” One would have thought that this claim was self-evidently absurd. After all, states are free to opt out of Medicaid if they choose; Medicaid’s “coercive” power comes only from the fact that the federal government provides aid to states that are willing to follow the program’s guidelines. If you offer to give me a lot of money, but only if I perform certain tasks, is that servitude?

Yet several of the conservative justices seemed to defend the proposition that a federally funded expansion of a program in which states choose to participate because they receive federal aid represents an abuse of power, merely because states have become dependent on that aid. Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed boggled by this claim: “We’re going to say to the federal government, the bigger the problem, the less your powers are. Because once you give that much money, you can’t structure the program the way you want.” And she was right: It’s a claim that makes no sense — not unless your goal is to kill health reform using any argument at hand.

As I said, we don’t know how this will go. But it’s hard not to feel a sense of foreboding — and to worry that the nation’s already badly damaged faith in the Supreme Court’s ability to stand above politics is about to take another severe hit.

They’ll probably come up with another one of those “special” decisions that they declare can’t be used as precedent.  Stare decisis be damned.

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

Bobo wants us all to “Step to the Center.”  (As if he had a clue where that is.)  He gurgles that the Obama health care law represents another stage in the concentration of power.  Mr. Cohen muses on “The Titanic and the End of an Era” and says as on 9/11, purring routine turned to panic with incomprehensible swiftness. Then as now, a maelstrom lurks behind order.  Mr. Nocera assures us that “Government’s Not Dead Yet,” and that the workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have the passion to tackle some of the country’s pressing problems.  Despite everything that Republicans tried to keep them from doing it…  Mr. Bruni, in “A Farewell to Newt,” says it’s time to turn away from him and stick to a healthier political regimen.  Here’s Bobo:

On May 23-24, 1865, the victorious Union armies marched through Washington. The columns of troops stretched back 25 miles. They marched as a single mass, clad in blue, their bayonets pointing skyward.

As Wilfred McClay wrote in his book, “The Masterless,” spectators were transfixed and realized that the war had changed them. These troops had gone to war as a coalition of states, with different uniforms in different colors. But they came back as a centralized unit, with a national identity and consciousness.

American history can be seen as a series of centralizing events — the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society.

Many liberals have tended to look at this centralizing process as synonymous with modernization — as inevitable and proper. As problems like inequality get bigger, government has to become more centralized to deal with them. As corporations grow, government has to grow to counterbalance them.

Many conservatives have looked at these inexorable steps toward centralization with growing alarm. Complicated problems, many have argued, are best addressed by local people on the ground. Centralized government inevitably leads to oligarchic government. The virtue of the citizenry depends on local control, personal initiative and intimate connections. These things are being bleached away.

The Obama health care law represents another crucial moment in the move toward centralization. With its state insurance exchanges, Obamacare is not as centralized as a single-payer system. Still, it centralizes authority in at least four ways.

First, while government has always had the power to regulate contracts and business activity, Obamacare compels people to enter into activity so that it can regulate them. This new ability to compel activity opens up vast new powers.

Second, Obamacare centralizes Medicare decisions — and the power of life and death — within an unelected Independent Payment Advisory Board. Fifteen experts are charged with controlling costs from the top down.

Third, Obamacare would continue the centralization of the nation’s resources — absorbing an estimated $1.76 trillion over the next 10 years.

Finally, it would effectively make health care a political responsibility. When you go to a campaign town hall in, say, Britain, you discover that many of the questions are about why somebody’s back or dental surgery didn’t go well and what the candidate can do to fix it. Once voters assume that national politicians are responsible for their health care, national politicians become more active in running the health system.

So this is a big moment. Obamacare forces us again to have an election about how centralized government should be.

Those of us in the Hamiltonian tradition sit crossways in this debate. Alexander Hamilton was not shy about concentrating power in Washington if he thought centralized authority was necessary to achieve national goals. On the other hand, he did not believe central decision-makers had the ability to direct an infinitely complex and changing world. He centralized goal-setting while decentralizing decision-making.

In that tradition, my own view is that the individual mandate is perfectly acceptable policy. We effectively have a national health care system. We all indirectly pay for ill, uninsured people who show up at emergency rooms. If all Americans are in the same interconnected health care system, I think it’s reasonable for government to insist that all Americans participate in the insurance network that is the payment method for that system.

But I think the Obama administration made a disastrous error in centralizing so many of the cost-control elements of the new health care system. I don’t care how many comparative effectiveness research studies are commissioned, there is no way centralized dirigistes can keep up with a complex, innovative system. There is no way government can adapt quickly to failure.

There is no way planners can know how many employers will drop coverage, how many doctors will refuse to see patients in expanded Medicaid, how to write uniform rules governing the state insurance exchanges, how many people will or won’t enter high-risk pools, how Congress will undermine any painful cuts the executive branch does make, how doctors will evade efforts to control their revenue, how doctor shortages will pop up, how spending is best controlled.

From a Hamiltonian perspective, the decentralized premium support model is a better way to control costs: government insists everybody has coverage but then encourages companies, families and Medicare beneficiaries to engage in a regulated process of discovery to find the best care at the lowest cost.

So, yes, let’s have another round in the debate about how centralized American government should be. Let’s watch liberals and conservatives duke it out. But remember there has always been a Hamiltonian alternative: centralize the goals, but decentralize the means people take to get there. Universal coverage is a worthy goal. Decentralized competition is the way to make it affordable.

Right, Bobo.  Sure.  Because it’s worked so VERY well up until now.  Putz.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

I was on a packed rush-hour Tube the other day when my eye was caught by a headline in one of the free tabloids that help pass the time in the Underground: “Menu from Titanic’s last lunch to fetch £100,000 at auction.”

That’s a lot for a menu, but then there is no limit to the fascination with the Titanic. Indeed, I found myself leaning over to read what the first-class passengers on that maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City ate on April 14, 1912, a century ago next month.

There was cockie leekie (a soup of fowl and leeks); egg à l’Argenteuil (scrambled eggs with asparagus tips); veal and ham pie; Norwegian anchovies; corned ox tongue; grilled mutton chops with mashed, fried or baked jacket potatoes; and custard pudding. Recommended libation: iced draught Munich lager.

Somehow all this was captivating, glimpsed on the London Underground one hundred years later. I could see Ruth Dodge of San Francisco, wife of Washington Dodge, a successful banker, mother of Washington Jr., slipping the menu into her purse, a small memento, as she then thought, of a happy interlude.

I say “happy interlude,” but of course I cannot be sure of that, even before disaster struck the great liner and turned those mutton chops into something more.

Whether or not this was in fact your last lunch depended heavily on your sex. Only 33 percent of the men in first class survived, whereas 97 percent of the women in the same class did. “Women and children first” meant something. The overall survival rate for men was 20 percent against 74 percent for women. The lower your class of travel, the lower your chances were.

But of course these numbers are the product of hindsight. The Dodges had no idea what was about to happen to them; none of the more than 2,200 people aboard did. Life, as Kierkegaard noted, is lived forward but understood backward — if you are still around to comprehend it.

Looking back at the Titanic’s doomed load — the high fliers with successful lives, and the humble headed for the New World in search of one — is like looking back at old black-and-white photographs. We are struck above all by how ephemeral the expressions, so full of vitality in the moment, are; and indeed by the brevity of the lives themselves. It was Roland Barthes who observed that, “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

In the case of the Titanic, catastrophe came with an inconceivable swiftness. What, I wondered on that crowded Tube, is it that explains our fascination? In part it is this rapid transition from purring routine to panicked disarray, the same on the Titanic a century ago as in the Twin Towers a decade ago, with similar countdowns from impact to implosion leaving an hour or two for agonized reflection, and the way this reminds us of the maelstrom always lurking behind order. The Titanic was unsinkable. Its fate therefore proves that nothing is.

Perhaps the menu suggests another factor in our fascination. The Titanic sank at the end of an era and on the eve of Europe’s catastrophe.

Today, the very language — cockie leekie or grilled mutton (not lamb) chops — evokes the twilight of the Edwardian era, before the eruption of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, and before the clash of classes and ideologies that the various decks on the Titanic contrived to keep at bay. That clash would become the tragic heart of the 20th century. At dinner in first class that evening the seventh course was roast squab and cress: enough said.

Today, early in another century again marked by war, we do not know how far the era-changing event of 2001 will cast its shadow. But again, as in the muddle on the Titanic, we have people second-guessing the second guesses of people who themselves do not know, and the potential for disaster in at least one region of the world is real.

On this anniversary there are new TV series and books about the Titanic. James Cameron’s movie is being released in 3D. You can hardly turn on the radio in London without hearing Celine Dion. There are memorial cruises — some at 50 percent off! — departing from New York and Southampton to the site where 1,517 souls were lost (many, as in the Twin Towers, without any trace ever being found.)

I have no doubt that in 2101 there will be a similar frenzy of commemoration of 9/11, delivered to any device you choose or even direct to your brain via the chip in your left forearm. I am not unhappy that I will not be there to see it.

Theodor Adorno, the German sociologist, remarked that memory is the only help left to the dead. “They pass away into it,” he wrote, “and if every deceased person is like someone who was murdered by the living, so he is also like someone whose life they must save, without knowing whether the effort will succeed.”

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

I met up recently with my old mentor, Charlie Peters, the founder, editor and driving force behind The Washington Monthly, where I worked in the late-1970s. Charlie is a supreme idealist who believes deeply in the good that government can do. He saw it growing up with Roosevelt’s New Deal and then again as a member of Sargent Shriver’s Peace Corps, where he served as the agency’s first director of evaluation.

Now 85, Charlie still believes that that government can make a difference in people’s lives. Knowing that many Americans have turned against this idea, he is writing a book “to give evidence that it has happened — and to show it can happen again,” he told me. The New Deal and the Great Society were eras when “money was not the driving force in choosing a career,” he said. “Passion was. People wanted to be able to do something about the country’s most pressing problems — and government was the place to do that.”

As Charlie spoke, it occurred to me that there is one agency in today’s government where you can still see that passion: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Last week, I went to Washington to spend some time with some of the bureau’s new employees.

The brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, the consumer bureau was part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and it has been charged with looking out for the interests of financial consumers. Warren initially brought it to life, and her charisma and rock-star status was a powerful early draw. “I saw her on TV, and then read her book ‘The Two-Income Trap,’ ” said Sean O’Mealia, 25, who joined the bureau from a consulting company. “I really believed in what she was saying about helping consumers. That was my motivating force.”

Warren, alas, left after Senate Republicans made clear that they would never confirm her as director, and President Obama named Richard Cordray, the former attorney general of Ohio, to be the agency’s first director. He has been trying to instill a culture that can best take advantage of the young talent flocking to its door. “To corral their sense of idealism and put it in the service of improving life for the average consumer, that is a tremendous thing,” he said. In thinking about how to instill that culture, Cordray kept reflecting on Charlie’s old boss, Sargent Shriver. “He built on the awareness that there is tremendous talent and energy in young people.” That is what Cordray was trying to do.

To judge by the people I spent the day talking to, he’s done it well. Angela Peoples, 25, had been the legislative director at the United States Student Association, which had pushed hard to ensure that the new bureau would have authority over student loans. In her still-young career, she had met many students who felt trapped by their loans, and it is the issue she most cared about. Her boss, Rohit Chopra, 30, a former consultant, said, “A whole generation of people are overleveraged with student loans. They won’t be able to get a mortgage or save for retirement. They won’t be able to do the things that are profitable for the banks.”

I met a designer, Audrey Chen, 33, who had worked at Comedy Central and was thrilled to be designing documents that would allow consumers to understand and compare financial offerings. O’Mealia told me how much he admired Cordray’s commitment to consumers and how he and other young staff members had become concerned that Cordray was working so hard that he wasn’t eating enough. (They took to getting him fruit every night to make sure that he had something to eat.) I met Garry Reeder, 26, who had gone from “a trailer park in North Carolina” to an M.B.A. student at Columbia University. “You can’t do that without credit,” he said. “But credit also makes a lot of people’s lives more difficult.” He wanted to make sure that people fully understood what they were getting into when they made a financial transaction. “You can’t have a system where the only way an institution does well is if the other party doesn’t fully understand the transaction.”

When I reported back to Charlie about my inspiring day at the new consumer bureau, he wasn’t surprised. “The beautiful thing about a new agency is that everyone is very driven to accomplish the mission. As they mature,” he added, “that’s when people become more concerned with self protection, and maneuvering for the next promotion.” True enough, but a problem for another day.

The last person I spoke to at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was Holly Petraeus, the wife of David Petraeus who leads the agency’s office for the military and their families. “I think there are still idealists in Washington,” she said. “And they work in this building.”

Last but not least here’s Mr. Bruni:

It’s not easy letting him go. Not easy at all. Sort of like swearing off bedtime Ben & Jerry’s: there’s valor and the promise of self-improvement in the sacrifice, but also the sad awareness that the world just got a little less naughty. A little less fun.

No matter. It’s time to cut Newt out of our diets.

He has no nutritional value, certainly not at this point, as he peddles his ludicrous guarantee of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, a promise that would be made only by someone with his own bottomless strategic reserve of crude. Doubly oily entendre intended.

There were calls for him to desist two weeks ago, after he lost Alabama, which abuts his home state of Georgia. But they fell on a deaf Newt.

There were fresh appeals last week, when he failed to wring even one measly delegate from Illinois on Tuesday and then Louisiana on Saturday. But Newt doesn’t need anything as prosaic as delegates, so long as there’s still pocket lint from Sheldon Adelson and the warmth of Callista’s frozen smile.

If he refuses to quit, we in the news media must quit him. Starve him of his very sustenance: attention. Exert a kind of willpower that we’ve lacked in this primary, which we turned into too much of a circus by encouraging too many clowns.

We’ve begun. As the weekend came to a close, The Times’s Trip Gabriel reported that Gingrich’s “full-time traveling press corps is down to a handful of embedded television reporters.” The Associated Press, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and even Politico had packed up their bags. I envision Newt as a larger, grayer, windier version of the little boy at the end of “Shane,” watching the last of these stubborn scribes recede into the horizon, begging them for one last sweet tweet, promising a tasty sound bite about Trayvon Martin or Robert De Niro or … “The Hunger Games!” There must be some harbinger of cultural decline to rail about there! Do “Hunger Games” contestants use food stamps? Those are always good for a diatribe or three.

I implore Fox News to pull up its drawbridge, CNN to bolt its doors. If a Newt falls in the forest and not a single news anchor listens, can he really hang around?

He says he’s propelled by a desire to promote “big ideas,” but his candidacy has devolved into ever smaller talk and ever more desperate sideshows that drag an already undistinguished debate ever lower. Late last week he actually resurrected the Obama-as-Muslim bile, saying the president’s policies raise legitimate suspicion in voters’ minds.

In truth Newt 2012 has never been a lofty enterprise. Although he loves to tout his intellectualism, he got what brief traction he did for visceral and theatrical reasons, with fits of rage and flights of fancy.

He took off when he lashed out at “the elites,” pretending not to be one of them. He soared when he savaged the news media. He rocketed to a colony on the moon.

And he illustrated a dynamic that will survive this campaign season and that we should all think about: how much the profusion of cable channels, Web outlets, other news platforms and commentary of all kinds (including this column) rewards flamboyance, histrionics and a crowded field. A brash candidate is never more than a bellow away from three minutes of air time or two paragraphs somewhere. The beast is ravenous, and I don’t mean Newt.

Yes, the serial surges of the Republican contest since August had grounding in a fickle electorate and changeable polls. But we eagerly abetted them. En route to our beige destiny of Mitt, we craved color. And showcased it.

Newt is one of the few surviving peacocks, especially if you discount Ron Paul, who’s less peacock than emaciated ostrich — never airborne, head in the sand — and so consistently discounted that no one even bothers to implore him to fold his tent. No one can remember that he pitched one.

It’s time to forget Newt as well. His delegate count is closer to Paul’s than to Rick Santorum’s. His strategy — a generous noun — hinges on a replay of the 1920 Republican convention, which picked Warren G. Harding on the 10th ballot.

The 10th ballot? That’d really send the Republican nominee into the general election with a head of steam. I can see the bumper stickers now. Newt: Battle ready. Ballot hardened.

Great politicians are memorialized with holidays, monuments, libraries. For Newt I think an ice cream flavor is in order, something in the clogged vein of Chubby Hubby or Chunky Monkey, although not so physique-focused. Nutty Professor is too obvious a suggestion, though it opens the door to pralines, aptly Southern.

Maybe Peaches ’n’ Scream? That would honor the state he comes from while acknowledging the state he’s been in — unsubtle, overwrought.  Not qualifying for the Virginia primary was a blow akin to Pearl Harbor. The Palestinians are “an invented” people.

Newt is empty calories. A pointless pint of them.

A pint?  More like a fat-laden gallon…

Keller and Krugman

Bill Keller has the unmitigated gall and audacity to write “Falling In and Out of War,” in which he presents five questions a president should ask before sending in the bombers.  I supposed it’s better late than never, but bear in mind he was Managing Editor when Judith Miller was peddling lies on the front pages of the Times.  Bastard.  Prof. Krugman says “Hurray for Health Reform,” and that despite some imperfections, the Affordable Care Act would do a lot of good and must be defended.  Here’s Mr. Keller, only a decade too late:

When you’ve been wrong about something as important as war, as I have, you owe yourself some hard thinking about how to avoid repeating the mistake. And if that’s true for a mere kibitzing columnist, it’s immeasurably more true for those in a position to actually start a war.

So here we are, finally, messily winding down the long war in Afghanistan and simultaneously being goaded toward new military ventures against the regimes in Syria and Iran. Being in the question-asking business, I’ve been pondering this: What are the right questions the president should ask — and we as his employers should ask — when deciding whether going to war is (a) justified and (b) worth it? Here are five, plus two caveats, and some thoughts about how all this applies to the wars before us.

1. HOW IS THIS OUR FIGHT?

It ought to be the first question we ask. Sometimes the answer is obvious. There is a broad agreement that it was in America’s vital national interest in 2001 to go after the homicidal zealots behind the 9/11 attacks on America, and the Afghan regime that hosted them. Whatever you think of how the war was waged or how long it should continue, the going-in was, as the cops say, a righteous shoot.

Often the American stake is not so clear-cut. We may feel an obligation to defend an ally. (Some allies more than others.) We have been known to fight for our economic interests. We intervene in the name of American values, an elastic rubric that can mean anything from halting a genocide to, in George W. Bush’s expansive doctrine, promoting freedom.

Senator John McCain, demanding American air strikes to help rebels topple the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, adopts the Bush “freedom agenda” rationale: by halting suffering and helping overthrow tyranny, we earn some leverage with the victors, improving the odds that Syria will become less hostile to our interests. For a variety of robust dissents, look no further than the conservative Web site National Review Online. There you find the neocon view that intervention is not about fomenting a Syrian democracy; it is about striking at an Islamist, anti-American cabal centered on Iran. You also find the libertarian view that our national interest is best served by staying out of a situation we can only make worse.

Nobody said these would be easy questions.

2. AT WHAT COST?

Judged solely by Question No. 1, there is little difference between Libya, where we helped an inchoate mix of rebels overthrow a brutally oppressive regime, and Syria, where we have so far chosen not to help an inchoate mix of rebels overthrow an even more brutally oppressive regime. The critical difference: Syria is much harder. Libya had weak air defenses deployed along the coastline, easily accessible to Western bombers. Syria’s defenses are more lethal, more plentiful and spread across inland population centers. “We’d have to carpet-bomb a path in and out, or risk American pilots being shot down by the regime and used as human shields,” said John Nagl, a retired Army counterinsurgency expert who teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy. “We’d be killing a lot more people.”

Cost-benefit analysis may seem a cold-blooded discipline — you can’t put a price on freedom, blah blah blah — but it is inseparable from the question of our national interests. After more than 10 years of war that have bled our treasury of at least $3 trillion, killed or disabled many thousands of our troops, and created the kind of multiple-rotation stress that invites atrocities and desecrations, every incremental commitment has to be weighed against the cost to our economic security and our readiness to face the next real threat.

Karl Eikenberry, who served in Afghanistan both as a military commander and as ambassador, put it this way: “If we do not in the future better align ends, ways and means, historians may find that in the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the United States was compelled to contract its global posture similar to the British when they announced their ‘East of Suez’ policy in the late 1960s.”

3. OR WHAT?

Policy makers should — and President Obama mostly has — put a premium on appraising alternatives to war. Most notably, the president has held off an Israeli air assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities by mobilizing tough sanctions on Iran’s oil and banking industries, and by all but declaring that if Iran gets too close to making nuclear weapons the U.S. will send in the bombs. The sanctions show some signs of working.

The ultimate “or what” question about Iran is, if sanctions and threats fail, could we live with a nuclear Iran? Could we trust that like every other nuclear state Iran would be deterred from using its weapons by the certain knowledge that a counterstrike would turn Persia into a wasteland? It’s worth serious discussion, but while the idea of containment by deterrence is gaining ground in pundit-land, President Obama can’t touch it; to do so would undermine the whole effort to halt Iran’s program and, not incidentally, would be hazardous to his reelection.

4. AND WHO ELSE?

In these optional wars, it is useful to have company — to enhance our moral authority, to amplify the intelligence, to share the cost, to spread the risk — and to second-guess us. In Libya, we had 17 other nations enforcing a blockade and no-fly zone, Arabs and Turks among them. “Leading from behind” may have been a mockable phrase, but it was a serviceable strategy.

In Syria, no one is volunteering to join us yet.

5. THEN WHAT?

This is the question Robert Gates made a mantra at the Defense Department: What happens next? How does this play out? What are the second-order and third-order effects?

One unintended (but foreseeable) consequence of invading Iraq was that it distracted our attention and energy from the far more important undertaking in Afghanistan. Now one possible consequence of rushing too fast for the exits in Afghanistan — tempting as that may be given the breakdown of Afghan-American trust — is the increased likelihood that a collapsing Afghanistan would spill into a wobbly Pakistan. In Pakistan there are both numerous nuclear weapons and an abundance of rogue fanatics who would not hesitate to use them.

Syria, says Nagl, is another good place to think hard about collateral chaos: “The hard part is not toppling Assad, it’s what comes afterwards. Everybody raise your hands if you’re up for another occupation of an Islamic country.”

My first caveat is public opinion, which no democracy can ignore. Fighting wars is not something you do by poll. Public opinion can be wrong. It lagged behind F.D.R. before World War II; it was riding along enthusiastically with President Bush when he invaded Iraq. But public opinion puts a thumb on the scale. The U.S. used force to stop a genocide in Bosnia, but did not in Rwanda or Darfur — one critical difference being that Americans (and American TV screens) were paying attention to the European slaughter, but not to the African atrocities.

My second caveat is that asking the right questions only works if you are prepared to hear answers you might not like. Sometimes our leaders start with the answers and work backward, fixing the facts to the policy, as the head of Britain’s MI6 said of the Potemkin intelligence used to sell the invasion of Iraq. To pick just one example from the no-fact zone of Republican primary season, Rick Santorum, the most hawkish of the Republican candidates on Iran, keeps suggesting that Iran’s nuclear program is not under international inspection. It’s possible that Iran has hidden away some facility we don’t know about, but everything we know about — that is, everything we would bomb if we decided to attack — is monitored by international inspectors.

If Iraq taught us nothing else, it should have taught us this: Before you deploy the troops, deploy the fact-checkers.

I guess the Times had none of those 10 years ago…  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

It’s said that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies. If the same principle applies to legislation, the Affordable Care Act — which was signed into law two years ago, but for the most part has yet to take effect — sits in a place of high honor.

Now, the act — known to its foes as Obamacare, and to the cognoscenti as ObamaRomneycare — isn’t easy to love, since it’s very much a compromise, dictated by the perceived political need to change existing coverage and challenge entrenched interests as little as possible. But the perfect is the enemy of the good; for all its imperfections, this reform would do an enormous amount of good. And one indicator of just how good it is comes from the apparent inability of its opponents to make an honest case against it.

To understand the lies, you first have to understand the truth. How would ObamaRomneycare change American health care?

For most people the answer is, not at all. In particular, those receiving good health benefits from employers would keep them. The act is aimed, instead, at Americans who fall through the cracks, either going without coverage or relying on the miserably malfunctioning individual, “non-group” insurance market.

The fact is that individual health insurance, as currently constituted, just doesn’t work. If insurers are left free to deny coverage at will — as they are in, say, California — they offer cheap policies to the young and healthy (and try to yank coverage if you get sick) but refuse to cover anyone likely to need expensive care. Yet simply requiring that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions, as in New York, doesn’t work either: premiums are sky-high because only the sick buy insurance.

The solution — originally proposed, believe it or not, by analysts at the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation — is a three-legged stool of regulation and subsidies. As in New York, insurers are required to cover everyone; in return, everyone is required to buy insurance, so that healthy as well as sick people are in the risk pool. Finally, subsidies make those mandated insurance purchases affordable for lower-income families.

Can such a system work? It’s already working! Massachusetts enacted a very similar reform six years ago — yes, while Mitt Romney was governor. Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who played a key role in developing both the local and the national reforms (and has published an illustrated guide to reform) has surveyed the results — and finds that Romneycare is working pretty much as advertised. The number of people without insurance has dropped sharply, the quality of care hasn’t suffered, and the program’s cost has been very close to initial projections.

Oh, and the budgetary cost per newly insured resident of Massachusetts was actually lower than the projected cost per American insured by the Affordable Care Act.

Given this evidence, what’s a virulent opponent of reform to do? The answer is, make stuff up.

We all know how the act’s proposal that Medicare evaluate medical procedures for effectiveness became, in the fevered imagination of the right, an evil plan to create death panels. And rest assured, this lie will be back in force once the general election campaign is in full swing.

For now, however, most of the disinformation involves claims about costs. Each new report from the Congressional Budget Office is touted as proof that the true cost of Obamacare is exploding, even when — as was the case with the latest report — the document says on its very first page that projected costs have actually fallen slightly. Nor are we talking about random pundits making these false claims. We are, instead, talking about people like the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, who issued a completely fraudulent press release after the latest budget office report.

Because the truth does not, sad to say, always prevail, there is a real chance that these lies will succeed in killing health reform before it really gets started. And that would be an immense tragedy for America, because this health reform is coming just in time.

As I said, the reform is mainly aimed at Americans who fall through the cracks in our current system — an important goal in its own right. But what makes reform truly urgent is the fact that the cracks are rapidly getting wider, because fewer and fewer jobs come with health benefits; employment-based coverage actually declined even during the “Bush boom” of 2003 to 2007, and has plunged since.

What this means is that the Affordable Care Act is the only thing protecting us from an imminent surge in the number of Americans who can’t afford essential care. So this reform had better survive — because if it doesn’t, many Americans who need health care won’t.

 

Brooks and Krugman

In “The Cagey Phase” Bobo has a question.  He says we’ve seen different facets of Obama throughout his presidency. As this election cycle unfolds, how will he demonstrate his commitment to the country?  Whatta tool.  Prof. Krugman, in “Natural Born Drillers,” says Republicans say gas would be cheap and jobs plentiful if we stopped protecting the environment and gave energy companies free rein. They’re wrong.  Well, that’s not surprising.  Republicans are generally wrong about everything.  Here’s Bobo:

Presidents don’t fundamentally change personalities while in office, but different aspects of their personality arise at different times. The first two years of the Obama presidency were the audacious phase: doing many big things at once. It was audacious to promote a giant health care reform in the middle of an economic crisis. It was audacious to continue to support it even after a Republican won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

But, more recently, President Obama has entered his cagey phase. By saying “cagey” I don’t mean deceptive. I mean cautious, incremental, clever, maneuvering to reduce one’s vulnerabilities. I mean balancing one’s positions so as to mollify opposing forces.

In Afghanistan, President Obama increased troop levels, to please his generals, while simultaneously announcing a withdrawal date, to please his party. On deficit reduction, Obama has often said he agrees with the Simpson-Bowles approach, while simultaneously distancing himself from the specific proposals. On tax reform, Obama has frequently said he wants to simplify the code while simultaneously proposing loopholes that make it more complex.

President Obama has gotten tough on China while simultaneously getting friendly with China. He has ratcheted up the heat on Iran while simultaneously trying to restrain Israel. He has promoted new oil and gas exploration while simultaneously blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would transport it.

One of the crucial moments of his presidency came in April of last year. Usually, presidents lead by proposing a budget and everybody reacts. But Obama decided to hang back and let Representative Paul Ryan propose a Republican budget. Then, after everybody saw the size of the cuts Ryan was proposing, Obama could come in with his less scary alternative. That is cageyness personified.

This is not a new element in Obama’s personality. He has always had a cautious, cool professional streak, and a tendency to see both sides of any issue. He often seems to adopt multiple perspectives and check his own impulses. Joe Klein, the Time magazine columnist, counted 50 on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand formulations in “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama’s second book.

In many ways, this serves him well. Life is about trade-offs, and often you want a leader who tries to balance. The cagey phase has certainly served Obama well politically. Liberals pine for the transcendent emotionalism of the 2008 campaign, but, by being incremental and reducing his exposure, he has made himself more acceptable to independents.

It has also served him well in foreign policy. Most military people would rather serve under a commander who led with a certain trumpet, but Obama’s hot-and-cold approaches to China, Russia and Iran have generally been excellent. In many ways, Obama’s multifaceted, maneuvering style makes him a natural foreign policy president.

But I wonder if this style will serve him well domestically, given the situation he will face if he wins re-election.

In December, a re-elected Obama would face three immediate challenges: the Bush tax cuts expire; there will be another debt-ceiling fight; mandatory spending cuts kick in. In addition, there will be an immediate need to cut federal deficits. During the recession, the government could borrow gigantic amounts without pushing up interest rates because there was so little private borrowing. But as the economy recovers and demand for private borrowing increases, then huge public deficits on top of that will push up interest rates, crowd out private investment and smother the recovery.  

These big problems won’t be solved during the transition. They are too complicated. Congress will find a mechanism to delay, and the nation will embark on a major effort to do tax reform, entitlement reform and debt reduction. This grand project — reforming the basic institutions of government — will consume the first two years of the next president’s new term, no matter who is elected. It has to get done or a debt crisis will be imminent.

Leading the country through this will require the intelligence, balance and craftiness that Obama has demonstrated. But it will also require indomitable inner conviction and an aggressive drive to push change. It will require a fearless champion who will fight all the interests that love the tax code the way it is. It will require a fervent crusader to rally the country behind shared sacrifice. It will take an impervious leader willing to spread spending cuts everywhere and offend everybody all at once. There will have to be a clearly defined vision of what government will look like at the end.

Obama has talked vaguely about tax reform. He has acknowledged the need for entitlement reform and major deficit reduction. But he has never thrown himself All In. He has never displayed an inner passion, a sense that these projects are his life mission, or a willingness to bear the pain that taking on these challenges necessarily entails.

It will be interesting, over the course of this campaign, to see what’s underneath the cageyness. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, arouses Obama’s passion to go All In.

Bobo, here’s a huge plate of salted rat dicks.  Dig in…  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

To be a modern Republican in good standing, you have to believe — or pretend to believe — in two miracle cures for whatever ails the economy: more tax cuts for the rich and more drilling for oil. And with prices at the pump on the rise, so is the chant of “Drill, baby, drill.” More and more, Republicans are telling us that gasoline would be cheap and jobs plentiful if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want.

Thus Mitt Romney claims that gasoline prices are high not because of saber-rattling over Iran, but because President Obama won’t allow unrestricted drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal tells readers that America as a whole could have a jobs boom, just like North Dakota, if only the environmentalists would get out of the way.

The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.

Why the hydrocarbon boom? It’s all about the fracking. The combination of horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing of shale and other low-permeability rocks has opened up large reserves of oil and natural gas to production. As a result, U.S. oil production has risen significantly over the past three years, reversing a decline over decades, while natural gas production has exploded.

Given this expansion, it’s hard to claim that excessive regulation has crippled energy production. Indeed, reporting in The Times makes it clear that U.S. policy has been seriously negligent — that the environmental costs of fracking have been underplayed and ignored. But, in a way, that’s the point. The reality is that far from being hobbled by eco-freaks, the energy industry has been given a largely free hand to expand domestic oil and gas production, never mind the environment.

Strange to say, however, while natural gas prices have dropped, rising oil production and a sharp fall in import dependence haven’t stopped gasoline prices from rising toward $4 a gallon. Nor has the oil and gas boom given a noticeable boost to an economic recovery that, despite better news lately, has been very disappointing on the jobs front.

As I said, this was totally predictable.

First up, oil prices. Unlike natural gas, which is expensive to ship across oceans, oil is traded on a world market — and the big developments moving prices in that market usually have little to do with events in the United States. Oil prices are up because of rising demand from China and other emerging economies, and more recently because of war scares in the Middle East; these forces easily outweigh any downward pressure on prices from rising U.S. production. And the same thing would happen if Republicans got their way and oil companies were set free to drill freely in the Gulf of Mexico and punch holes in the tundra: the effect on prices at the pump would be negligible.

Meanwhile, what about jobs? I have to admit that I started laughing when I saw The Wall Street Journal offering North Dakota as a role model. Yes, the oil boom there has pushed unemployment down to 3.2 percent, but that’s only possible because the whole state has fewer residents than metropolitan Albany — so few residents that adding a few thousand jobs in the state’s extractive sector is a really big deal. The comparable-sized fracking boom in Pennsylvania has had hardly any effect on the state’s overall employment picture, because, in the end, not that many jobs are involved.

And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.

Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer.

And intellectual bankruptcy, I’m sorry to say, is a problem that no amount of drilling and fracking can solve.

 

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

Today Bobo has decided to wring his hands over “The Fertility Implosion.”  He babbles that birthrates are falling nearly all over the world, and the speed of this change is breathtaking. As the population ages, this is creating great challenges.  So maybe that’s why the current crop of Republicans are so intent on doing away with contraception…  Mr. Cohen, in “#StopKONY Now!!!,” says a superficial movie about an African war criminal goes viral, and that on balance is a good thing.  Mr. Nocera has a question:  “Is MF Global Getting a Free Pass?”  He says no prosecution at all in the case would send a terrible message to the rest of us.  Mr. Bruni, in “One-Way Wantonness,” says Rush Limbaugh’s trash talk exposes a sexist double standard.  Here’s Bobo:

When you look at pictures from the Arab spring, you see these gigantic crowds of young men, and it confirms the impression that the Muslim Middle East has a gigantic youth bulge — hundreds of millions of young people with little to do. But that view is becoming obsolete. As Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah of the American Enterprise Institute point out, over the past three decades, the Arab world has undergone a little noticed demographic implosion. Arab adults are having many fewer kids.

Usually, high religious observance and low income go along with high birthrates. But, according to the United States Census Bureau, Iran now has a similar birth rate to New England — which is the least fertile region in the U.S.

The speed of the change is breathtaking. A woman in Oman today has 5.6 fewer babies than a woman in Oman 30 years ago. Morocco, Syria and Saudi Arabia have seen fertility-rate declines of nearly 60 percent, and in Iran it’s more than 70 percent. These are among the fastest declines in recorded history.

The Iranian regime is aware of how the rapidly aging population and the lack of young people entering the work force could lead to long-term decline. But there’s not much they have been able to do about it. Maybe Iranians are pessimistic about the future. Maybe Iranian parents just want smaller families.

As Eberstadt is careful to note, demographics is not necessarily destiny. You can have fast economic development with low fertility or high fertility (South Korea and Taiwan did it a few decades ago). But, over the long term, it’s better to have a growing work force, not one that’s shrinking compared with the number of retirees.

If you look around the world, you see many other nations facing demographic headwinds. If the 20th century was the century of the population explosion, the 21st century, as Eberstadt notes, is looking like the century of the fertility implosion.

Already, nearly half the world’s population lives in countries with birthrates below the replacement level. According to the Census Bureau, the total increase in global manpower between 2010 and 2030 will be just half the increase we experienced in the two decades that just ended. At the same time, according to work by the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, the growth in educational attainment around the world is slowing.

This leads to what the writer Philip Longman has called the gray tsunami — a situation in which huge shares of the population are over 60 and small shares are under 30.

Some countries have it worse than others. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has managed the trick of having low birthrates and high death rates. Russian life expectancy is basically the same as it was 50 years ago, and the nation’s population has declined by roughly six million since 1992.

Rapidly aging Japan has one of the worst demographic profiles, and most European profiles are famously grim. In China, long-term economic growth could face serious demographic restraints. The number of Chinese senior citizens is soaring by 3.7 percent year after year. By 2030, as Eberstadt notes, there will be many more older workers (ages 50-64) than younger workers (15-29). In 2010, there were almost twice as many younger ones. In a culture where there is low social trust outside the family, a generation of only children is giving birth to another generation of only children, which is bound to lead to deep social change.

Even the countries with healthier demographics are facing problems. India, for example, will continue to produce plenty of young workers. By 2030, according to the Vienna Institute of Demography, India will have 100 million relatively educated young men, compared with fewer than 75 million in China.

But India faces a regional challenge. Population growth is high in the northern parts of the country, where people tend to be poorer and less educated. Meanwhile, fertility rates in the southern parts of the country, where people are richer and better educated, are already below replacement levels.

The U.S. has long had higher birthrates than Japan and most European nations. The U.S. population is increasing at every age level, thanks in part to immigration. America is aging, but not as fast as other countries.

But even that is looking fragile. The 2010 census suggested that U.S. population growth is decelerating faster than many expected.

Besides, it’s probably wrong to see this as a demographic competition. American living standards will be hurt by an aging and less dynamic world, even if the U.S. does attract young workers.

For decades, people took dynamism and economic growth for granted and saw population growth as a problem. Now we’ve gone to the other extreme, and it’s clear that young people are the scarce resource. In the 21st century, the U.S. could be the slowly aging leader of a rapidly aging world.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Justin Bieber, the pop star, put it bluntly to his 18.3-million Twitter army: “SO glad you’re behind this! He MUST be stopped! THANK YOU for helping spread the word. POWER IS IN NUMBERS. #STOPKONY.”

Yes, as u MUST know by now — unless u live on another planet!! — a 30-minute video uploaded to YouTube on March 5 by the advocacy group Invisible Children designed to rally global support for the arrest of Joseph Kony, a Ugandan war criminal, has gone viral, with 71 million views on YouTube as I write and no doubt MILLIONS more by the time u read this.

Kony is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.), which started operations in northern Uganda more than two decades ago, kidnapping children by the thousands, turning some into sex slaves and brutalizing the civilian population. He’s top of the International Criminal Court’s most-wanted list.

But this just in: RT button and #hashtags apparently operating with 10-year delay. And esp this: the celebs of the California-based White Savior Industrial Complex are terrible reporters. I mean, rly.

The L.R.A. has been in decline for some time, its membership probably numbers a few hundred rather than the tens of thousands mentioned in the video, Kony and his dwindling band now operate mainly in other nations including the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the once terrorized northern Ugandan city of Gulu is calm enough to attract investment.

None of which dented the determination of P. Diddy, the rapper. He rallied his six million Twitter followers to the cause after seeing the “KONY 2012” video: “Dear Joseph Kony, I’m Gonna help Make you FAMOUS!!!! We will stop YOU #StopKONY. All 6,000,000 of my followers RT now!!! Pls!”

They sure did RT. My 14-year-old daughter was bombarded on Twitter and Facebook early last week. She watched the video, as have her friends. According to figures posted on Vimeo, the video sharing Web site, 58,000 people viewed the video on March 5, 2.7 million on March 6, 8.2 million on March 7 — and so on exponentially.

Nothing, it seems, has ever gone viral at quite the speed of this film about a faraway African conflict that’s basically over.

The real q is: why? Another q, for people in my business, is why try to get people exercised on the world’s problems in 800 words when long-reads are a shrinking niche, widely regarded as lame or just BS, if millions can be mobilized about not much in 140 characters or less?

But back to the video, made by Jason Russell and co-starring his young son Gavin. It’s a powerful piece of work. It’s also eerie. Here’s the plot: Bad guy called Kony terrorizes thousands of kids, including co-star former abductee Jacob Acaye (whose brother was killed by the L.R.A.). A connected world can stop Kony if it acts. Send $30 to Invisible Children for your #StopKONY action kit — including two bracelets!!!

The eerie bit is the way Russell uses his cute little boy to make his point. Jacob: good. Kony: bad. Situation: sad. He gets the child to respond to prompts and so, in effect, turns us all into five-year-olds learning about Africa. At times it feels like squirming Gavin is getting lessons from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

But, of course, Russell is no sinister totalitarian. He’s just simplifying grossly and distorting adeptly to make a valid point: that no effort should be spared to arrest Kony. His white-savior push for Africa is well intentioned — and it has plugged into an inspiring current of cyber-idealism among the under-25s.

It’s also generated significant pushback, including a heavily viewed Tumblr blog called “Visible Children” by Grant Oyston, a student at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, who raised numerous questions about Invisible Children. The group appears to have spent much of its $9-million 2011 income on officer salaries, travel and filmmaking rather than on-the-ground programs; it has no Africans on its board.

In short, this is a teachable Internet moment. Every social media theorist is weighing in, many lamenting the simplifications and distortions of Internet action.

On balance I back Russell over his armchair critics. He’s put his boots on the ground and he’s doing something. Gross simplification of Africa is nothing new. It’s the poor, disease-ravaged, war-torn continent where every complicated war is about control of diamonds, right? The reduction of Uganda’s many problems to Kony abusing children is not much different from the reduction of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo to a fight for mineral riches. So, Russell works in a well-established genre, even if he pushes it.

Sure, his superficial video and its viral wave have troubling aspects. As Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” tweeted: “Should we pay attention to the LRA because Invisible Children is more effective at using social media than the Free Syrian Army is. WTF?”

Well, no — but it would help if the Free Syrian Army or Syrian National Council had Twitter handles.

Anyway, I’ve already written my next column. Here it is: “He MUST be stopped. Do smth!! All 17,577 of my followers pls RT now!!! #StopAssadinSyria.

And I’m sure that all the twitter-twats will have a miraculous effect…  Here’s Mr. Nocera:

It’s sure starting to look as if Jon Corzine is going to get away with it.

By now, it has been well established that Corzine’s former firm, MF Global, committed the sin of sins for a broker-dealer. In late October, during the final, desperate days before it entered bankruptcy proceedings, its executives took money from segregated customer accounts — money that belonged not to MF Global but to the farmers and commodities traders that were its clients — and used it to prop up its rapidly collapsing business. Nor was this petty cash: of the $6.9 billion in customer assets that MF Global held, a stunning $1.6 billion is missing. There is virtually no chance that the full amount will ever be recovered.

Let’s not mince words here. These executives committed a crime. Virtually every knowing violation of the Commodities Exchange Act is a crime, but taking money from segregated customer accounts is at the top of the list. And for good reason. Customer money is supposed to be sacrosanct. If a broker-dealer goes bankrupt, the segregated accounts are supposed to remain safe, a little like the way bank deposits remain protected if a bank goes under. Indeed, customers need to be able to trust the fact that their money is segregated and protected at all times. Otherwise, the markets can’t function.

Yet, a few weeks ago, Azam Ahmed and Ben Protess, who have done a remarkable job covering the MF Global bankruptcy for The Times, wrote an article suggesting that prosecutors were having trouble putting together a criminal case against anyone at MF Global. So far, wrote Ahmed and Protess, they’d been “unable to find a smoking gun.” In fact, they continued, “a number of federal prosecutors have expressed doubts” that MF Global “intentionally misused customer money.” Apparently, the current theory is that it was all just a big accident, the chaos of those final days causing the firm’s executives to tap into customer funds without realizing it.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes. Of course there isn’t a smoking gun. As a general rule, financial professionals tend not to write e-mails that say, “Hey, we’re desperate. Let’s break into the customer accounts!” And, of course, they are always going to say it was unintentional. They are saying it already, starting with Corzine, who told Congress last year that “there was no intention to violate segregation rules.”

As for the chaos, you bet it was chaotic at the end. How could it not have been? Last month, James W. Giddens, the bankruptcy trustee for the broker-dealer arm of MF Global, issued a report that vividly described the scene: “The rush to meet funding needs … led to billions of dollars in securities sales, draws on credit facilities and a web of intercompany loans. … The company’s computer systems and employees had trouble keeping up. … A number of transactions were recorded erroneously or not at all. …” And so on.

Well, fine. But is it really plausible that you can take $1.6 billion — nearly 25 percent of the customer assets under management — and not know you’ve used customer money? It is not. One theory, which is implicitly suggested in the trustee’s report, is that the executives “borrowed” the money thinking they would be able to replace the funds quickly, which they then couldn’t because the counterparties wouldn’t give back the collateral. That’s still a crime.

I understand that bringing complex financial cases in front of a jury is not easy. But what prosecutors don’t seem to understand is that the country needs them to bring these cases. When they took a pass on Angelo Mozilo, the former chairman and chief executive of Countrywide, and Richard Fuld, who was chief executive of Lehman Brothers when it went bankrupt, they sent a signal that the highly paid executives who gave us the financial crisis would not be held to account.

A failure to prosecute anyone at MF Global would be, if anything, even worse. It would mean that executives at a broker-dealer can indeed steal customer money and get away with it — so long as it was “unintentional.” And it would only deepen the cynicism so many people feel about government. I’ve heard it suggested, for instance, that the Justice Department won’t prosecute Corzine because it would hurt President Obama. (Corzine, the former governor of New Jersey, had been a big fund-raiser for the president.) I don’t happen to subscribe to that theory, but I certainly understand why others might.

To be sure, it is early yet. Federal investigators are still digging into the facts surrounding MF Global’s failure, no doubt searching for that elusive smoking gun. But if, in the end, they decide they can’t make a case, I hope they understand what they are telling the rest of us. Giving the big guys a pass isn’t good for the financial markets. And it isn’t good for democracy either.

Pigs will fly before anyone on Wall Street is indicted for anything.  Now here’s Mr. Bruni:

Hussy. Harlot. Hooker.

Floozy. Strumpet. Slut.

When attacking a woman by questioning her sexual mores, there’s a smorgasbord of slurs, and you can take your rancid pick. Help me out here: where are the comparable nouns for men? What’s a male slut?

A role model, in some cases. In others, a presidential candidate.

“Gigolo” doesn’t have the acid or currency of “whore,” and the man with bedpost notches gets compliments. He’s a Casanova, a conquistador.

The lady is a tramp.

Nearly two weeks since Rush Limbaugh let loose on Sandra Fluke, equating her desire for insurance-covered birth control with a prostitute’s demand for a fee, the wrangling over how awful that really was and whether it will truly haunt him continues.

Advertisers bolted in protest; advertisers come and go all the time. It was the beginning of his end; it was ratings chum. He lost his way; he was Rush in Excelsis.

One especially robust strand of commentary has focused on whether Limbaugh, a god of the far right, was smacked down for the kind of thing that less conservative men routinely get away with.

In a spirited essay on The Daily Beast this past weekend, the novelist Paul Theroux joined many commentators in alleging liberal hypocrisy, of which there has indeed been some.

And he said that provocative language is an essential part of public dialogue, arguing that you can’t recoil from its deployment against Fluke unless you want to forfeit its use elsewhere.

“You have to give Limbaugh a pass,” he maintained, in order to preserve the right to call Newt Gingrich and Eric Cantor “pimps for Israel, and Rick Santorum a mental midget.”

It’s an interesting point, but it ignores the precise type of language Limbaugh turned to and assumes an even playing field where one doesn’t exist.

While both men and women are called idiots and puppets and frauds, only women are attacked in terms of suspected (or flat-out hallucinated) licentiousness. And only for women is there such a brimming, insidious thesaurus of accordant pejoratives.

Decades after the dawn of feminism, despite the best efforts of everyone from Erica Jong to Kim Cattrall, women are still seen through an erotically censorious prism, and promiscuity is still the ultimate putdown.

It’s antediluvian, and it’s astonishing. You’d think our imaginations would have evolved, even if our humanity hasn’t.

Anthony Weiner may have been felled by his libido, but the weirdness of its expression and his recklessness were what people mainly balked at. Ditto for John Edwards. No one called them gigolos.

You could argue that Limbaugh chose the slurs he did for Fluke simply because the context, a debate over contraception, was in part sexual.

But there are examples aplenty of women being derided as sluts and prostitutes — two of his descriptions of Fluke — when sex is nowhere in the preamble, nowhere in the picture.

Some involve Limbaugh himself. As Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan noted in a recent editorial for CNN.com, he has referred to female cabinet members as “sex-retaries.”

But look as well to Columbia University and what happened last week after President Obama, an alumnus, announced that he would give a commencement address at its all-women’s sister school, Barnard College, instead. A Columbia blog lit up with anti-Barnard rants, several stressing crude, tired sexual stereotypes. A few were apparently written by women.

Last year the TV and radio host Ed Schultz hurled “slut” as an all-purpose insult at the right-wing commentator Laura Ingraham. He got a week’s suspension.

Another radio host, John “Sly” Sylvester, used his Wisconsin talk show to savage the state’s lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, as someone given to oral and group sex. This was just random invective, his special way of saying “I hate you.” He went unpunished.

The impulse toward gross sexual caricatures of women is a sick tic without end.

In 1992 the threat to Bill Clinton’s first presidential bid was a “bimbo eruption.” Note how the slur was assigned to the lubricious co-conspirator, not the lustful (and philandering) candidate.

Two decades later, Amanda Knox wasn’t just an alleged killer but an alleged killer with supposedly kinky sexual habits, the latter presumably shedding light on the former.

Just before the Hollywood producer and director Brett Ratner was dropped from taking charge of this year’s Oscars telecast, he went on a revoltingly sexist tear, saying that he insists that the women he becomes physically intimate with are examined first for transmissible diseases. He separately used an anti-gay epithet. His misogyny struck me as more florid than his homophobia, but if you followed the events closely, you sensed that the homophobia did him in. Only because his victim pool included men as well as women did the water get really hot.

Back to Limbaugh: the lawyer Gloria Allred has called for his criminal prosecution, citing an obscure Florida statute. (Limbaugh does his radio show from West Palm Beach.) The statute says anyone who “speaks of and concerning any woman, married or unmarried, falsely and maliciously imputing to her a want of chastity” is committing a misdemeanor.

Good thing it’s not a felony. The prisons might fill to bursting.

And of course that revolting pig gets to spew his bile on the Armed Forces Network…