Collins, Blow and Herbert

My Firefox blew up this morning, and it’s taken a while to get it all sorted out.  [snarl]  So here we go.  Ms. Collins, in “The Siege of Planned Parenthood,” says so much for doing something about jobs, jobs, jobs. Our elected officials seem more worried about repealing health care and stopping family-planning services.  Of course they are, honey.  All our wombs belong to the Talibangelicals.  Didn’t you know that?  I’m lucky that mine is all old and shriveled up.  Mr. Blow, in “The Kindling of Change,” says a check of some data shows Tunisia and Egypt to have a lot of company when it comes to elements that may spark a revolution.  Let’s hope so, and that there are peaceful outcomes.  Mr. Herbert is “Bewitched by the Numbers,” and says confusing jobless data do not capture the painful economic realities plaguing millions of American families.  Sweetie, the jobless data is cooked.  Doesn’t include folks who’ve given up.  It’s probably closer to 15% than 9%, and I think I’m being VERY conservative in that.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

As if we didn’t have enough wars, the House of Representatives has declared one against Planned Parenthood.

Maybe it’s all part of a grand theme. Last month, they voted to repeal the health care law. This month, they’re going after an organization that provides millions of women with both family-planning services and basic health medical care, like pap smears and screening for diabetes, breast cancer, cervical cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.

Our legislative slogan for 2011: Let Them Use Leeches.

“What is more fiscally responsible than denying any and all funding to Planned Parenthood of America?” demanded Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, the chief sponsor of a bill to bar the government from directing any money to any organization that provides abortion services.

Planned Parenthood doesn’t use government money to provide abortions; Congress already prohibits that, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. (Another anti-abortion bill that’s coming up for hearing originally proposed changing the wording to “forcible rape,” presumably under the theory that there was a problem with volunteer rape victims. On that matter at least, cooler heads prevailed.)

Planned Parenthood does pay for its own abortion services, though, and that’s what makes them a target. Pence has 154 co-sponsors for his bill. He was helped this week by an anti-abortion group called Live Action, which conducted a sting operation at 12 Planned Parenthood clinics in six states, in an effort to connect the clinic staff to child prostitution.

“Planned Parenthood aids and abets the sexual abuse and prostitution of minors,” announced Lila Rose, the beautiful anti-abortion activist who led the project. The right wing is currently chock-full of stunning women who want to end their gender’s right to control their own bodies. Homely middle-aged men are just going to have to find another sex to push around.

Live Action hired an actor who posed as a pimp and told Planned Parenthood counselors that he might have contracted a sexually transmitted disease from “one of the girls I manage.” He followed up with questions about how to obtain contraceptives and abortions, while indicating that some of his “girls” were under age and illegally in the country.

One counselor, shockingly, gave the “pimp” advice on how to game the system and was summarily fired when the video came out. But the others seem to have answered his questions accurately and flatly. Planned Parenthood says that after the man left, all the counselors — including the one who was fired — reported the conversation to their supervisors, who called the authorities. (One Arizona police department, the organization said, refused to file a report.)

Still, there is no way to look good while providing useful information to a self-proclaimed child molester, even if the cops get called. That, presumably, is why Live Action chose the scenario.

“We have a zero tolerance of nonreporting anything that would endanger a minor,” said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood. “We do the same thing public hospitals do and public clinics do.”

But here’s the most notable thing about this whole debate: The people trying to put Planned Parenthood out of business do not seem concerned about what would happen to the 1.85 million low-income women who get family-planning help and medical care at the clinics each year. It just doesn’t come up. There’s not even a vague contingency plan.

“I haven’t seen that they want to propose an alternative,” said Richards.

There are tens of millions Americans who oppose abortion because of deeply held moral principles. But they’re attached to a political movement that sometimes seems to have come unmoored from any concern for life after birth.

There is no comparable organization to Planned Parenthood, providing the same kind of services on a national basis. If there were, most of the women eligible for Medicaid-financed family-planning assistance wouldn’t have to go without it. In Texas, which has one of the highest teenage birthrates in the country, only about 20 percent of low-income women get that kind of help. Yet Planned Parenthood is under attack, and the State Legislature has diverted some of its funding to crisis pregnancy centers, which provide no medical care and tend to be staffed by volunteers dedicated to dissuading women from having abortions.

In Washington, the new Republican majority that promised to do great things about jobs, jobs, jobs is preparing for hearings on a bill to make it economically impossible for insurance companies to offer policies that cover abortions. And in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry, faced with an epic budget crisis that’s left the state’s schools and health care services in crisis, has brought out emergency legislation — requiring mandatory sonograms for women considering abortion.

Hypocrisy — with Republicans it’s a feature, not a bug.  Always remember that, Gail.  Here’s Mr. Blow:

It is impossible to know exactly which embers spark a revolution, but it’s not so hard to measure the conditions that make a country prime for one.

Since the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, speculating about whether the fervor will spread and to which countries has become something of a world-watcher’s parlor game.

So I’ve decided to give over much of my space this week to providing more data for that discussion.

As The New York Times headline declared earlier this week, “Jobs and Age Reign As Factors in Mideast Uprisings.” And the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy has used levels of democracy to identify countries at risk around the world.

These are solid measures, but I would add spending on essentials like food (there is nothing like food insecurity to spur agita), income inequality and burgeoning Internet usage (because the Internet has been crucial to the organization of recent uprisings).

Seen through that prism, Tunisia and Egypt look a lot alike, and Algeria, Iran, Jordan, Morocco and Yemen look ominously similar.

Please, explore for yourself.

Color me unsurprised.  Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

The data zealots have utterly discombobulated themselves.

They were expecting something on the order of 150,000 new jobs to have been created in January. That would have been a lousy number, but they were fully prepared to spin it as being pretty good. They thought the official jobless rate might hop up a tick to 9.5 percent.

Instead, the economy created just 36,000 jobs in January, an absolutely dreadful number. But the unemployment rate fell like a stone from 9.4 percent to 9.0 percent.

The crunchers stared at the numbers in disbelief. They moved them this way and that. No matter how they arranged them, they made no sense. Nothing even close to enough jobs were being created to bring the unemployment rate down, but for two successive months it had dropped sharply. (It dived from 9.8 percent to 9.4 in December.)

A baffled commentator on CNBC said, “I think there is an improvement in the economy, though you can’t see it in today’s payroll survey.”

Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, who is frequently very good at this stuff, said: “I think these numbers are meaningless. I don’t think they mean anything.”

What data zealots need to do is leave their hermetically sealed rooms and step outside, take a walk among the millions of Americans who are hurting to the bone. They should talk with families that are suffering, losing their homes, doubling up, checking into homeless shelters.

We behave as though the numbers are an end in themselves — just get the G.D.P. up or the jobless rate down — and we’ll be on our way to fat city. But the numbers are just tools, abstractions to help guide us, orient us. They aren’t the be-all and end-all. They don’t tell us squat about the flesh-and-blood reality of the mom or dad lying awake in the dark of night, worrying about the repo man coming for the family van or the foreclosure notice that’s sure to materialize any day now.

The policy makers who rely on the data zealots are just as detached from the real world of real people. They’re always promising in the most earnest tones imaginable to do something about employment, to ease the awful squeeze on the middle class (policy makers never talk about the poor), to reform education, and so on.

They say those things because they have to. But they are far more obsessed with the numbers than they are with the struggles and suffering of real people. You won’t hear policy makers acknowledging that the unemployment numbers would be much worse if not for the millions of people who have left the work force over the past few years. What happened to those folks? How are they and their families faring?

The policy makers don’t tell us that most of the new jobs being created in such meager numbers are, in fact, poor ones, with lousy pay and few or no benefits. What we hear is what the data zealots pump out week after week, that the market is up, retail sales are strong, Wall Street salaries and bonuses are streaking, as always, to the moon, and that businesses are sitting on mountains of cash. So all must be right with the world.

Jobs? Well, the less said the better.

What’s really happening, of course, is the same thing that’s been happening in this country for the longest time — the folks at the top are doing fabulously well and they are not interested in the least in spreading the wealth around.

The people running the country — the ones with the real clout, whether Democrats or Republicans — are all part of this power elite. Ordinary people may be struggling, but both the Obama administration and the Republican Party leadership are down on their knees slavishly kissing the rings of the financial and corporate kingpins.

I love when the wackos call President Obama a socialist. Wasn’t it his budget director, Peter Orszag, who moved effortlessly from his job in the administration to a hotshot post at Citigroup, beneficiary of tons of government largess? And didn’t the president’s new chief of staff, William Daley, arrive in his powerful new post fresh from the executive suite of JPMorgan Chase? And isn’t the incoming chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness very conveniently the chairman and chief executive of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt?

You might ask: Who represents working people? The answer, as Tevye would say with grave emphasis in “Fiddler on the Roof,” is, “I don’t know.”

Maybe the data zealots have stumbled on a solution. They’ve created a model in which a radically insufficient number of jobs has resulted in a sharp decline in the official gauge of unemployment. If that trend can be sustained, we’ll eventually get the jobless rate down to zero. People will still be suffering, but full employment will have finally been achieved.

Fuckers.

Brooks and Herbert

Bobo’s trying to be helpful again.  He’s not any good at it, but he keeps on trying.  Today, in “The Talent Magnet,” he gurgles that President Obama’s State of the Union address should paint a vision of America being the crossroads nation of the 21st century.  It’s typical Bobo crap.  Mr. Herbert, in “Raising False Alarms,” says attacking Social Security is cruel and unnecessary, and it has to stop.  But it won’t.  Here’s Bobo:

President Obama will be talking about economic growth and competitiveness in the State of the Union address Tuesday night. It will be interesting to see if he talks about it in the standard way or in a visionary way.

The conventional way would be fine — expanding exports, reforming education, adjusting corporate tax rates to help firms compete. But it wouldn’t really give the country what it hungers for. The country wants a more precise vision of what a thriving America is going to look like in the 21st century. It also wants Obama to define, once and for all, his vision of government’s role.

A visionary speech might begin with the fact that America’s position in the world is changing. In the 20th century, America was the Big Dog nation. We had more money, more resources and more skilled labor, and we could outcompete our rivals by dominating the inputs and the outputs — by pouring in more talent, greater investments and more resources.

In the 21st century, the U.S. will no longer be the Big Dog. Human capital will be more broadly dispersed. There will be an array of affluent nations fully engaged in the global economy. Therefore, competitiveness will be more about organizing relationships than amassing force. To thrive, America will have to be the crossroads nation where global talent congregates and collaborates.

Parents in middle-class nations around the world should want to send their kids to American colleges. Young strivers should dream of working in Hollywood or Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs from Israel to Indonesia should be visiting venture-capital firms in San Francisco or capital markets in New York. Global engineers should want to learn the plastics techniques in Akron and retailers should learn branding and distribution in Bentonville and Park Slope.

In this century, economic competition between countries is less like the competition between armies or sports teams (with hermetically sealed units bashing or racing against each other). It’s more like the competition between elite universities, who vie for prestige in a networked search for knowledge. It’s less: “We will crush you with our efficiency and might.” It’s more: “We have the best talent and the best values, so if you want to make the most of your own capacities, you’ll come join us.”

The new sort of competition is all about charisma. It’s about gathering talent in one spot (in the information economy, geography matters more than ever because people are most creative when they collaborate face to face). This concentration of talent then attracts more talent, which creates more collaboration, which multiplies everybody’s skills, which attracts more talent and so on.

The nation with the most diverse creative hot spots will dominate the century.

If this is the nature of competitiveness, what is the role for government? Well, government will be a bit like the administration of a university. A university president is nominally the head of the institutions. He or she lives in the big house. But everybody knows a university president is a powerful stagehand.

The professors, the researchers, the tutors, the coaches and the students are the real guts of a university. They handle the substance of what gets done. The administrators play vital but secondary roles. They build the settings. They raise money. They recruit and do marketing. They help students who are stumbling.

The administrators couldn’t possibly understand or control the work in the physics or history departments. They just try to gather talent, set guidelines and create an atmosphere where brilliance can happen.

So it is with government in an innovation economy. Entrepreneurs, corporate executives, line workers and store managers handle the substance of the economy. Government tries to nurture settings where brilliance can happen.

First, government establishes an overall climate, with competitive tax rates and predictable regulations and fiscal balance. Tax rates don’t have to be rock bottom. Companies will pay more if there are other amenities to compensate. But everything should be structured to nurture new business formation.

Then government actively concentrates talent. City governments are used to thinking in this way, while national governments lag. For example, Robert Steel, the deputy mayor of New York City, gave an excellent speech on Dec. 16 on how to build a bioscience center in Brooklyn and how to build an engineering center on Staten Island or Roosevelt Island. The speech was about using government to build hubs.

Finally, the government has to work aggressively to reduce the human capital inequalities that open up in an innovation economy. That means early and constant interventions so everybody has a chance to participate.

President Obama exists because his father was drawn to study in the United States. Obama embodies America’s nascent role as the crossroads nation. Let’s see if he can describe the next phase of American greatness.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

If there’s a better government program than Social Security, I’d like to know what it is.

It has gone a long way toward eliminating poverty among the elderly. Great numbers of them used to live and die in ghastly, Dickensian conditions of extreme want. Without Social Security today, nearly half of all Americans aged 65 or older would be poor. With it, fewer than 10 percent live in poverty.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us that close to 90 percent of people 65 and older get at least some of their family income from Social Security. For more than half of the elderly, it provides the majority of their income. For many, it is the only income they have.

When you see surveillance videos of some creep mugging an elderly person in an elevator or apartment lobby, the universal reaction is outrage. But when the fat cats and the ideologues want to hack away at the lifeline of Social Security, they are treated somehow as respectable, even enlightened members of the society.

We need a reality check. Attacking Social Security is both cruel and unnecessary. It needs to stop.

The demagogues would have the public believe that Social Security is unsustainable, that it is some kind of giant contributor to the federal budget deficits. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the Economic Policy Institute has explained, Social Security “is emphatically not the cause of the federal government’s long-term deficits, since it is prohibited from borrowing and must pay all benefits out of dedicated tax revenues and savings in its trust funds.”

Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t have been clearer about the crucial role of the payroll taxes used to finance Social Security. They gave the beneficiaries a “legal, moral and political right” to collect their benefits, he said. “With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program.”

There has always been feverish opposition on the right to Social Security. What is happening now, in a period of deficit hysteria, is that this crucial retirement program is being dishonestly lumped together with Medicare as an entitlement program that is driving federal deficits. Medicare costs are a serious problem, but that’s because of the nightmarish expansion of health care costs in general.

Beyond Medicare, the major drivers of the deficits are not talked about so much by the fat cats and demagogues because they were either responsible for them, or are reaping gargantuan benefits from them, or both. The country is drowning in a sea of debt because of the obscene Bush tax cuts for the rich, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have never been paid for and the Great Recession.

Mugging the nation’s grandparents by depriving them of some of their modest, hard-earned Social Security retirement benefits is hardly an answer to the nation’s ills. And, believe me, those benefits are modest. The average benefit is just $14,000 a year, which is less than the minimum wage would pay. With employer-provided pensions going the way of the typewriter and pay telephones, the income from Social Security is becoming more precious by the day.

“If we didn’t have Social Security, we’d have to invent it right now,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. “It’s perfectly suited to the terrible times we’re going through. Hardly anyone has pensions anymore. People’s private savings have taken a huge hit, and home prices have been hit hard. So the private savings that so many seniors and soon-to-be seniors have counted on have just been wiped out.

“Social Security is still there, and it’s still paying out retirement benefits indexed to wages. It’s the one part of the retirement stool that is working.”

The deficit hawks and the right-wingers can scream all they want, but there is no Social Security crisis. There is a foreseeable problem with the program’s long-term financing, but it can be fixed with changes that do no harm to its elderly beneficiaries. One obvious step would be to raise the cap on payroll taxes so that wealthy earners shoulder a fairer share of the burden.

The alarmist rhetoric should cease. Americans have enough economic problems to worry about without being petrified that their Social Security benefits will be curtailed. A Gallup poll taken recently found that 90 percent of Americans ages 44 to 75 believed that the country was facing a retirement crisis. Nearly two-thirds were more fearful of depleting their assets than they were of dying. The fears about retirement are well placed — most Americans do not have enough to retire on. But there should be no reason to believe that Social Security is in jeopardy.

The folks who want to raise the retirement age and hack away at benefits for ordinary working Americans are inevitably those who have not the least worry about their own retirement. The haves so often get a perverse kick out of bullying the have-nots.

No shit, Sherlock…

Collins, Blow and Herbert

In “The Week of Speaking Pleasantly” Ms. Collins says as the new Congress gets to work, we get a look at the new breed of politician who came up through reality TV.  Mr. Blow, in “Obama’s Gun Play,” says President Obama’s base has high expectations on gun control. Will he openly support sensible restrictions in the State of the Union next week?  Yeah, Mr. Blow, that’ll calm down the rabid crazies on the right who are convinced he’s out to take their guns away.  Good move!  Mr. Herbert, in “The Loss of a Good Man,” says Sargent Shriver, who died this week at 95, had a splendid vision of America.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Congress really has been looking a little more civil. Not quite Athens in the age of Pericles, but it’s very possible that this year we’ll get through the State of the Union address without anybody jumping up to scream insults at the president.

Going for baby steps.

The Senate has had no comity issues whatsoever because everybody went home after a single meeting early this month under rules that require time to come to a halt. It’s officially still the first day of the year in Harry Reid Land, demonstrating once again how closely the United States Senate resembles the second season of the original “Star Trek.”

But the House has been busy. First, the members read the Constitution out loud, which gave us a welcome opportunity to recall the time last fall that John Boehner gave a speech in which he bragged that he carried the document everywhere, pulled it out of his pocket, waved it around, and then started to recite passages from the Declaration of Independence.

Then came the first bill of the year, which directed the Government Printing Office to stop producing hundreds of copies of bills and resolutions that people can just look up online.

It passed unanimously! Who says Republicans and Democrats can’t work together? True, since the entire House printing budget is only about $7 million a year, this is not going to make much of an impact on the deficit. But trees will be saved, waste paper reduced and Washington parks will no longer be littered with fluttering resolutions commemorating National Frozen Food Day.

Good start, guys.

Then, of course, the new Republican majority took their symbolic vote to repeal the health care reform law. The debate really wasn’t that bad. In a welcome break from the past, the Republicans refrained from claiming that God was personally rooting for the collapse of Obamacare. And while the Democrats said that people would die if the law was repealed, they did not suggest that this would make the Republicans happy.

I’m picking up good vibrations … …

“I look forward to working with my friends not only on the right but also my colleagues on the left to craft a bill that’s going to work for the American people,” said Sean Duffy, a new Republican from Wisconsin. He is the one who used to be in the reality show “The Real World.” He met his wife on another reality show, “Road Rules All-Stars,” and they now have six children.

I believe Sean Duffy is the progenitor of a new breed of American politicians who will begin their careers by being chosen to live, on camera, with a bunch of strangers in a large apartment, or competing for valuable prizes on a remote island, or losing enormous amounts of weight on national television. Then they can announce their candidacy for Congress.

No longer will it be necessary to go to law school. Actually, Duffy did both, but he is like one of those cross-species babies in science-fiction movies who pave the way for a whole new life form.

When they weren’t being polite to one another, the Democrats spent much of the debate time holding up pictures of seriously ill constituents who would lose their health coverage if the law went away, while Republicans made their victims out of small business.

“I want to tell you about the owner of the Pizza Hut in Headland, Ala., who will be forced to close his doors due to the costs associated with this law,” warned Martha Roby, one of the freshmen who defeated an incumbent Democrat and, therefore, got special first-day positioning.

The new law’s opponents don’t generally say in so many words that they’re fighting for employers’ God-given right to refuse to provide health insurance for their workers. But that seems to be the bottom line.

The worst moment for the Democrats came when one of their own, Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, broke the march toward civil discourse by comparing the Republican talking points to Nazi propaganda. This was during a brief speech in which he also managed to work in the term “blood libel.”

The only possible consolation for his fellow party members was that in this week’s competition for worst remark by a politician, Cohen was pitted against the new governor of Alabama, who announced in his Martin Luther King Day speech that any constituent who had not accepted Jesus Christ as his savior was “not my brother.”

That would be worse, particularly if you were a Jew or a Muslim living in Birmingham.

But, all in all, not a bad record. Maybe civility will become a serious trend. Everything would be better. All the screaming heads would lose their cable TV shows to be replaced by a bunch of pleasant House members who can talk both about the issues, and their plans to appear on “Survivor CCLV.”

Now here’s Mr. Blow:

President Obama is under renewed pressure from his base to demonstrate that he is, indeed, a principled man of unwavering conviction rather than a pliant political reed willingly bent and bowed by ever-shifting winds.

This time the issue is gun control.

Pre-presidency, Obama had been a strong supporter of gun-control initiatives. Since then, however, he has remained curiously quiet on the issue in general and following the Tucson shooting in particular.

The question now is: which Obama will show up at the State of the Union?

Obama, the politician, must be hesitant. He’s enjoying a surge in the polls following a successful lame-duck session of Congress in which a few concessions bought substantial gains. And his handling of the shooting seemed to strike the right balance with the overwhelming majority of Americans. He’s on a roll!

Furthermore, according to a 2005 Gallup poll, gun owners are almost twice as likely to be white as nonwhite, are more than three times as likely to be male as female and are more likely to live in the South and Midwest than in the East or West. Yes, you guessed it: This fits the profile of the voters Obama has lost and needs to win back if he wants to be re-elected.

And no one wants to upset the powerful gun-rights lobby, whose campaign-finance clout dwarfs that of the gun-control lobby. According to data from the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog group the Center for Responsive Politics, the gun-rights lobby has contributed more than $24 million in election cycles from 1990 to 2010. About 85 percent went to Republicans. By comparison, the gun-control lobby donated less than $2 million in the same period, mostly to Democrats.

That said, Obama the gun-control supporter surely knows how anomalous we are among comparable nations. We are a violent society whose intense fealty to firearms has deadly consequences. Sensible restrictions on the most dangerous weapons could go a long way toward making us safer.

According to 2005 data from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, a comparison of member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for which data were available showed that the U.S. is in a league of its own, and not in a good way. We have nearly 9 guns for every 10 people, and about 9 out of every 10 of our homicides are committed with one of those guns. No other country even comes close.

At the moment, there is popular support for more restrictions. According to a NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, 52 percent of Americans asked believed that laws covering the sale of guns should be made more strict. Will Obama seize the sentiment? This is a test of character: Will the president choose what is right over what is convenient and speak out for what he believes in?

Next week we will see which Obama emerges: a stalwart of conviction, an exemplar of expediency or someone still stuck in the ambiguous middle of conciliation and pseudocourage.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

It was like reading fiction. Scott Stossel, in his book, “Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver,” described a harrowing World War II sea battle that erupted off Guadalcanal on the night of Nov. 14, 1942:

“The foremast was hit. Electrical fires erupted continuously, all around Shriver. Whole gun crews were killed by flying shells. The ship began to slow down, and more Japanese rounds ripped across the deck, killing an officer in the radar plotting room. Three rounds exploded in another battle station, killing a half dozen more men. Steam lines were severed, and the hot, hissing steam scalded numerous sailors. Ladders between decks got knocked out, making putting out fires and attending to the growing scores of wounded much more difficult. Shriver himself was wounded when metal shrapnel from an explosion lodged itself in his shoulder, a wound for which he was later to be awarded a Purple Heart.”

It was such a different time, an era when it was considered shameful for men to run and hide when their nation was at war. Now we send other people’s children off to war willy-nilly, and the rest of us go shopping. (At least until someone steeped in the business philosophy of Neutron Jack Welch takes our jobs away.)

R. Sargent Shriver, one of America’s great good men, died this week at the age of 95. He was best known as the brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy. Married for 56 years to Kennedy’s sister, Eunice, who died in 2009, he was also the father of Maria Shriver, the former television personality who is married to Arnold Schwarzenegger. That Mr. Shriver was not better known for his own extraordinary accomplishments, and for his rock-solid commitment to the ideals that this nation ought to stand for, is not just unfortunate, but discouraging.

He was the founding director of the Peace Corps, the signature success of Kennedy’s New Frontier. He founded Head Start, created the Job Corps and Legal Services for the Poor, and gave us Volunteers in Service to America, which was the domestic version of the Peace Corps. He served as president and chairman of the Special Olympics, which was founded by Eunice Shriver. Indefatigable and unrepentantly idealistic, Mr. Shriver may have directly affected more people in a positive way than any American since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He was the flip side of the cruelty and ugliness that has come to dominate so much of American public life. The U.S. has once again fallen into the hands of the forces who, rather than trying to help, would relieve the middle class and the poor of every last shred of economic security. Not only have millions been thrown out of work, but the squeeze is on to prevent them from getting the safety net assistance that might cushion the awful blow of joblessness.

Public services are being dismantled throughout the republic in the name of austerity — school systems, libraries, police forces, transportation services, and so on. Any talk of raising taxes on the rich is verboten. Shared sacrifice? Not if you’re wealthy.

Sargent Shriver had a different view of America — warmer, richer and more humane. A young Bill Moyers, who joined Mr. Shriver at the Peace Corps and eventually became its deputy director, said a crucial component of the corps was Mr. Shriver’s deep commitment to the idea of America “as a social enterprise … of caring and cooperative people.”

Here’s an example: In 1964, as leader of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Johnson administration, Mr. Shriver came across studies that showed connections between poor nutrition, lower I.Q. scores and arrested social and emotional development. He wondered whether early childhood intervention “could have a beneficial effect on the children of poor people.” Head Start followed in incredibly short order.

Mr. Shriver was the point man, the driving force of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. Between 1964 and 1968, nearly one of every three poor Americans left the poverty rolls, the largest drop in a four-year period ever recorded. Mr. Shriver’s idealism was not of the dreamy sort. It was geared toward concrete results.

He was also a fighter for the rights and dignity of black people and other ethnic minorities. It was Mr. Shriver who suggested that John Kennedy, during his campaign for the presidency, make a phone call to Coretta Scott King, expressing his concern and offering assistance at a time when her husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had been sentenced to a four-month prison term at hard labor for a bogus traffic-related arrest in Georgia.

Real courage, idealism, a commitment to service and a willingness to sacrifice — Sargent Shriver had all of that and more. In an interview several years ago, he told me, “We made an effort during that time to find out what was true, and what was needed by way of improvement.”

 

Brooks and Herbert

Bobo has been reading again.  He says “Amy Chua Is a Wimp,” and that “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” may denounce soft American-style parenting, but its author shelters her children from the truly arduous experiences necessary to achieve.  I can’t find any evidence anywhere that he’s spawned, but he sure knows a lot about parenting…  Mr. Herbert has a question:  “How Many Deaths Are Enough?”  He says that we’ve allowed the extremists to carry the day when it comes to guns in the United States. It seems as if they care more about guns than people.  Here’s Bobo:

Sometime early last week, a large slice of educated America decided that Amy Chua is a menace to society. Chua, as you probably know, is the Yale professor who has written a bracing critique of what she considers the weak, cuddling American parenting style.

Chua didn’t let her own girls go out on play dates or sleepovers. She didn’t let them watch TV or play video games or take part in garbage activities like crafts. Once, one of her daughters came in second to a Korean kid in a math competition, so Chua made the girl do 2,000 math problems a night until she regained her supremacy. Once, her daughters gave her birthday cards of insufficient quality. Chua rejected them and demanded new cards. Once, she threatened to burn all of one of her daughter’s stuffed animals unless she played a piece of music perfectly.

As a result, Chua’s daughters get straight As and have won a series of musical competitions.

In her book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Chua delivers a broadside against American parenting even as she mocks herself for her own extreme “Chinese” style. She says American parents lack authority and produce entitled children who aren’t forced to live up to their abilities.

The furious denunciations began flooding my in-box a week ago. Chua plays into America’s fear of national decline. Here’s a Chinese parent working really hard (and, by the way, there are a billion more of her) and her kids are going to crush ours. Furthermore (and this Chua doesn’t appreciate), she is not really rebelling against American-style parenting; she is the logical extension of the prevailing elite practices. She does everything over-pressuring upper-middle-class parents are doing. She’s just hard core.

Her critics echoed the familiar themes. Her kids can’t possibly be happy or truly creative. They’ll grow up skilled and compliant but without the audacity to be great. She’s destroying their love for music. There’s a reason Asian-American women between the ages of 15 and 24 have such high suicide rates.

I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.’s of the smartest members.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others’ emotions — when they take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others’ inclinations and strengths.

Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.

This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table.

Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?

These and a million other skills are imparted by the informal maturity process and are not developed if formal learning monopolizes a child’s time.

So I’m not against the way Chua pushes her daughters. And I loved her book as a courageous and thought-provoking read. It’s also more supple than her critics let on. I just wish she wasn’t so soft and indulgent. I wish she recognized that in some important ways the school cafeteria is more intellectually demanding than the library. And I hope her daughters grow up to write their own books, and maybe learn the skills to better anticipate how theirs will be received.

Why anyone would have thought to flood Bobo’s inbox with outraged messages about the book defeats me, but then Republicans, Inc. defeats my understanding…  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

On April 22, 2008, almost exactly one year after 32 students and faculty members were slain in the massacre at Virginia Tech, the dealer who had sold one of the weapons used by the gunman delivered a public lecture on the school’s campus. His point: that people at Virginia Tech should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus.

Eric Thompson, owner of the online firearms store that sold a .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun to the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, did not think that his appearance at Virginia Tech was disrespectful or that his position was extreme. He felt so strongly that college students should be allowed to be armed while engaged in their campus activities that he offered discounts to any students who wanted to buy guns from him.

Thompson spun the discounts as altruistic. He told ABCNews.com, “This offers students and people who might not have otherwise been able to afford a weapon to purchase one at a hefty discount and at a significant expense to myself.”

The sale to Cho was not Thompson’s only unfortunate link to a mass killer. His firm sold a pair of 9-millimeter Glock magazines and a holster to Steven Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old graduate student in DeKalb, Ill., who, on the afternoon of Feb. 14, 2008, went heavily armed into an auditorium-type lecture hall at Northern Illinois University. Kazmierczak walked onto the stage in front of a crowd of students and opened fire. He killed five people and wounded 18 others before killing himself.

We’ve allowed the extremists to carry the day when it comes to guns in the United States, and it’s the dead and the wounded and their families who have had to pay the awful price. The idea of having large numbers of college students packing heat in their classrooms and at their parties and sporting events, or at the local pub or frat house or gymnasium, or wherever, is too stupid for words.

Thompson did not get a warm welcome at Virginia Tech. A spokesman for the school, Larry Hincker, said the fact that he “would set foot on this campus” was “terribly offensive” and “incredibly insensitive to the families of the victims.”

Just last week, a sophomore at Florida State University, Ashley Cowie, was shot to death accidentally by a 20-year-old student who, according to authorities, was showing off his rifle to a group of friends in an off-campus apartment complex favored by fraternity members. A second student was shot in the wrist. This occurred as state legislators in Florida are considering a proposal to allow people with permits to carry concealed weapons on campuses. The National Rifle Association thinks that’s a dandy idea.

The slaughter of college students — or anyone else — has never served as a deterrent to the gun fetishists. They want guns on campuses, in bars and taverns and churches, in parks and in the workplace, in cars and in the home. Ammunition everywhere — the deadlier, the better. A couple of years ago, a state legislator in Arizona, Karen Johnson, argued that adults needed to be able to carry guns in all schools, from elementary on up. “I feel like our kindergartners are sitting there like sitting ducks,” she said.

Can we get a grip?

The contention of those who would like college kids and just about everybody else to be armed to the teeth is that the good guys can shoot back whenever the bad guys show up to do harm. An important study published in 2009 by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine estimated that people in possession of a gun at the time of an assault were 4.5 times more likely to be shot during the assault than someone in a comparable situation without a gun.

“On average,” the researchers said, “guns did not seem to protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Although successful defensive gun uses can and do occur, the findings of this study do not support the perception that such successes are likely.”

Approximately 100,000 shootings occur in the United States every year. The number of people killed by guns should be enough to make our knees go weak. Monday was a national holiday celebrating the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While the gun crazies are telling us that ever more Americans need to be walking around armed, we should keep in mind that more than a million people have died from gun violence — in murders, accidents and suicides — since Dr. King was shot to death in 1968.

We need fewer homicides, fewer accidental deaths and fewer suicides. That means fewer guns. That means stricter licensing and registration, more vigorous background checks and a ban on assault weapons. Start with that. Don’t tell me it’s too hard to achieve. Just get started.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

Ms. Collins has been reading.  In “Presidential Primary Book Club” she says it’s time to start reviewing the latest books from the Republican presidential hopefuls. First up is the new one from Tim Pawlenty.   Mr. Blow addresses “The Tucson Witch Hunt,” and scolds that within hours of the massacre in Arizona last week, there was a rush to link the shooter to the rhetoric of the right.  I can’t imagine why anyone would have done such a thing…  Mr. Herbert, in “Helpless in the Face of Madness,” says we seem unable to take even the most modest of steps to curb the horrific toll of gun violence in the United States.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

This is the time when presidential candidates start poking their little noses up through the snow, and making soft, trilling noises. I know you think it’s too soon, even though Mitt Romney made his intentions clear on the family Christmas card. But as a public service, I am going to start providing summaries of the latest books from the potential Republican nominees so we’ll all be well educated by the time the debates begin.

We need to get going because there’s no way I’m going to read more than one a month. Let’s begin today with the newest entry out of the chute:

“Courage to Stand: An American Story,” by Tim Pawlenty.

Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, helps us to get to know his beloved home state. (“There are a lot of differences from one region to the next. But there are a lot of similarities, too.”) And although there are very serious sections about the deficit and the evils of Obamacare, he wants us to know that he’s a humorous guy, too.

Examples of Tim Pawlenty’s Fun-Loving Side:

¶Introduced to a man who had just been fitted for a new hearing aid, Pawlenty decided to josh him by “moving my lips as if I were talking but without saying anything so he’d think something was wrong.”

¶Made fun of a North Dakota hockey team while wearing a Gophers jersey.

¶While walking the family dog on the day McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate, Pawlenty bent down to clean up after his pet and told himself: “Well, this is the only No. 2 I’ll be picking up today.”

¶Attempted to tell his “No. 2” joke to Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog on the Conan O’Brien show. Dismayed when the joke never aired.

On the very first page of his introduction, Pawlenty tells us: “My family was eating breakfast one morning, discussing Greece and its financial trouble.” This is a pretty impressive start, and if you see the man known to his fans as “T-Paw” in a Republican debate this year, I want you to remember that he is the one who eats breakfast with his wife and two daughters, and that the meal does not consist of grunts, snorts and evasive replies to questions about finished homework.

Chapter 1 depicts Pawlenty’s Inauguration Day, with a great deal of attention paid to the outgoing governor, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, a former professional wrestler. This is possibly because the guy who helped Pawlenty write “Courage to Stand” previously performed the same chores for Hulk Hogan.

Anyway, Pawlenty asks Ventura if he has any advice for him, and Ventura says: “Nope.” This is definitely a book highlight.

One important theme of “Courage to Stand” is Pawlenty’s love of hockey. This may not be the best possible sport for a presidential aspirant, since, in my experience, a candidate for high office wearing a hockey helmet and those big shoulder pads looks kind of silly. But actually, I am only going on John Kerry.

Things Tim Pawlenty likes besides hockey:

¶“U.S. News & World Report.”

¶John McCain.

¶Bruce Springsteen.

¶Hockey fights. (“Occasionally if I really need a good mental break … I’ll sit at the computer when I’m home at night and pop over to hockeyfights.com to watch a few of the latest videos.”)

Pawlenty met his wife, Mary, in law school. I was really looking forward to this part since he has taken to referring to her at public events as “my red-hot smokin’ wife.” However, in the book she turns out to be a hard-working district judge who can always supply an appropriate Bible passage in times of crisis.

Before you know it, they’re starting a family and he is campaigning door to door for state representative. “One big dog actually lunged at me, and I defended myself by sticking my stack of brochures in his face. He ended up biting the stack and left teeth marks in the pamphlets!” Pawlenty writes. This is the second high point of the book.

Pawlenty was elected and did well in the State Capitol. (“I like people.”) Then he decided to run for governor.

We will skip over “the longest endorsing convention in the state’s history” and just point out that Pawlenty’s campaign theme was no new taxes. For sure. Really, none.

Becoming governor, Pawlenty writes, was like being “pushed into a high-speed turbowasher” and also like “a bullet-train ride on a roller-coaster track.” This is the critical nexus of the book where, despite a massive shortfall, he stands up to the big-tax Democrats and figures out how to balance the budget solely by making cuts.

Which he says he did. But he actually doesn’t explain how, except to point out that the Democrats were really, really ticked off when he gloated.

Also, that bridge that fell down in Minneapolis? Totally and completely not in any way his fault.

Now here’s Mr. Blow:

Tragedy in Tucson. Six Dead. Democratic congresswoman shot in the head at rally.

Immediately after the news broke, the air became thick with conjecture, speculation and innuendo. There was a giddy, almost punch-drunk excitement on the left. The prophecy had been fulfilled: “words have consequences.” And now, the right’s rhetorical chickens had finally come home to roost.

The dots were too close and the temptation to connect them too strong. The target was a Democratic congresswoman. There was the map of her district in the cross hairs. There were her own prescient worries about overheated rhetoric.

Within hours of the shooting, there was a full-fledged witch hunt to link the shooter to the right.

“I saw Goody Proctor with the devil! Oh, I mean Jared Lee Loughner! Yes him. With the devil!”

The only problem is that there was no evidence then, and even now, that overheated rhetoric from the right had anything to do with the shooting. (In fact, a couple of people who said they knew him have described him as either apolitical or “quite liberal.”) The picture emerging is of a sad and lonely soul slowly, and publicly, slipping into insanity.

I have written about violent rhetoric before, and I’m convinced that it’s poisonous to our politics, that the preponderance of it comes from the right, and that it has the potential to manifest in massacres like the one in Tucson.

But I also know that potential, possibility and even plausibility are not proof.

The American people know it, too. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday, 42 percent of those asked said that political rhetoric was not a factor at all in the shooting, 22 percent said that it was a minor factor and 20 percent said that it was a major factor. Furthermore, most agreed that focusing on conservative rhetoric as a link in the shooting was “not a legitimate point but mostly an attempt to use the tragedy to make conservatives look bad.” And nearly an equal number of people said that Republicans, the Tea Party and Democrats had all “gone too far in using inflammatory language” to criticize their opponents.

Great. So the left overreacts and overreaches and it only accomplishes two things: fostering sympathy for its opponents and nurturing a false equivalence within the body politic. Well done, Democrats.

Now we’ve settled into the by-any-means-necessary argument: anything that gets us to focus on the rhetoric and tamp it down is a good thing. But a wrong in the service of righteousness is no less wrong, no less corrosive, no less a menace to the very righteousness it’s meant to support.

You can’t claim the higher ground in a pit of quicksand.

Concocting connections to advance an argument actually weakens it. The argument for tonal moderation has been done a tremendous disservice by those who sought to score political points in the absence of proof.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

The second semester French class began a little after 9 on the morning of April 16, 2007. The weather that day was unusually cold for April. A light snow was falling.

One of the students, Colin Goddard, now 25, recalled what happened that morning in a new documentary film, “Living for 32.”

“We started hearing loud banging noises outside of our classroom,” he said. “The teacher went to the door to look into the hallway to see what was going on. … As soon as she opened it, she shut it back again and said, ‘Everyone get underneath your desk and somebody call 911.’ I pulled out my phone and dialed 911, and I said, ‘We’re in Norris Hall. There’s a shooting going on.’ And as soon as I basically got that out, we saw bullets coming through the door.”

Norris Hall is one of the main academic buildings on the campus of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, known as Virginia Tech. The gunman was a crazed student named Seung-Hui Cho, who was armed with a pair of semiautomatic pistols. It was not the first class he had visited that day.

Goddard remembered being shot in his left knee and feeling the blood, warm, seeping down his leg. The gunmen apparently left the panicked classroom momentarily. But the sound of gunfire continued.

“And then,” Goddard said, “the bangs just got much louder again, and you could tell he was back in our room. This time he more methodically came down each of the rows, and he was still firing. At one point he was standing at my feet, and that’s when I was shot a second time, in my left hip. Then he shot me a third time, in my right shoulder, and it flipped my whole body around and exposed my right side. And I was shot a fourth time, in my right hip.”

In case we hadn’t noticed, a photo and a headline on the front page of The New York Times this week gave us some insight into just how sick our society has become. The photo showed 11-year-old Dallas Green weeping and using his left arm to wipe his eyes during the funeral for his sister, Christina-Taylor Green, who was 9 years old and was killed in the attack in Tucson that took the lives of five other people and left Representative Gabrielle Giffords gravely wounded.

Beneath the photo was the headline: “Sadness Aside, No Shift Seen On Gun Laws.”

What is the matter with us? Are we really helpless in the face of the astounding toll that guns take on this society?

More than 30,000 people die from gunfire every year. Another 66,000 or so are wounded, which means that nearly 100,000 men, women and children are shot in the United States annually. Have we really become so impotent as a society, so pathetically fearful in the face of the extremists, that we can’t even take the most modest of steps to begin curbing this horror?

Where is the leadership? We know who’s on the side of the gun crazies. Where is the leadership on the side of sanity?

For starters, assault weapons should be banned. Their raison d’être is to kill the maximum number of people — people, not animals — in the shortest amount of time.

In “Living for 32,” the 32 refers to the 32 students and faculty members who were killed by Cho at Virginia Tech. Goddard, during a filmed visit to the site of the shooting, remembered that when the police showed up, they had to call out to the survivors inside the classroom for help in opening the door, which was blocked by bodies piled in front of it.

He said it was only when the police cried out, “Shooter down!” that he realized that Cho had killed himself. Then came the awful process of triage: “I remember hearing them walk up to people, saying, ‘This person’s yellow. This person’s red.’ And then I heard, ‘Black tag. Black tag. Black tag.’ And that’s when I realized that there were other students in here who didn’t make it.”

The professor, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, 49, was also killed.

The film, produced by Maria Cuomo Cole and directed by Kevin Breslin, chronicles Goddard’s recovery from his wounds, his return to Virginia Tech to get his degree, and his commitment to fight for stricter gun laws. He is now working with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Goddard does not want guns banned and has no desire to deny people their constitutional rights. But he believes there are sensible steps that could be taken that would make the U.S. a safer and better place, a place where college students and their professors do not have to worry about getting shot to death in the classroom.

 

Brooks and Herbert

Bobo is going to ‘splain “The Politicized Mind.”  He babbles that the political opportunism occasioned by the Tucson massacre has ranged from the irrelevant to the irresponsible, all while we ignore the most productive questions.  And if anyone can really come up with productive questions it’s Bobo, right?  Right??? Mr. Herbert, in  “A Flood Tide of Murder,” says the attack in Tucson is just the latest wave in America’s endless ocean of violence.  Here’s Bobo:

Before he allegedly went off on his shooting rampage in Tucson, Jared Loughner listed some of his favorite books on his YouTube page. These included: “Animal Farm,” “Brave New World,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Through the Looking Glass” and “The Communist Manifesto.” Many of these books share a common theme: individuals trying to control their own thoughts and government or some other force trying to take that control away.

Loughner also made a series of videos. These, too, suggest that he was struggling to control his own mind. Just before his killing spree, Loughner made one called “My Final Thoughts.” In it he writes about different levels of consciousness and dreaming. He tries to build a rigid structure to organize his thinking. He uses the word “currency” as a metaphor for an inner language to make sense of the world.

“You create and distribute your new currency, listener?” the video asks. “You don’t allow the government to control your grammar structure, listener?”

All of this evidence, which is easily accessible on the Internet, points to the possibility that Loughner may be suffering from a mental illness like schizophrenia. The vast majority of schizophrenics are not violent, and those that receive treatment are not violent. But as Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a research psychiatrist, writes in his book, “The Insanity Offense,” about 1 percent of the seriously mentally ill (or about 40,000 individuals) are violent. They account for about half the rampage murders in the United States.

Other themes from Loughner’s life fit the rampage-killer profile. He saw himself in world historical terms. He appeared to have a poor sense of his own illness (part of a condition known as anosognosia). He had increasingly frequent run-ins with the police. In short, the evidence before us suggests that Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it.

Yet the early coverage and commentary of the Tucson massacre suppressed this evidence. The coverage and commentary shifted to an entirely different explanation: Loughner unleashed his rampage because he was incited by the violent rhetoric of the Tea Party, the anti-immigrant movement and Sarah Palin.

Mainstream news organizations linked the attack to an offensive target map issued by Sarah Palin’s political action committee. The Huffington Post erupted, with former Senator Gary Hart flatly stating that the killings were the result of angry political rhetoric. Keith Olbermann demanded a Palin repudiation and the founder of the Daily Kos wrote on Twitter: “Mission Accomplished, Sarah Palin.” Others argued that the killing was fostered by a political climate of hate.

These accusations — that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl — are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.

Yet such is the state of things. We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leans toward political explanations. We have a news media with a strong distaste for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to tarnish them. We have a segmented news media, so there is nobody in most newsrooms to stand apart from the prevailing assumptions. We have a news media market in which the rewards go to anybody who can stroke the audience’s pleasure buttons.

I have no love for Sarah Palin, and I like to think I’m committed to civil discourse. But the political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible.

The good news is that there were a few skeptics, even during the height of the mania: Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast, James Fallows of The Atlantic and Jonathan Chait of The New Republic. The other good news is that the mainstream media usually recovers from its hysterias and tries belatedly to get the story right.

If the evidence continues as it has, the obvious questions are these: How can we more aggressively treat mentally ill people who are becoming increasingly disruptive? How can we prevent them from getting guns? Do we need to make involuntary treatment easier for authorities to invoke?

Torrey’s book describes a nation that has been unable to come up with a humane mental health policy — one that protects the ill from their own demons and society from their rare but deadly outbursts. The other problem is this: contemporary punditry lives in the world of superficial tactics and interests. It is unprepared when an event opens the door to a deeper realm of disorder, cruelty and horror.

Bobo seems to be settling into his role as the Times’ concern troller quite nicely.  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

By all means, condemn the hateful rhetoric that has poured so much poison into our political discourse. The crazies don’t kill in a vacuum, and the vilest of our political leaders and commentators deserve to be called to account for their demagoguery and the danger that comes with it. But that’s the easy part.

If we want to reverse the flood tide of killing in this country, we’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than bad-mouth a few sorry politicians and lame-brained talking heads. We need to face up to the fact that this is an insanely violent society. The vitriol that has become an integral part of our political rhetoric, most egregiously from the right, is just one of the myriad contributing factors in a society saturated in blood.

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, more than a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were killed. That figure includes suicides and accidental deaths. But homicides, deliberate killings, are a perennial scourge, and not just with guns.

Excluding the people killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more than 150,000 Americans have been murdered since the beginning of the 21st century. This endlessly proliferating parade of death, which does not spare women or children, ought to make our knees go weak. But we never even notice most of the killings. Homicide is white noise in this society.

The overwhelming majority of the people who claim to be so outraged by last weekend’s shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others — six of them fatally — will take absolutely no steps, none whatsoever, to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. And similar tragedies are coming as surely as the sun makes its daily appearance over the eastern horizon because this is an American ritual: the mowing down of the innocents.

On Saturday, the victims happened to be a respected congresswoman, a 9-year-old girl, a federal judge and a number of others gathered at the kind of civic event that is supposed to define a successful democracy. But there are endless horror stories. In April 2007, 32 students and faculty members at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute were shot to death and 17 others were wounded by a student armed with a pair of semiautomatic weapons.

On a cold, rainy afternoon in Pittsburgh in 2009, I came upon a gray-haired woman shivering on a stone step in a residential neighborhood. “I’m the grandmother of the kid that killed those cops,” she whispered. Three police officers had been shot and killed by her 22-year-old grandson, who was armed with a variety of weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle.

I remember having lunch with Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a few days after the Virginia Tech tragedy. She shook her head at the senseless loss of so many students and teachers, then told me: “We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence. As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

If we were serious, if we really wanted to cut down on the killings, we’d have to do two things. We’d have to radically restrict the availability of guns while at the same time beginning the very hard work of trying to change a culture that glorifies and embraces violence as entertainment, and views violence as an appropriate and effective response to the things that bother us.

Ordinary citizens interested in a more sane and civilized society would have to insist that their elected representatives take meaningful steps to stem the violence. And they would have to demand, as well, that the government bring an end to the wars overseas, with their terrible human toll, because the wars are part of the same crippling pathology.

Without those very tough steps, the murder of the innocents by the tens of thousands will most assuredly continue.

I wouldn’t hold my breath. The Gabrielle Giffords story is big for the time being, but so were Columbine and Oklahoma City. And so was the anti-white killing spree of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo that took 10 lives in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., in October 2002. But no amount of killing has prompted any real remedial action.

For whatever reasons, neither the public nor the politicians seem to really care how many Americans are murdered — unless it’s in a terror attack by foreigners. The two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are to ignore it or be entertained by it. The horror prompted by the attack in Tucson on Saturday will pass. The outrage will fade. The murders will continue.

 

Collins, Blow and Herbert

In “God Save the Debate” Ms. Collins says we answer to a higher committee.  Mr. Blow, in “Religion and Representation,” says increasingly, the face of religion in America is fluid, fluctuant, questioning, nonconformist and in many cases unaffiliated.  Mr. Herbert, in “Misery With Plenty of Company,” says policy makers are bending to the superrich while turning a blind eye to the nation’s poor.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Next week the House Republicans are going to vote to repeal the health care reform law. It’s a symbolic gesture they got the right to make when they won the majority, but it would be nice if they could leave God out of it.

I am thinking about you, Representative Steve King of Iowa. On Friday, King gave a 58-minute-and-20-second speech on the floor of the House in which he made it abundantly clear that God did not want more federal regulation of health insurance companies. “We will carry on this struggle until in God’s good time, with all his power and might, he steps forth to the rescue and liberation of our God-given American liberty,” King declared.

The Republicans have set aside seven hours for debating the repeal, but once one side has announced that God is their co-signer, there’s really not a whole lot more to say.

We are going to be hearing a lot about Representative King in the coming year. “I have more words in the Congressional Record than anyone else,” he bragged during an interview with a newspaper in his district. And he is one quotable fella. Just the other day he jumped into the health care fray to defend his party’s leadership against a Democratic attack, declaring that Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor had “established their integrity and their mendacity for years in this Congress.”

King also got into an argument about whether insurance could be regulated as interstate commerce, claiming that some people are born, live their lives and die in one state without ever having one single encounter with health care. When a Democrat demanded to know where you could find a baby born outside a hospital without a midwife’s assistance and with no inoculations, King retorted: “I hate to tell you, but they show up in garbage cans around this country, sir.”

King was in line to be chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration this year, but the Judiciary chairman, Lamar Smith, decided he’d rather go for someone who did not walk into the Capitol on Day 1 waving a bill to eliminate citizenship rights for children born in this country to parents who are illegal immigrants. Score one for the new civility.

And kudos to Representative Darrell Issa, the incoming head of the powerful House Oversight Committee. This week Issa turned over a new, more collegial leaf by taking back, sort of, his recent claim that Barack Obama is “one of the most corrupt presidents of modern times.”

Which was certainly not charitable. Particularly from the party that gave us Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair and Warren Harding.

What he actually meant to say, Issa explained, was not that Obama was on the take, but that “when you hand out $1 trillion in TARP just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect.”

So it was all about big government! Much less appalling. Although, did you notice that the first trillion came while somebody else was in office? Issa could at least have added, “and obviously, when you look at it that way, George W. Bush and Barack Obama were two of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.”

Kudos to the Democrats for their spirit of charity in the matter of the two House Republicans who missed the swearing-in ceremony because they were at a celebration elsewhere. Which they insisted was not a fund-raiser, but simply a gathering of 500 constituents who paid $30 apiece to get there.

The lawmakers, Pete Sessions of Texas and Mike Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, did raise their hands and recite the oath of office in front of the televised version of the event. But really, what if we’d all done that? If I’d known it was an option, I would definitely have sworn myself in and then gotten my picture taken with John Boehner.

Plus, Sessions and Fitzpatrick violated the parliamentary rules set down by Thomas Jefferson. If Jefferson had wanted representatives swearing in front of a flat-screened TV, he would have said so. Those founding fathers knew what they were doing.

Things got more complicated when it turned out that Sessions, unsworn, had gone to a committee hearing and voted to set rules for the debate on repealing the health care law. (Fitzpatrick went to the House and took part in the reading of the Constitution.)

To make sure the rules were still legal, the House had to vote to straighten everything out, which it did very speedily and — this is the important part — without all that much Democratic sniping about what had come to be called “the undocumented members.” This was obviously because people have decided that in times of great conflict and stress, it is better to be collegial.

Also, the Republicans permitted only four minutes of debate.

They’re off to a really great start…  Here’s Mr. Blow:

Years ago, my oldest son told me that he thought those in our small Baptist church had all been brainwashed. How else could they believe in the unbelievable? At the time, I was shocked.

He later softened that position. Although he said that he couldn’t accept all things biblical, he explained, quite eloquently I thought, that he “wouldn’t want to live in a world where a God didn’t exist.” I was impressed.

Then, a few months ago, he told me that he was a deist. I was confused. This time I had to turn to the all-knowing and omnipresent — Google.

Through it all, I’ve been very sympathetic about my son’s spiritual quest, in part because my own religious beliefs are evolving. I have gone from the most devout born-again Christian to a more nebulous, nondoctrinal set of beliefs that do not necessarily align with organized religion. When people ask about my faith, I often reply, “unresolved.”

This is increasingly the face of religion in America — fluid, fluctuant, questioning, nonconformist and in many cases unaffiliated.

That’s why a report this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life about the religious composition of the 112th Congress caught my eye. According to the report, the unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics, the unchurched, uncommitted, etc.), at 16.1 percent of the population, is the largest religious group in America without representation in Congress. (Six members, about 1 percent, did not specify a religious category.)

For perspective, there are almost two-thirds as many unaffiliated people as there are Catholics in this country and nearly as many as there are Baptists. Their number is more than twice that of Methodists, and more than nine times the numbers of Jews or Mormons. Yet, no unaffiliated representation. Why?

First, let me get this out of the way: I don’t for a second believe that all those members are religious. I believe some are trapped in the religious closet of American politics where nonbelief is a nonstarter. It’s not only seen as unholy, it’s also seen as un-American. (Although Pete Stark, a California Democrat and a Unitarian, has said that he doesn’t believe in a Supreme Being. One out!)

Second, and perhaps more important, the unaffiliated are simply not unified. They have few advocacy groups or high-profile faces. They don’t congregate, organize or petition like members of organized religions. Politicians don’t feel the need to court them, let alone identify as one of them. Part of the problem is that the unaffiliated are a jumbled lot. Only about a fourth are atheists or agnostics. Many of the others feel strongly connected to religion, but choose not to participate. It’s like a protest vote.

Whether they are organized, cohesive or disgruntled, the unaffiliated are the fastest-growing religious category in America. Nonaffiliation is not un-American. Increasingly, it is America. Eventually, our politics will have to catch up.

Actually, our politics should leave religion alone, and vice versa.  I don’t want to hear politics preached in my church, and I don’t want my representatives rattling on about God.  Stick to your knitting, folks…  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

Consider the extremes. President Obama is redesigning his administration to make it even friendlier toward big business and the megabanks, which is to say the rich, who flourish no matter what is going on with the economy in this country. (They flourish even when they’re hard at work destroying the economy.) Meanwhile, we hear not a word — not so much as a peep — about the poor, whose ranks are spreading like a wildfire in a drought.

The politicians and the media behave as if the poor don’t exist. But with jobs still absurdly scarce and the bottom falling out of the middle class, the poor are becoming an ever more significant and increasingly desperate segment of the population.

How do you imagine a family of four would live if its annual income was $11,000 or less?

During a conversation I had this week with Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a longtime expert on issues related to poverty, he pointed out that the number of people in that tragically dismal category has grown to more than 17 million. These are the folks trying to make it on incomes below half of the official poverty line, which is $22,000 annually for a family of four.

No one talks about these families and individuals living in extreme poverty. Certainly not the Republicans who were having a dandy time this week deliberately misreading the Constitution and promising budget cuts and other initiatives that will hurt the poor even more.

If you’re still having trouble deciding whose side the Republicans are on, just keep in mind that the House G.O.P. bigwig Darrell Issa sent a letter to 150 businesses, trade groups and think tanks asking them to spell out which federal regulations they dislike the most. These are lifeguards on the side of the sharks.

Scared to death of being outdone, President Obama and his sidekicks climbed into their spiffy new G.O.P. costumes and promised in humiliatingly abject tones to shower the business world with whatever government largess they could lay their hands on. The first order of business (pun intended) was the announcement that William Daley, the Chicago wheeler-dealer and former Clinton administration official who landed a fat gig at JPMorgan Chase, would become the president’s chief of staff. Mr. Daley was a loud critic of recent financial regulatory reforms and has been obsessed with getting Democrats to be more subservient to business.

The poor, who have been hurt more than anyone else in this recession, don’t stand a heartbeat’s chance in this political environment. The movers and shakers in government don’t even give a thought to being on the side of the angels anymore — they’re on the side of the millionaires and billionaires.

Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty in 2009, which was more than 14 percent of the American population and a jump of four million from the previous year. Anyone who thinks things are much better now is delirious. More than 15 million children are poor — one of every five kids in the United States. More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor.

Are we doing anything about this? No. Our government officials, from the president on down, are too busy kissing the bejeweled fingers of the megarich.

Professor Edelman broke the poor into two categories: the new poor, who have lost jobs and homes and otherwise been clobbered by the recession; and the old poor, who in many cases had previously been working, sometimes sporadically or part time, at jobs that didn’t pay much. Many of those low-paying jobs have since vanished and the old poor have just been crushed.

“There is this astonishing number of people all the way down there at the bottom that we just don’t talk about,” Mr. Edelman said, “and they’re in very big trouble.”

Welfare, even for the poorest of the poor, is not much help. More than 17 million people may be living in extreme poverty, but welfare, for most of the people who need it, was “reformed” right out of existence. TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), which is what welfare is called now, helps far fewer people than welfare used to, even though the poor have been laid low by the worst economy since the Depression.

Hardly anyone cares. Hardly anyone even notices.

With the tax cuts for the rich saved and William Daley coming on board, the atmosphere is being readied for Obama & Co. to tap the fat cats for the zillions necessary for next year’s re-election run. And that, of course, is the only thing that really matters.

 

Brooks and Herbert

Bobo has produced a thing called “The Achievement Test,” in which he says the debate over the size of government should shift to a more important question: How can government best influence Americans’ lives?  Well, Bobo, let’s see what your little friends in Congress think.  Start by asking Mr. Issa, why don’t you?  Schmuck.  Mr. Herbert, in “Get Ready for a G.O.P. Rerun,” says the Republican agenda: more riches for the rich, more misery for the rest.  Well.  It looks like he’s answered Bobo’s question.  Here’s Bobo:

Unless something big and unexpected happens, 2011 will be consumed by a debate over the size of government. Republicans will launch a critique of big government as part of their effort to cut spending. Democrats will surge to the barricades to defend federal programs.

This debate will be contentious, but I hope it’s not rude to mention that it will be largely beside the point. National destinies are not shaped by what percentage of G.D.P. federal spending consumes. They are shaped by the character and behavior of citizens. The crucial issue is not whether the federal government takes up 19 percent or 23 percent of national income. The crucial question is: How does government influence how people live?

There have been cases when big government has encouraged virtuous behavior (in the U.S. during World War II), and cases when big government has encouraged self-indulgence and irresponsibility (modern Greece). There have been cases when small government was accompanied by enterprise and development, and cases when small government has led to lawlessness, corruption and distrust.

The size of government doesn’t tell you what you need to know; the social and moral content of government action does. The budgeteers and the technicians may not like it, but it’s the values inculcated by policies that matter most.

The best way to measure government is not by volume, but by what you might call the Achievement Test. Does a given policy arouse energy, foster skills, spur social mobility and help people transform their lives? Over the years, America has benefited from policies that passed this test, like the Homestead Act and the G.I. Bill. Occasionally, the U.S. government has initiated programs that failed it. The welfare policies of the 1960s gave people money without asking for work and personal responsibility in return, and these had to be replaced. The welfare reforms of the 1990s involved big and intrusive government, but they did the job because they were in line with American values, linking effort to reward.

Over the past few decades, Americans have waged political war as if all that matters is the amount of money going into federal coffers. The fights have been about “cutting government” or “raising revenue.” But amid this season of distraction the entire society suffered a loss of values and almost nobody noticed until it was too late. Both business and government started favoring consumption and short-term comfort and neglecting investment and long-term growth.

This hasn’t been a case of government corrupting capitalism or vice versa. The two have worked hand-in-hand. The government has erected a welfare state that, as Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, spends vast amounts on consumption (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt) and much less on investment (education, research, infrastructure), while pushing the costs on future generations. Meanwhile, the private sector has encouraged a huge increase in personal debt to fuel a consumption bubble. The geniuses flock to finance, not industry.

If we’re going to reverse this tide, it might be useful to put the Achievement Test back at the center of politics. This would help focus the national mind on the fundamental challenge: moving from a consumption-dominated economy oriented around satisfying immediate needs toward a more balanced investment and consumption economy. It might also cut through the gridlocked trench warfare between big-government liberals and small-government conservatives.

Reframing the argument around achievement wouldn’t end partisan division. Democrats and Republicans differ on what makes an economy productive. But it would allow for horse-trading.

As part of the budget process, Republicans could champion the things they believe will enhance productivity and mobility. Many of these will mean making sure people have the incentives to take risks and the freedom to adjust to foreign competition: a flatter, simpler tax code with lower corporate rates, a smaller debt burden, predictable regulations, affordable entitlements.

Democrats could champion the things they believe will enhance productivity and mobility. Many of these will mean making sure everybody has the tools to compete: early childhood education, infrastructure programs to create jobs, immigration policies that recruit talent, incentives for energy innovation.

The two agendas sit in tension, but they are not contradictory. The exciting thing about this moment is that everything is on the table. Thousands of policy proposals are floating around, thanks to the various deficit commissions and policy entrepreneurs. As the parties argue about the debt limit and the rest, it should be possible to take items from both and ram them into a package that cuts consumption spending in order to make investment spending more affordable.

How big will the resulting government be? That is a secondary issue. If a policy enhances achievement, we should be for that thing. If it displaces investment, we should be skeptical of it. Quality, not quantity, matters most.

Bobo’s now all for stifling consumption spending and increasing investment spending…  I’d love to do a lot of investing, but all my money goes into consumption of things like groceries and utilities…  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

You just can’t close the door on this crowd. The party that brought us the worst economy since the Great Depression, that led us into Iraq and the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, that would like to take a hammer to Social Security and a chisel to Medicare, is back in control of the House of Representatives with the expressed mission of undermining all things Obama.

Once we had Dick Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and belligerently asserting that deficits don’t matter. We had Phil Gramm, Enron’s favorite senator and John McCain’s economic guru, blithely assuring us in 2008 that we were suffering from a “mental recession.”

(Mr. Gramm was some piece of work. A champion of deregulation, he was disdainful of ordinary people. “We’re the only nation in the world,” he once said, “where all of our poor people are fat.”)

Maybe the voters missed the entertainment value of the hard-hearted, compulsively destructive G.O.P. headliners. Maybe they viewed them the way audiences saw the larger-than-life villains in old-time melodramas. It must be something like that because it’s awfully hard to miss the actual policies of a gang that almost wrecked the country.

In any event, the G.O.P. has taken its place once again as the House majority and is vowing to do what it does best, which is make somebody miserable — in this case, President Obama. Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who is now chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said recently on the Rush Limbaugh program that Mr. Obama was “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” He backed off a little on Sunday, saying that what he really thinks is that Mr. Obama is presiding over “one of the most corrupt administrations.”

This is the attitude of a man who has the power of subpoena and plans to conduct hundreds of hearings into the administration’s activities.

The mantra for Mr. Issa and the rest of the newly empowered Republicans in the House, including the new Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, is to cut spending and shrink government. But what’s really coming are patented G.O.P. efforts to spread misery beyond Mr. Obama and the Democrats to ordinary Americans struggling in what are still very difficult times.

It was ever thus. The fundamental mission of the G.O.P. is to shovel ever more money to those who are already rich. That’s why you got all that disgracefully phony rhetoric from Republicans about attacking budget deficits and embracing austerity while at the same time they were fighting like mad people to pile up the better part of a trillion dollars in new debt by extending the Bush tax cuts.

This is a party that has mastered the art of taking from the poor and the middle class and giving to the rich. We should at least be clear about this and stop being repeatedly hoodwinked — like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy’s football — by G.O.P. claims of fiscal responsibility.

There’s a reason the G.O.P. reveres Ronald Reagan and it’s not because of his fiscal probity. As Garry Wills wrote in “Reagan’s America”:

“Reagan nearly tripled the deficit in his eight years, and never made a realistic proposal for cutting it. As the biographer Lou Cannon noted, it was unfair for critics to say that Reagan was trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, since ‘he never seriously attempted to balance the budget at all.’ ”

We’ll see and hear a lot of populist foolishness from the Republicans as 2011 and 2012 unfold, but their underlying motivation is always the same. They are about making the rich richer. Thus it was not at all surprising to read on Politico that the new head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Fred Upton of Michigan, had hired a former big-time lobbyist for the hospital and pharmaceuticals industries to oversee health care issues.

I remember President Bush going on television in September 2008, looking almost dazed as he said to the American people, “Our entire economy is in danger.”

Have we forgotten already who put us in such grave peril? Republicans benefit from the fact that memories are short and statutes of limitations shorter. It was the Republican leader in the House, Tom DeLay, who insisted against all reason and all the evidence of history that “nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.”

But that’s all water under the bridge. The Republicans are back in control of the House, ready to run interference for the rich as recklessly and belligerently as ever.

New year, same old shit.

Collins, Herbert, and a New Year’s Day Bonus

Ms. Collins has an “End-of-the-Year Quiz” — Let’s see how well you followed the news in 2010. No cheating!  Mr. Herbert, in “For Two Sisters, the End of an Ordeal,” says the governor of Mississippi has finally freed the Scott sisters from prison. But that does not mean they have received justice.  As a bonus we have a contribution from Dr. Oliver Sacks called “This Year, Change Your Mind,” in which he says don’t leave learning to the young. Older brains can grow, too.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

I. Happy New Year! Besides the Times Square ball, the glorious American mosaic of things scheduled to be dropped around the nation on New Year’s Eve also included all but which one of the following:

A) The Brasstown, N.C., Possum Drop

B) Dillsburg, Pa.’s giant pickle

C) The Elmore, Ohio, Sausage Drop

D) Seaside Heights, N.J., first annual dropping of Nicole (Snooki) Polizzi

*****

II. Finish the quote:

1) After the lame-duck session, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said: “When it’s all going to be said and done, Harry Reid has

A) brought us together.”

B) eaten our lunch.”

C) eaten a lot of late-night pizza.”

*****

2) John Boehner, the incoming House speaker, broke into tears on election night and weepily announced: “I’ve spent my whole life chasing

A) the American dream.”

B) women.”

C) cars.”

*****

3) “Oh, my gosh! It’s so important,” Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts said sarcastically during a recent debate. “I’m glad I rushed back from our break to work on:

A) earmarks.”

B) food safety.”

C) tax cuts for the wealthy.”

*****

III. Identify the speaker:

1) “They cheat. They are serial cheaters.”

A) Senator James Risch of Idaho, speaking in opposition to a nuclear arms treaty with Russia.

B) Cuckolded former aide to Senator John Ensign of Nevada, on the Republican caucus.

C) Tiger Woods, on the golf tour.

D) Unsuccessful “Dancing With the Stars” finalist, on Bristol Palin’s family.

*****

2) “Balloons and ballrooms are not my thing.”

A) John Boehner, explaining his teariness at postelection victory party.

B) Bristol Palin, analyzing her ultimate defeat on “Dancing With the Stars.”

C) Harry Reid, describing his partying skills.

D) Andrew Cuomo, the new governor of New York, on his plans for a “new austerity” swearing-in.

*****

3) “There’s no one who wants this over more than I do.”

A) Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the New York City snowstorm.

B) President Obama on the 111th Congress.

C) Tony Hayward, the former chief executive of BP, on the oil spill.

D) Sarah Palin on filming the last episode of her reality show.

*****

4) “What I said was stupid, stupid, stupid.”

A) U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina of California after making fun of Senator Barbara Boxer’s hair.

B) Rod Blagojevich for saying he was blacker than Obama.

C) Christine O’Donnell for the “I am not a witch” ad.

D) Kate Middleton for announcing she and Prince William do not want any household help.

*****

IV. Multiple choice:

1) The Wall Street Journal reported that at least 15 percent of the incoming House freshman plan to:

A) Sleep in their offices.

B) Use the word “refudiate” in their official correspondence.

C) Twitter 24/7.

D) Try to get invited to Prince William’s wedding.

*****

2) John Boehner told Lesley Stahl that he can no longer visit public schools in his district because:

A) They’ve all been closed.

B) He hates that cloakroom smell.

C) He cries when he thinks of the importance of giving them a shot at the American dream.

D) He’s afraid he’ll be asked to spell “potato.”

*****

V. Match Republican presidential hopefuls with their 2010 achievements. (One hopeful gets two):

1. Sarah Palin

2. Haley Barbour

3. Tim Pawlenty

4. Mike Huckabee

5. Mitt Romney

6. Newt Gingrich

A) On a visit to Iowa, introduced his spouse to the audience as “my red-hot, smoking wife.”

B) Took six shots to kill a caribou that was, really, just standing there.

C) Continued to fail to explain why he drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

D) Said he doesn’t remember what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said during a 1962 civil rights speech at his hometown because he was “watching the girls.”

E) Compared Democrats to Nazis; compared lower Manhattan mosque supporters to Nazis.

F) Family Christmas card said: “Guess which grandchild heard that Papa might run again?”

G) Demonstrated how to deep-fry a turkey on TV.

*****

ANSWERS: I: C (the Sausage Drop was canceled because of a lack of volunteers); II: 1-B, 2-A, 3-B; III: 1-A, 2-C, 3-C, 4-B; IV: 1-A, 2-C; V: 1-B, 2-D, 3-A, 4-G, 5-C and F, 6-E.

Lordy, but it was a “special” year, wasn’t it?  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

I got a call on New Year’s Eve from Gladys Scott, which was a terrific way for 2010 to end.

As insane as it may seem, Gladys and her sister, Jamie, are each serving consecutive life sentences in a state prison in Mississippi for their alleged role in a robbery in 1993 in which no one was hurt and $11 supposedly was taken.

Gladys was on the phone, excited and relieved, because Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi had agreed to suspend the prison terms.

“I’ve waited so long for this day to come,” she said.

I was happy for the Scott sisters and deeply moved as Gladys spoke of how desperately she wanted to “just hold” her two children and her mother, who live in Florida. But I couldn’t help thinking that right up until the present moment she and Jamie have been treated coldly and disrespectfully by the governor and other state officials. It’s as if the authorities have found it impossible to hide their disdain, their contempt, for the two women.

The prison terms were suspended — not commuted — on the condition that Gladys donate a kidney to Jamie, who is seriously ill with diabetes and high blood pressure and receives dialysis at least three times a week. Gladys had long expressed a desire to donate a kidney to her sister, but to make that a condition of her release was unnecessary, mean-spirited, inhumane and potentially coercive. It was a low thing to do.

Governor Barbour did not offer any expression of concern for Jamie’s health in his statement announcing the sentence suspension.

He said of the sisters: “Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the state of Mississippi.”

By all means, get those medical costs off the books if you can.

I asked Gladys how she had learned that she was to be released. “Oh, I saw it while I was looking at the news on television,” she said.

The authorities hadn’t bothered to even tell the sisters. After all, who are they? As Gladys put it, “Nobody told me a thing.”

I asked if she had seen Jamie, who is in another section of the prison, since the governor’s decision had been announced. She said no one had tried to get the two of them together for even a telephone conversation.

“I haven’t seen her or heard from her,” Gladys said. “I want to see her. I want to see how she’s doing and take care of her.”

I am not surprised at Governor Barbour’s behavior. He’s not the first person who comes to mind when I think of admirable public officials. The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., noted that the governor had been on the radio this week asserting that there was hardly anyone in prison who didn’t deserve to be there. It’s an interesting comment from a governor who has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to free prisoners convicted of the most heinous crimes.

The Jackson Free Press, an alternative weekly, and Slate magazine have noted that Mr. Barbour has pardoned four killers and suspended the life sentence of a fifth. So cold-blooded murder is no reason, in Mr. Barbour’s view, to keep the prison doors closed.

This is also a governor who said recently, while reminiscing about the civil rights struggle and the treatment of blacks in his hometown of Yazoo City, Miss., in the 1960s: “I just don’t remember it being that bad.” The comment was in an article in The Weekly Standard in which the governor managed to find some complimentary things to say about the rabidly racist White Citizens Councils.

Faced with heavy and widespread criticism, he later pulled back on the comments, describing the era as “difficult and painful” and the councils as “indefensible.”

The only reason the Scott sisters have gotten any relief at all is because of an extraordinary network of supporters who campaigned relentlessly over several years on their behalf. Ben Jealous, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., emerged as one of the leaders of the network. The concerted effort finally paid off.

Gladys Scott said her 16 years in prison have been extremely difficult and that she had gotten depressed from time to time but had not given up hope. “It was a very bad experience, ” she said.

What is likely to get lost in the story of the Scott sisters finally being freed is just how hideous and how outlandish their experience really was. How can it be possible for individuals with no prior criminal record to be sentenced to two consecutive life terms for a crime in which no one was hurt and $11 was taken? Who had it in for them, and why was that allowed to happen?

The Scott sisters may go free, but they will never receive justice.

Haley Barbour is a disgrace to the human race, and an unspeakable bigot.  Here’s Dr. Sacks:

New Year’s resolutions often have to do with eating more healthfully, going to the gym more, giving up sweets, losing weight — all admirable goals aimed at improving one’s physical health. Most people, though, do not realize that they can strengthen their brains in a similar way.

While some areas of the brain are hard-wired from birth or early childhood, other areas — especially in the cerebral cortex, which is central to higher cognitive powers like language and thought, as well as sensory and motor functions — can be, to a remarkable extent, rewired as we grow older. In fact, the brain has an astonishing ability to rebound from damage — even from something as devastating as the loss of sight or hearing. As a physician who treats patients with neurological conditions, I see this happen all the time.

For example, one patient of mine who had been deafened by scarlet fever at the age of 9, was so adept at lip-reading that it was easy to forget she was deaf. Once, without thinking, I turned away from her as I was speaking. “I can no longer hear you,” she said sharply.

“You mean you can no longer see me,” I said.

“You may call it seeing,” she answered, “but I experience it as hearing.”

Lip-reading, seeing mouth movements, was immediately transformed for this patient into “hearing” the sounds of speech in her mind. Her brain was converting one mode of sensation into another.

In a similar way, blind people often find ways of “seeing.” Some areas of the brain, if not stimulated, will atrophy and die. (“Use it or lose it,” neurologists often say.) But the visual areas of the brain, even in someone born blind, do not entirely disappear; instead, they are redeployed for other senses. We have all heard of blind people with unusually acute hearing, but other senses may be heightened, too.

For example, Geerat Vermeij, a biologist at the University of California-Davis who has been blind since the age of 3, has identified many new species of mollusks based on tiny variations in the contours of their shells. He uses a sort of spatial or tactile giftedness that is beyond what any sighted person is likely to have.

The writer Ved Mehta, also blind since early childhood, navigates in large part by using “facial vision” — the ability to sense objects by the way they reflect sounds, or subtly shift the air currents that reach his face. Ben Underwood, a remarkable boy who lost his sight at 3 and died at 16 in 2009, developed an effective, dolphin-like strategy of emitting regular clicks with his mouth and reading the resulting echoes from nearby objects. He was so skilled at this that he could ride a bike and play sports and even video games.

People like Ben Underwood and Ved Mehta, who had some early visual experience but then lost their sight, seem to instantly convert the information they receive from touch or sound into a visual image — “seeing” the dots, for instance, as they read Braille with a finger. Researchers using functional brain imagery have confirmed that in such situations the blind person activates not only the parts of the cortex devoted to touch, but parts of the visual cortex as well.

One does not have to be blind or deaf to tap into the brain’s mysterious and extraordinary power to learn, adapt and grow. I have seen hundreds of patients with various deficits — strokes, Parkinson’s and even dementia — learn to do things in new ways, whether consciously or unconsciously, to work around those deficits.

That the brain is capable of such radical adaptation raises deep questions. To what extent are we shaped by, and to what degree do we shape, our own brains? And can the brain’s ability to change be harnessed to give us greater cognitive powers? The experiences of many people suggest that it can.

One patient I knew became totally paralyzed overnight from a spinal cord infection. At first she fell into deep despair, because she couldn’t enjoy even little pleasures, like the daily crossword she had loved.

After a few weeks, though, she asked for the newspaper, so that at least she could look at the puzzle, get its configuration, run her eyes along the clues. When she did this, something extraordinary happened. As she looked at the clues, the answers seemed to write themselves in their spaces. Her visual memory strengthened over the next few weeks, until she found that she was able to hold the entire crossword and its clues in her mind after a single, intense inspection — and then solve it mentally. She had had no idea, she later told me, that such powers were available to her.

This growth can even happen within a matter of days. Researchers at Harvard found, for example, that blindfolding sighted adults for as few as five days could produce a shift in the way their brains functioned: their subjects became markedly better at complex tactile tasks like learning Braille.

Neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to create new pathways — is a crucial part of recovery for anyone who loses a sense or a cognitive or motor ability. But it can also be part of everyday life for all of us. While it is often true that learning is easier in childhood, neuroscientists now know that the brain does not stop growing, even in our later years. Every time we practice an old skill or learn a new one, existing neural connections are strengthened and, over time, neurons create more connections to other neurons. Even new nerve cells can be generated.

I have had many reports from ordinary people who take up a new sport or a musical instrument in their 50s or 60s, and not only become quite proficient, but derive great joy from doing so. Eliza Bussey, a journalist in her mid-50s who now studies harp at the Peabody conservatory in Baltimore, could not read a note of music a few years ago. In a letter to me, she wrote about what it was like learning to play Handel’s “Passacaille”: “I have felt, for example, my brain and fingers trying to connect, to form new synapses. … I know that my brain has dramatically changed.” Ms. Bussey is no doubt right: her brain has changed.

Music is an especially powerful shaping force, for listening to and especially playing it engages many different areas of the brain, all of which must work in tandem: from reading musical notation and coordinating fine muscle movements in the hands, to evaluating and expressing rhythm and pitch, to associating music with memories and emotion.

Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active, engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to cognitive fitness.

Happy New Year!  Here’s hoping it’s better than last year…

Brooks and Herbert

Bobo is telling us all about “The Sidney Awards, Part II,” and gives us the second batch of winners of the 2010 Sidney Awards.  He says it seems as though turbulent times produce good essays.  Mr. Herbert, in “The Data and the Reality,” says despite optimistic economic forecasts, a national survey highlights the deep and continuing pain experienced by millions of jobless Americans.  Here’s Bobo:

The Sidney Awards go to some of the best magazine essays of the year. The one-man jury is biased against political essays, since politics already gets so much coverage. But the jury is biased in favor of pieces that illuminate the ideas and conditions undergirding political events.

For example, there’s been a lot of talk this year about trying to reduce corruption in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the Middle East. But in a piece in The American Interest called “Understanding Corruption,” Lawrence Rosen asks: What does corruption mean?

For Westerners, it means one set of things: bribery and nepotism, etc. But when Rosen asks people in the Middle East what corruption is, he gets variations on an entirely different meaning: “Corruption is the failure to share any largess you have received with those with whom you have formed ties of dependence.”

Our view of corruption makes sense in a nation of laws and impersonal institutions. But, Rosen explains, “Theirs is a world in which the defining feature of a man is that he has formed a web of indebtedness, a network of obligations that prove his capacity to maneuver in a world of relentless uncertainty.” So to not give a job to a cousin is corrupt; to not do deals with tribesmen is corrupt. Reducing corruption in Afghanistan is not a question of replacing President Hamid Karzai with a more honest man. It’s a deeper process.

In earlier ages, people consulted oracles. We consult studies. We rely on scientific findings to guide health care decisions, policy making and much else. But in an essay called “The Truth Wears Off” in The New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer reports on something strange.

He describes a class of antipsychotic drugs, whose effectiveness was demonstrated by several large clinical trials. But in a subsequent batch of studies, the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to wane precipitously.

This is not an isolated case. “But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain,” Lehrer writes. “It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.”

The world is fluid. Bias and randomness can creep in from all directions. For example, between 1966 and 1995 there were 47 acupuncture studies conducted in Japan, Taiwan and China, and they all found it to be an effective therapy. There were 94 studies in the U.S., Sweden and Britain, and only 56 percent showed benefits. The lesson is not to throw out studies, but to never underestimate the complexity of the world around.

There’s been a lot written about Detroit, but Charlie LeDuff’s essay “Who Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones” in Mother Jones packs a special power. It starts with a killing of a little girl in a police raid, then pulls back to the idiotic murder of a teenage boy that precipitated the raid — that murder victim may have smirked at his killer for riding a moped.

Then LeDuff touches on the decay all around — a city in which 80 percent of the eighth graders are unable to do basic math, the crime lab was closed because of ineptitude, 500 fires are set every month and 50 percent of the drivers are operating without a license.

LeDuff, a former reporter for The Times, travels from broad context to the specific details — from the collapse of the industrial economy to the fact that a local minister was left with the girl’s $4,000 funeral costs, claiming the girl’s father ran off with the donations.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Demographic Future,” Nicholas Eberstadt describes the coming global manpower decline. Over the next two decades, for example, there will be a 30 percent decline in the number of Chinese between the ages of 15 and 29 — 100 million fewer workers.

Tyler Cowen wrote a superb, counterintuitive piece on income inequality for The American Interest called “The Inequality That Matters.” It’s filled with interesting observations. For example, the inequality that really bites is local — the guy down the street who can spend three bucks more for a case of beer, not Bill Gates’s billions across the country.

But his main insight is this. Smart people, especially in the financial sector, now have tremendous incentives to take great risks. If the risks fail, they still have millions in the bank. If the risks pay off, they get enormously rich. The result is a society with more inequality and more financial instability. It’s not clear we know how to address this phenomenon.

Finally, two historical essays deserve mention. Adam Gopnick wrote a fresh piece on Winston Churchill for The New Yorker called “Finest Hours.” Anne Applebaum wrote a chilling essay on central Europe in the 20th century called “The Worst of the Madness” in The New York Review of Books. (The online version of this column has links to the essays.)

I’ve been doing these awards for several years now. This was the richest year, with the best essays.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

I keep hearing from the data zealots that holiday sales were impressive and the outlook for the economy in 2011 is not bad.

Maybe they’ve stumbled onto something in their windowless rooms. Maybe the economy really is gathering steam. But in the rough and tumble of the real world, where families have to feed themselves and pay their bills, there are an awful lot of Americans being left behind.

A continuing national survey of workers who lost their jobs during the Great Recession, conducted by two professors at Rutgers University, offers anything but a rosy view of the economic prospects for ordinary Americans. It paints, instead, a portrait filled with gloom.

More than 15 million Americans are officially classified as jobless. The professors, at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, have been following their representative sample of workers since the summer of 2009. The report on their latest survey, just out this month, is titled: “The Shattered American Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope, and Faith in Their Futures.”

Over the 15 months that the surveys have been conducted, just one-quarter of the workers have found full-time jobs, nearly all of them for less pay and with fewer or no benefits. “For those who remain unemployed,” the report says, “the cupboard has long been bare.”

These were not the folks being coldly and precisely monitored, classified and quantified as they made their way to the malls to kick-start the economy. These were among the many millions of Americans who spent the holidays hurting.

As the report states: “The recession has been a cataclysm that will have an enduring effect. It is hard to overstate the dire shape of the unemployed.”

Nearly two-thirds of the unemployed workers who were surveyed have been out of work for a year or more. More than a third have been jobless for two years. With their savings exhausted, many have borrowed money from relatives or friends, sold possessions to make ends meet and decided against medical examinations or treatments they previously would have considered essential.

Older workers who are jobless are caught in a particularly precarious state of affairs. As the report put it:

“We are witnessing the birth of a new class — the involuntarily retired. Many of those over age 50 believe they will not work again at a full-time ‘real’ job commensurate with their education and training. More than one-quarter say they expect to retire earlier than they want, which has long-term consequences for themselves and society. Many will file for Social Security as soon as they are eligible, despite the fact that they would receive greater benefits if they were able to delay retiring for a few years.”

There is a fundamental disconnect between economic indicators pointing in a positive direction and the experience of millions of American families fighting desperately to fend off destitution. Some three out of every four Americans have been personally touched by the recession — either they’ve lost a job or a relative or close friend has. And the outlook, despite the spin being put on the latest data, is not promising.

No one is forecasting a substantial reduction in unemployment rates next year. And, as Motoko Rich reported in The Times this month, temporary workers accounted for 80 percent of the 50,000 jobs added by private sector employers in November.

Carl Van Horn, the director of the Heldrich Center and one of the two professors (the other is Cliff Zukin) conducting the survey, said he was struck by how pessimistic some of the respondents have become — not just about their own situation but about the nation’s future. The survey found that workers in general are increasingly accepting the notion that the effects of the recession will be permanent, that they are the result of fundamental changes in the national economy.

“They’re losing the idea that if you are determined and work hard, you can get ahead,” said Dr. Van Horn. “They’re losing that sense of optimism. They don’t think that they or their children are going to fare particularly well.”

The fact that so many Americans are out of work, or working at jobs that don’t pay well, undermines the prospects for a robust recovery. Jobless people don’t buy a lot of flat-screen TVs. What we’re really seeing is an erosion of standards of living for an enormous portion of the population, including a substantial segment of the once solid middle class.

Not only is this not being addressed, but the self-serving, rightward lurch in Washington is all but guaranteed to make matters worse for working people. The zealots reading the economic tea leaves see brighter days ahead. They can afford to be sanguine. They’re working.