B.F. Skinner and Thinking Meat (Reposted)

[First posted March 31, 2005. Unfortunately the principal link is no longer active, but I grabbed enough of the content to make the post interesting.]

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a couple of young people and made reference to a Skinner box. Since these were college graduates with undergraduate degrees in a liberal arts area, I mistakenly assumed that they had been exposed to Skinner's work. Not everyone has a Psych 201 lab class to study the behavior of laboroatory rats using a Skinner box, but surely the name has not disappeared altogether. Maybe so. These kids had never heard of either Skinner or a Skinner box. I never bothered to tell them about the man's utopian novel, Walden Two. I figured they would consider me quaint.

Abbas Raza directs us to a short piece by David Barash in The Chronicle with a few comments remembering Skinner. I hope not to insult anyone, but if the reader is not familiar with B.F. Skinner, there is a serious gap in your education and you owe it to yourself to do a bit of homework. This little snip will not do the trick, because there is more than you think to the greater issue of human behavior.

It was Skinner who identified, more clearly than anyone before -- or after -- the key stumbling block for those of us trying to see ourselves accurately; namely, a reluctance to countenance that human actions are caused, because the more causation, the less credit. "We recognize a person's dignity or worth," writes Skinner, "when we give him credit for what he has done. The amount we give is inversely proportional to the conspicuousness of the causes of his behavior. If we do not know why a person acts as he does, we attribute his behavior to him. We try to gain additional credit for ourselves by concealing the reasons why we behave in given ways or by claiming to have acted for less powerful reasons." Ironically, there is something flattering and legitimizing in actions or thoughts that spring unbidden from our "self" -- whatever that may be -- and that aren't otherwise explicable. By the same token, the more our actions are caused, the less are we credited for them.

The article ends with this wonderful quote...

In a 1991 science-fiction story by Terry Bisson, we listen in on a conversation between the robotic commander of an interplanetary expedition and his equally electronic leader, reporting with astonishment that the human inhabitants of Earth are "made out of meat":

"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. ... "
"That's impossible. ... How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you. I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector, and they're made out of meat." ...
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. ... "
"Nope, we thought of that, since they do have meat heads. ... But ... they're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So ... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat?"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Dreaming meat! The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

American Idol - David Archuleta - Imagine - 2/27/08

Even Simon said it was good.
Too much soul-riffing for my taste, but hey...what do I know?

Bloomberg Says...

What to make of this?

In the weeks and months ahead, I will continue to work to steer the national conversation away from partisanship and toward unity; away from ideology and toward common sense; away from sound bites and toward substance. And while I have always said I am not running for president, the race is too important to sit on the sidelines, and so I have changed my mind in one area. If a candidate takes an independent, nonpartisan approach — and embraces practical solutions that challenge party orthodoxy — I’ll join others in helping that candidate win the White House.

Barak O'Bollywood

H/T 3Quarks

Help me out here. Has any other candidate for president ever generated as much international attention and excitement?

William F. Buckley (1925-2008) -- This I Believe Essay

This from May, 2005, is reposted in remembrance of this irreplaceable man who died yesterday.

Mona Charen's recollections are also worth reading.

Like many a star-struck youngster, I maneuvered to meet him when I was in college. To my amazement, he agreed to be interviewed for my yearbook. Determined to ask questions that wouldn't betray my outsized admiration for him, I posed the vaguely feminist query, "In what ways would your life have been different if you had been born female?" His reply: "I'd have seduced John Kenneth Galbraith and spared the world much pain."

§§§§§

DSL was down this morning so my time is limited. No essays and profound insights this morning, I'm afraid. Sorry 'bout that.
Lest you go away hungry, here is a link to a wonderful "This I Believe" essay that will only take about five minutes of your time. More, actually, if you like to hear the thing twice through, if for no other reason than to hear this man's unbelievable vocabulary at work. (Click on the "Listen" icon to hear Buckley read his essay.)

Vocabulary has always been a passion for me. A graduate student I knew in college used the word "retrograde" naturally in conversation once and it impressed me a lot. I was impressed for two reasons. First, because he was from Bombay and second because he used it spot on [sorry, Cat] to describe the American Medical Association.

In the case of Buckley, he once used "jejune" in a sentence instead of "trivial." I had to look it up, and sure enough his point was much sharper thanks to his vocabulary.

Tip to Southern Appeal, which has already collected one snarky comment from an infidel.

Song of the Red Cap and Master of The House

No connection...

But the melodies and moods seem somehow alike.

Two fun listens. I'm taking a break from thinking.

Justice for International Criminals

The Economist has a snip worth reading.

Heads of state, past and present, are increasingly being brought to book for crimes committed while in office.

Thomas P.M. Barnett comments....

How can America not be in the lead on this emerging rule set that so favors a shrink the Gap strategy? How can this not be a huge lever in our global war on terror?

Indeed. Imagine how different the last six years would have been if the U.S. response to the attack on the World Trade Center had been an international police action led by America rather than a unilateral misdirected military response.

Blog Traffic Report

It is nine o'clock in the evening. According to Sitemeter there are twenty links to this site as I write, all of which are reading one post:

What is Barack Obama's religion? Updated

Accordingly, ninety of the last one hundred hits, all of which have resulted from searches, have also been to the same post.

Here are where the places they came from:

1 The Dalles, Oregon
2 Johnston, Rhode Island
3 Evansville, Indiana
4 Dyersburg, Tennessee
5 Cedarburg, Wisconsin
6 Los Angeles, California
7 Toledo, Ohio
8 Jeffersonville, Indiana
9 Houston, Texas
10 Canton, Georgia
11 Chicago, Illinois
12 Florence, South Carolina
13 Huntsville, Ohio
14 San Antonio, Texas
15 Lafayette, Louisiana
16 Savannah, Georgia
17 Birmingham, Alabama
18 United States
19 El Cajon, California
20 United States
21 Savannah, Georgia
22 Birmingham, Alabama
23 United States
24 El Cajon, California
25 United States
26 Auckland
27 Fort Worth, Texas
28 Baton Rouge, Louisiana
29 Plymouth, Massachusetts
30 Ambridge, Pennsylvania
31 Laredo, Texas
32 Indianapolis, Indiana
33 West New York, New Jersey
34 United States
35 United States
36 Verona, New Jersey
37 Wallingford, Connecticut
38 Austin, Texas
39 Albuquerque, New Mexico
40 Saint Louis, Missouri
41 Canada, Calgary, Alberta
42 Richmond, Virginia
43 Brooklyn, New York
44 Mentor, Ohio
45 Hibbing, Minnesota
46 San Antonio, Texas
47 Toledo, Ohio
48 Cincinnati, Ohio
49 Birmingham, Alabama
50 New Zealand, Christchurch
51 United States
52 Provo, Utah
53 Canada, Niagara Falls, Ontario
54 Eden Prairie, Minnesota
55 United States
56 Kirkland, Washington
57 Brooklyn, New York
58 United States
59 Canada, Halifax, Nova Scotia
60 Boston, Massachusetts
61 Burbank, California
62 Howell, Michigan
63 Worcester, Massachusetts
64 Midland, Texas
65 High Point, North Carolina
66 Atlanta, Georgia
67 Maineville, Ohio
68 Kansas City, Missouri
69 South Charleston, Ohio
70 Tallahassee, Florida
71 Boston, Massachusetts
72 Seminole, Florida
73 Houston, Texas
74 Arlington, Texas
75 Grand Junction, Colorado
76 New York
77 San Leandro, California
78 Pascagoula, Mississippi
79 Tehachapi, California
80 United States
81 Del Mar, California
82 United States
83 Mashpee, Massachusetts
84 Minneapolis, Minnesota
85 Fayetteville, Arkansas
86 Saint Louis, Missouri
87 Puerto Rico
88 Kenner, Louisiana
89 United States
90 Eatontown, New Jersey
91 Moorhead, Minnesota
92 Cincinnati, Ohio
93 United States
94 Silver Spring, Maryland
95 Branson, Missouri
96 Indianapolis, Indiana
97 Unknown
98 Cave Creek, Arizona
99 Perryville, Missouri
100 Marysville, Washington

Ten of these came for a different reason. I didn't take time to find out which ones.

I expected a heavy bunch fom Ohio and Texas, because those important primaries are next Tuesday and the media talks at tiresome length about those two states, but that is not the case.
The curiosity is all over the place.

Inside the Space Station

Quick lesson in chemistry -- shellac and lacquer

[Recycled post from October, 2006, which came up from someone's Google search.]

I was cleaning my windshield and came across a few particularly hard insect spots. As I applied the elbow juice I recalled reading about the lac bug, source of shellac, and it made perfect sense that an insect smached on the windshield could be a lot harder to remove than bird poop. We don't have lac bugs in North America, but I was inspired to look it up.

First of all shellac is not to be confused with lacquer. Shellac is that unique, now mostly obsolete product of the lac bug. Lacquer is a product of special trees, now enhanced by modern chemistry to become the versatile product that it has become. I'm glad to know that those lacquer keepsakes I got from Korea are not made of bug juice.

Here are the links to the two Wikipedia articles.

Shellac is a brittle or flaky secretion of the lac insect Coccus lacca, found in the forests of Assam and Thailand. Freed from wood it is called "seedlac." Once it was commonly believed that shellac was a resin obtained from the wings of a bug (order Hemiptera) found in India. In actuality, shellac was obtained from the secretion of the female bug, harvested from the bark of the trees where she deposits it to provide a sticky hold on the trunk. There is a risk that the harvesting process can scoop the bug up along with the secretion, leading to its death. The natural coloration of lac residue is greatly influenced by the sap consumed by the lac insect and the season of the harvest. Generally in the trade of seedlac there are two distinct colors; the orange Bysacki and the blonde Kushmi.

More than you ever needed to know at the link, including this:

Shellac is edible, and it was used as a glazing agent on pills and candies. When used for this purpose, it has the food additive E number E904. There were concerns that this coating is not vegetarian as it may contain crushed bugs.

Lacquer is not the same:

The earliest known lacquers were made in China, about 7000 B.C. These lacquers, made from the resin of the tree Rhus verniciflua, produce very hard, durable finishes that are both beautiful, and very resistant to damage by water, acid, alkali or abrasion. They do not, however, stand up well to ultraviolet light. The active ingredient of the resin is urushiol, a mixture of various phenols suspended in water, plus a few proteins.

Aagin, more than you need to know at the link...

Resume what you were doing.

Hiatus

Hello, little cadre of regular readers,

I expect blogging to be light for a while as I catch up on some reading and adjust to a new place of employment which will consume more time and attention than my present job.

After several years of blogging I find it hard to pay attention to books as I once did. My attention span has been injured. As I read a book, I sometimes want to interrupt my reading to see of anyone left a comment somewhere...but then I realize I'm not at the computer. It's maddening. Blogging is the reading and learning equivalent of junk food. It tastes wonderful, but you know it's filled with so much fat, salt, chocolate and grease that eating too much is not healthful.

I've been plowing through William Least Heat-Moon's Prairie Erth for six months and I'm only half way. (That one's like a box of cherry cordials...ingest slowly and savor every page...but that takes a lot of time. I keep it in one of the bathrooms.) It took me months to get through Virginia Postrel's The Future and It's Enemies last year. I've had Obama's Dreams From My Father for a week and have only passed Chapter Five. (Incidentally, he is incredibly introspective and analytical. If as president he received an alert that an emergency was occurring I think his first instinct would be to remain calm and move instantly to verify facts before reacting. I guess that's okay. No reasonable person would do less. Sometimes shooting from the hip is needed when a split-second delay might result in tragedy but those cases truly are rare.) I started Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building over a year ago and put it down, but I know I have to finish because the man who recommended it, an Oxford-educated naturalized American from Egypt whose judgement I respect, said it was good. Besides, Baheyya found it worth commenting about. On, and I also promised to blog a review Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith in return for a complementary copy. Whew. This is almost like work.

Please excuse me. I have lots on my plate at the moment and will get back to serious blogging eventually. (Look for softballs and You Tube videos. I haven't given up candy and pretzels altogether.)

Barbara Jordan (1936-1996)

If you don't know who this is, it's time you found out. Those of us who remember her timeless voice will never forget.
Take time to listen to this audio link.

Her Wikipedia article does not do justice to this incredible woman but it's a good place to begin.

Top Ten Campaign Promises, Obama and Clinton

Cuba, Castro and U.S. Electoral Politics

Peter Howard blogs at Duck of Minerva, one of my favorite sites tracking international relations. This week's news that Fidel Castro is "stepping down" due to health issues has been received with little or no notice in the U.S. Bad weather and celebrity gossip get more attention in the media than anything about Cuba, thanks partly to a long-standing policy of denial about that tragic little country.

This is what Professor Howard wrote:

If there is one domestic lobby that has captured US policy toward another country, it is the Cuba lobby that pushes for ever stricter sanctions on the Castro regime. The power of this lobby in Presidential politics can’t be overstated—it is a very large, issue specific, and highly organized voting bloc in Miami Dade county in Florida. Win Florida, win the White House, we all know that story well. Thus, we regularly see leading national politicians competing to out-tough the other in order to make inroads into the Cuban vote in south Florida.

Today’s big news, that Fidel would formally step down as Cuba’s head of state, offers an interesting chance to view the power of this domestic political lobby at a moment when the national interest might suggest an alternative different policy.

The Libertad Act, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Clinton in the election year of 1996 wrote the US embargo of Cuba into law, significantly strengthening it (Clinton won Florida and won re-election that year). From JFK through 1996, the embargo was a series of Executive orders. The difference: a future president could end the executive orders at any time. Changing the law requires a subsequent act of Congress. A central point of the Libertad act was that the Embargo will remain in force until there is a transitional government in Cuba that does not include Fidel Castro or his brother Raul.

This brings us to today. Fidel stepping aside certainly marks a sea-change in Cuban politics. It does mark a transition in government, but for the time being, Raul Castro remains a part of the picture. This change also presents a unique opportunity for the United States.

Cuba faced tough times after the end of the Cold War. The USSR was a valuable patron, buying its exports and providing funds to subsidize its economy. Without the USSR, Cuba suffered. Recently, though, Hugo Chavez has stepped into that role, using its vast oil profits to funnel money into Cuba.

Here’s the opportunity for the US: take the transition in Cuba, from Fidel to a successor government, to lift the embargo and allow US capital, business, and tourists to pour in (and it would—see the Godfather or Guys and Dolls). Engaging Cuba could steer them away from Chavez and toward the US. The US has identified the rise of Chavez as a national security challenge, and has identified a clear interest in reducing Chavez’s influence in Latin America. [ed. emphasis added]

So, here’s the question: Given a clear national security argument for taking this opportunity to engage Cuba, end the embargo, and peel Cuba away from the Chavez camp, does this National Interest trump the domestic politics of pandering to CANF and Cuban voters in Miami in an election year. Do we see the Cuba lobby press for a continued embargo, further driving Raul and the transition government closer to Chavez? What does Bush do, what does Congress do, and what to the Presidential Candidates press for?

I have been watching Florida presidential politics with amusement for years, watching the Cuban community of South Florida as the tail that wags the presidential electoral dog.

America has in effect preserved and protected its own pet Communist in a little cage ninety miles from Florida, by insuring that none of the forces attacking the rest of world Socialism have been able to get at Cuba. Some keep boa constrictors, some exotic birds, some tarantulas, but the US keeps Cuba. Every four years presidential candidates of all political pursuasions will not risk losing the Cuban votes in Florida, and between elections, whoever is in power keeps those eggs in the basket and is careful that they don't get broken.

Guys and Dolls, indeed. The professor is exactly right, of course, but that little dose of reality has never been part of
power politics that has dictated (er, excuse me...bad word there...maybe inspired would read better...) U.S. Cuban policy for the last forty years or so.

Here is a link to the reaction of Henry Louis Gomez to Castro's move. He has been a tireless articulate blogging voice at Babalu Blog about as long as blogging has been around. I'm sure that along with the rest of the Florida Cuban community he would oppose the notion of revisiting the Libertad Act with a view of opening Cuba to U.S. tourism which, like "glasnost and peristroika" mentioned in his comments, could hasten the end of Cuba's oppressive system in the same way that the Soviet Union came apart.

The never-say-die tenacity of that thinking is not subject to change, even when the word, now made popular by you-know-who is echoing like the shot heard around the world. That snarky reference to "a trite slogan used by a politician's wife who isn't proud of our country" tells us that South Florida ain't Obama Country.

I predict a deafening silence from all the candidates, both Democrat and Republican, about developments in Cuba. Not because they don't know or don't care, but because they have no intention of poking a nest of stinging insects in Florida.

Perhaps the next generation of American-born Cuban expats will persuade their Washington Lobby to lighten up a little.

Just Words

I heard Obama giving this speech on television and it made me want to stand up alone in the living room and start clapping.

He is being criticized for borrowing oratory from someone else. “It’s true that speeches don’t solve all problems,” he said. “But what is also true if we cannot inspire the country to believe again, it doesn’t matter how many policies and plans we have.”

Right he is.

If he can be as pursuasive at the negotiating table as he is on stage, he very well might get better results than resorting to military force. Could it be that the incumbent president has to wage wars to compensate for being, shall we say, somewhat limited in his use of the mother tongue?

Tom Rush - Remember Song

Michael Wade says, "This may become the Boomer Anthem."

One Damning Video

[My old posts keep percolating up in the referrals. This one from Katrina days (October, 2006) helps me remember a political catastrophe at the time resulting in federal inertia as the same administration that had overturned a despot in the Middle East and dropped "daisy cutter" bombs in the hills of Afghanistan sat with hands in their laps, citing...Hell, I don't remember what was the excuse for doing nothing as helpless people in New Orleans remained trapped in the Super Dome for days.

One criticism of Barak Obama is that he might not be able to handle a crisis. I can't speak for anyone else, but looking backward, it's hard for me to imagine the next four years being mismanaged any worse than the last four.]

◄§§§►

I will never forget listening to the radio during the first day or two of the Katrina disaster, listening to the Neal Boortz program. A listener called all the way from Australia. He was monitoring the Hurricane story by listening to Boortz show on the Internet. He posed this haunting and unanswered question...

"Where are your amphibious vehicles???"

The question goes to the heart of Washington's inaction during a time of crisis. I sometimes wonder if in retrospect anyone in a position to intervene has had any regrets about his failure to do so.

This YouTube U2 Video spells it out in sad, bleeding irony.
Four thousand comments left so far...
I am not alone.



This is part of what I mused about at the time.

In the absence of leadership on the part of elected officials the role of the military continues to expand in our national affairs. The recent catastrophic damage of Hurricane Katrina begs the question. In the absence of local and state leadership, how and when should the military intervene (or be used - there is a difference, you know) to bring about a speedy and efficient recovery in the aftermath of a natural disaster?After last year's tsunami brought wholesale tragedy to the Indian Ocean, the military response was swift and impressive. This was an example of swords into plowshares in the best sense of the phrase. Following the Katrina disaster with all those people penned up in the Superdome, an Australian caller to a talk show asked an obvious question.

"Where," he asked incredulously, "are your amphibious vehicles???"

Where, indeed? For this observer, watching from the other side of the world, it was a no-brainer. The military has hovercraft capable of delivering tanks and trucks to battlefields with no highways. Amphibious vehicles from World War Two are being used to taxi sight-seers over both water and city streets in Boston, Detroit and other places. Why not load up water, food and other supplies, take them to where they can be used, load up a crowd of people to be evacuated, and keep it up until the situation is safer and better organized?

Stuff White People Like

Stuff White People Like fired up in January and is gaining traffic. Twice this morning I have come across links to this obliquely funny place. They are up to 69 posts. Here is #54 Kitchen Gadgets...

White people are under a lot of pressure to like cooking. Everything in their culture tells them that they need to have a nice kitchen and that they need to cook with organic, fresh ingredients to make delicious, complicated food.

Though any great chef can prepare fantastic meals with a knife and a few pots, white people believe that they need a full cadre of appliances and gadgets in their kitchen in order to live up to the pressure.

If you go into a white person’s kitchen you will find a waffle maker, a rice cooker, a steamer, a food processor, a panini press and a blender. They also have hand powered devices like flour sifters, ravioli crimpers, pizza cutters, potato ricers, and a sushi mat.

But, in order for them to truly enter into whitedom, they need to own the holy grail of white kitchens - the kitchen aid stand mixer (right). They will match this mixer to their kitchen’s color scheme and it will make up the focal point. And much like many religious artifacts, it will remain untouched for months and even years, sitting on the counter to be admired as a testament to their lifestyle.

Kitchen Gadgets also serve as one of the main reasons why white people get married. Look at their registry and you will find gadgets for any possible task in the kitchen. If you end up buying one of these for a white person, your card should make reference to them using a lot to make beautiful food that you hope you can eat one day. This kind of stuff goes over like gang busters.

If you find yourself in a conversation about these things, a good way to say a little but mean a lot is to mention that you “find the consumer models to be poorly built, my friend, a chef, brings me with him to a restaurant supply shop that’s not open to the public. The stuff there is real quality, it’s where I get all of my pans.”

If this is too big of a risk, you should just throw out a combination of these words: “le Creuset, Calphalon, All Clad, Williams Sonoma, and Sur Le Table.” White people go so nuts when they hear these words, you won’t even have to finish your sentence.

◄§§§►

The list started with Coffee (I promise you that the first person at your school to drink coffee was a white person. You could kind of tell they didn’t enjoy it, but they did it anyways until they liked it - like cigarettes.) and included Barak Obama at Number Eight (Because white people are afraid that if they don’t like him that they will be called racist).

Just reporting here. (*eyes roll*) Anything I say will come across as a wet blanket.

Obama -- He sure writes purty (Updated)

[Posted first December 29, 2006. Obama was thinking seriously about running for president but was not to make the announcement for a couple more weeks. This is the first chapter of The Audacity of Hope. Much has changed since the NY Times first printed this.]

Chapter One from his book is online at the NY Times. Thanks, Abbas, for the link. He seems to know what he's in for.

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First Chapter

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The Audacity of Hope
By BARACK OBAMA

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It's been almost ten years since I first ran for political office. I was thirty-five at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with life. A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends suggested that I run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and contacts from my days as a community organizer, would make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every first-time candidate does: I talked to anyone who would listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I'd get some version of the same two questions.

.

"Where'd you get that funny name?"
And then: "You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?"

.

I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I'd first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It signaled a cynicism not simply with politics but with the very notion of a public life, a cynicism that-at least in the South Side neighborhoods I sought to represent-had been nourished by a generation of broken promises. In response, I would usually smile and nod and say that I understood the skepticism, but that there was-and always had been-another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country's founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done. It was a pretty convincing speech, I thought. And although I'm not sure that the people who heard me deliver it were similarly impressed, enough of them appreciated my earnestness and youthful swagger that I made it to the Illinois legislature.

.

Six years later, when I decided to run for the United States Senate, I wasn't so sure of myself.
By all appearances, my choice of careers seemed to have worked out. After spending my two terms during which I labored in the minority, Democrats had gained control of the state senate, and I had subsequently passed a slew of bills, from reforms of the Illinois death penalty system to an expansion of the state's health program for kids. I had continued to teach at the University of Chicago Law School, a job I enjoyed, and was frequently invited to speak around town. I had preserved my independence, my good name, and my marriage, all of which, statistically speaking, had been placed at risk the moment I set foot in the state capital.

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But the years had also taken their toll. Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws-the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip. In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me. It's a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think-endemic, too, in the American character-and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics. Whether politics actually encourages the trait or simply attracts those who possess it is unclear. Lyndon Johnson, who knew much about both politics and restlessness, once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.

.

In any event, it was as a consequence of that restlessness that I decided to challenge a sitting Democratic incumbent for his congressional seat in the 2000 election cycle. It was an ill-considered race, and I lost badly-the sort of drubbing that awakens you to the fact that life is not obliged to work out as you'd planned. A year and a half later, the scars of that loss sufficiently healed, I had lunch with a media consultant who had been encouraging me for some time to run for statewide office. As it happened, the lunch was scheduled for late September 2001.

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"You realize, don't you, that the political dynamics have changed," he said as he picked at his salad.

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"What do you mean?" I asked, knowing full well what he meant. We both looked down at the newspaper beside him. There, on the front page, was Osama bin Laden.

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"Hell of a thing, isn't it?" he said, shaking his head.

.

"Really bad luck. You can't change your name, of course. Voters are suspicious of that kind of thing. Maybe if you were at the start of your career, you know, you could use a nickname or something. But now ..." His voice trailed off and he shrugged apologetically before signaling the waiter to bring us the check.

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I suspected he was right, and that realization ate away at me. For the first time in my career, I began to experience the envy of seeing younger politicians succeed where I had failed, moving into higher offices, getting more things done. The pleasures of politics-the adrenaline of debate, the animal warmth of shaking hands and plunging into a crowd-began to pale against the meaner tasks of the job: the begging for money, the long drives home after the banquet had run two hours longer than scheduled, the bad food and stale air and clipped phone conversations with a wife who had stuck by me so far but was pretty fed up with raising our children alone and was beginning to question my priorities. Even the legislative work, the policy-making that had gotten me to run in the first place, began to feel too incremental, too removed from the larger battles-over taxes, security, health care, and jobs-that were being waged on a national stage. I began to harbor doubts about the path I had chosen; I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream, after years of waiting tables between auditions or scratching out hits in the minor leagues, he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grown-up and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.

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Denial, anger, bargaining, despair-I'm not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance-of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality. I refocused on my work in the state senate and took satisfaction from the reforms and initiatives that my position afforded. I spent more time at home, and watched my daughters grow, and properly cherished my wife, and thought about my long-term financial obligations. I exercised, and read novels, and came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part.

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And it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come up with the thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate. An up-or-out strategy was how I described it to my wife, one last shot to test out my ideas before I settled into a calmer, more stable, and better-paying existence. And she-perhaps more out of pity than conviction-agreed to this one last race, though she also suggested that given the orderly life she preferred for our family, I shouldn't necessarily count on her vote.

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I let her take comfort in the long odds against me. The Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, had spent $19 million of his personal wealth to unseat the previous senator, Carol Moseley Braun. He wasn't widely popular; in fact he didn't really seem to enjoy politics all that much. But he still had unlimited money in his family, as well as a genuine integrity that had earned him grudging respect from the voters.

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For a time Carol Moseley Braun reappeared, back from an ambassadorship in New Zealand and with thoughts of trying to reclaim her old seat; her possible candidacy put my own plans on hold. When she decided to run for the presidency instead, everyone else started looking at the Senate race. By the time Fitzgerald announced he would not seek reelection, I was staring at six primary opponents, including the sitting state comptroller; a businessman worth hundreds of millions of dollars; Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's former chief of staff; and a black, female health-care professional who the smart money assumed would split the black vote and doom whatever slim chances I'd had in the first place.

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I didn't care. Freed from worry by low expectations, my credibility bolstered by several helpful endorsements, I threw myself into the race with an energy and joy that I thought I had lost. I hired four staffers, all of them smart, in their twenties or early thirties, and suitably cheap. We found a small office, printed letterhead, installed phone lines and several computers. Four or five hours a day, I called major Democratic donors and tried to get my calls returned. I held press conferences to which nobody came. We signed up for the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade and were assigned the parade's very last slot, so that my ten volunteers and I found ourselves marching just a few paces ahead of the city's sanitation trucks, waving to the few stragglers who remained on the route while workers swept up garbage and peeled green shamrock stickers off the lampposts.

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Mostly, though, I just traveled, often driving alone, first from ward to ward in Chicago, then from county to county and town to town, eventually up and down the state, across miles and miles of cornfields and beanfields and train tracks and silos. It wasn't an efficient process. Without the machinery of the state's Democratic Party organization, without any real mailing list or Internet operation, I had to rely on friends or acquaintances to open their houses to who ever might come, or to arrange for my visit to their church, union hall, bridge group, or Rotary Club. Sometimes, after several hours of driving, I would find just two or three people waiting for me around a kitchen table. I would have to assure the hosts that the turnout was fine and compliment them on the refreshments they'd prepared. Sometimes I would sit through a church service and the pastor would forget to recognize me, or the head of the union local would let me speak to his members just before announcing that the union had decided to endorse someone else.

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But whether I was meeting with two people or fifty, whether I was in one of the well-shaded, stately homes of the North Shore, a walk-up apartment on the West Side, or a farmhouse outside Bloomington, whether people were friendly, indifferent, or occasionally hostile, I tried my best to keep my mouth shut and hear what they had to say. I listened to people talk about their jobs, their businesses, the local school; their anger at Bush and their anger at Democrats; their dogs, their back pain, their war service, and the things they remembered from childhood. Some had well-developed theories to explain the loss of manufacturing jobs or the high cost of health care. Some recited what they had heard on Rush Limbaugh or NPR. But most of them were too busy with work or their kids to pay much attention to politics, and they spoke instead of what they saw before them: a plant closed, a promotion, a high heating bill, a parent in a nursing home, a child's first step.

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No blinding insights emerged from these months of conversation. If anything, what struck me was just how modest people's hopes were, and how much of what they believed seemed to hold constant across race, region, religion, and class. Most of them thought that anybody willing to work should be able to find a job that paid a living wage. They figured that people shouldn't have to file for bankruptcy because they got sick. They believed that every child should have a genuinely good education-that it shouldn't just be a bunch of talk-and that those same children should be able to go to college even if their parents weren't rich. They wanted to be safe, from criminals and from terrorists; they wanted clean air, clean water, and time with their kids. And when they got old, they wanted to be able to retire with some dignity and respect.

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That was about it. It wasn't much. And although they understood that how they did in life depended mostly on their own efforts-although they didn't expect government to solve all their problems, and certainly didn't like seeing their tax dollars wasted-they figured that government should help.

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I told them that they were right: government couldn't solve all their problems. But with a slight change in priorities we could make sure every child had a decent shot at life and meet the challenges we faced as a nation. More often than not, folks would nod in agreement and ask how they could get involved. And by the time I was back on the road, with a map on the passenger's seat, on my way to my next stop, I knew once again just why I'd gone into politics.

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I felt like working harder than I'd ever worked in my life.

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This book grows directly out of those conversations on the campaign trail. Not only did my encounters with voters confirm the fundamental decency of the American people, they also reminded me that at the core of the American experience are a set of ideals that continue to stir our collective conscience; a common set of values that bind us together despite our differences; a running thread of hope that makes our improbable experiment in democracy work. These values and ideals find expression not just in the marble slabs of monuments or in the recitation of history books. They remain alive in the hearts and minds of most Americans-and can inspire us to pride, duty, and sacrifice.

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I recognize the risks of talking this way. In an era of globalization and dizzying technological change, cutthroat politics and unremitting culture wars, we don't even seem to possess a shared language with which to discuss our ideals, much less the tools to arrive at some rough consensus about how, as a nation, we might work together to bring those ideals about. Most of us are wise to the ways of admen, pollsters, speechwriters, and pundits. We know how high-flying words can be deployed in the service of cynical aims, and how the noblest sentiments can be subverted in the name of power, expedience, greed, or intolerance. Even the standard high school history textbook notes the degree to which, from its very inception, the reality of American life has strayed from its myths. In such a climate, any assertion of shared ideals or common values might seem hopelessly naive, if not downright dangerous-an attempt to gloss over serious differences over policy and performance or, worse, a means of muffling the complaints of those who feel ill served by our current institutional arrangements.

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My argument, however, is that we have no choice. You don't need a poll to know that the vast majority of Americans-Republican, Democrat, and independent-are weary of the dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth. Whether we're from red states or blue states, we feel in our gut the lack of honesty, rigor, and common sense in our policy debates, and dislike what appears to be a continuous menu of false or cramped choices. Religious or secular, black, white, or brown, we sense-correctly-that the nation's most significant challenges are being ignored, and that if we don't change course soon, we may be the first generation in a very long time that leaves behind a weaker and more fractured America than the one we inherited. Perhaps more than any other time in our recent history, we need a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.
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That's the topic of this book: how we might begin the process of changing our politics and our civic life. This isn't to say that I know exactly how to do it. I don't. Although I discuss in each chapter a number of our most pressing policy challenges, and suggest in broad strokes the path I believe we should follow, my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete. I offer no unifying theory of American government, nor do these pages provide a manifesto for action, complete with charts and graphs, timetables and ten-point plans. . . .

Social Security vs. Individual Security

[This post is a re-run from three years ago (March 7, 2005). At that time the president and his Republican supporters were trying to advance the nutty idea of "privatizing" Social Security, leading to what looks to me like Individual, not "social" Security. With the presidential race now underway, it's time to revisit some of the old struggles to remind people how different the two parties stand in this debate.]

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CAUTION: RANT AHEAD

Nothing new here, folks...

Feel free to scroll down to the next post...

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Josh Marshall was listening to Meet the Press yesterday.
[I heard the same program on my car radio, but didn't pay much attention because like so many of the pundit shows it struck me as a babbling contest of soundbites as this or that clever turn of a phrase tried to out-spin another one. Words and phrases like predicate something or other... suffering from... waning of... yadda yadda (suffering? Gimme a break) -- phrases like that turn me off, especially when content is about an inch deep, without the benefit of being a mile wide.]

He zeroes in on a central point about Social Security:

The real point, though, is that when you set aside all the practical matters of debt and transition costs, this is an ideological debate -- or to put it less antiseptically, a debate over different sets of values.

The idea behind private accounts is that people should rely on themselves alone and bear the consequences of their successes and their failures and random chance on their own shoulders. If things don't pan out for you in retirement, that's something to take up with your children.

The concept behind Social Security is fundamentally different. The first premise is that if you put in a lifetime's work there is simply a level of destitution below which society will not let you fall. Maybe you made so little during your working years that there wasn't enough to save. Or maybe you just didn't plan ahead well enough. Or maybe you suffered some misfortune. Whatever. If you worked you won't be destitute when you retire. People who made big bucks through their lives don't get a particularly good 'deal' from Social Security, if you insist on seeing it in investment terms. But that's a distorting prism, sort of like thinking you got a rotten deal on your medical insurance if you never have a catastrophic illness.

Here, in easy to understand language, is the difference between what we have and what is being proposed by that wonderfully appealing idea of "private" (Damn! That's great! I get to own it myself myself!) "accounts" (Gee! Just like the bank! My own piece of the rock that nobody can take away! Wow!). Well what we have already has accounts. And the accounts are better than private. They are collective, like insurance. Have you looked at your Social Security statement lately? It's humbling to see. There is a record of your earnings going all the way back to those scrimp and scrape days before you earned enough to piss away on a date to the movie.

I would like for someone to grab a random bunch of statements, representing a balance cross-section of American wage earners, do a bit of arithmetic backwards, and figure out exactly what they would have been "contributing" (I still hate that word. It's income tax with no deductions.) to a pretend "private account."
Next, with a bit of analytical projecting, take each one and figure out what it would be worth today had those little bits been collecting in some kind of investment. Remember, now, the investment cannot be in real estate, privately owned business, or other hard assets...just paper. Not just any paper, but the "safest" (read low-risk, another word for low interest rate) places. We need to discover how well a very conservative person would do over a lifetime of work if those moneys had been placed in a private account rather than being used for Social Security (and oh, by the way, to also feed the kitty of the general fund, leading to what we now call the so-called "trust fund" that many argue is worthless). My guess is that most people would not have anything like enough to maintain them when they were no longer able to work due to age or health. It is certain that those we now refer to as the working poor would be SOL.

Josh Marshall's insurance analogy apt for Social Security. If you never have a catastrophic illness you might think your insurance premiums are a ripoff. Same is true for Social Security. Young people like to see themselves as comfortable and well-cared for in their retirement years, because that is how young people tend to think. At least that is how young people think around those who sit around the movers and shakers who make policy.
Very few policy makers actually get out into the population they presume to represent and pay attention to the large numbers of people who make up the economy. Like the Kennedy clan trekking up the hollows of West Virginia, genuinely shocked and saddened by what they found, very few of our politicians take the trouble to venture into places where the underground economy operates, with drug money, bartered child care, and I-1099's that never get filed by "sub-contractors" who are really casual laborers, often illegal.

This appeals to me:

I like to think of this as the moral equality of work. In our society, we allow the market to assign all manner of different cash values to different sorts of work or even the same sorts of work under different circumstances. And by and large, within some very small limitations like the minimum wage or certain non-discrimination laws, most of us think this is how it should be. I certainly do. (In this sense, I think collective bargaining amounts to another competitive arrangement within a market economy -- though doctrinaire free market folks have always seen it in contrary terms.)

But the cash value of work isn't the same as its moral value. And if you look at the values embedded in all those Social Security actuarial tables, you see this principle: whether you were a janitor or a fast-food worker or a doctor or a tycoon, if you worked during your working years you shouldn't be left destitute when your working years are over (retirement) or when, through no fault of your own, you can't work anymore (disability). No matter what. The common denominator is a life of work -- skilled or unskilled, impressive or unimpressive, remembered or forgotten. It doesn't matter.

Yesterday I heard another report of someone living the fulfillment of the American Dream. A young woman where I work tells of her family's journey. Her parents came from a poor Caribbean country where they simply worked hard at anything they could do. With no special training, and with ambition that only comes from having no other choice, they migrated to America where they were able to rear a family, save enough to buy some real estate and now live in retirement, a retirement which came to them, incidentally, before they were sixty.

I made my heart glad to hear this story. It reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, a man from Cambodia who started years ago as a dishwasher in the cafeteria and has become one of the most sought-after sushi chefs in the Southeast, with a beautiful wife and three incredible kids, living in suburbia.

But these stories are few and far between. Most of the stories I know about are filled with children growing up with only one parent or being reared by another relative because one of both parents cannot do the job for one reason or another. Substance abuse, unresolved medical problems and corrosive social habits seem to be the norm for many people.

But even with all the problems I have witnessed, I am still observing a group of people at work, earning whatever they can at very low wages to make ends meet. Some have more than one job. I cannot imagine what it must be like not to be able to work at even the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, but I do know that the numbers of job applications far outnumbers the number of available jobs, even at the lower edge of the economy. With thirty-five years in the food business, I can speak with some authority about conditions at the lower edge of our so-called "service economy." (When I hear pundits talk about "moving us from the industrial age to the information age" it makes me roll my eyes. The vast numbers of people at work in America have no idea about "ages" and "eras" and "trends." They are simply trying to make a living the best way they can, with whatever resources they can manage. )

Anyone who thinks that replacing Social Security with some kind of Individual Security is a good idea is not living in the real world. Life in the real world is for many - in the words of Thomas Hobbs - "nasty, brutish and short." Sure, we now have flush toilets and cell phones, but these and other benefits of modern society are no reason to pull the economic rug from under people who have participated as best they knew how in the society until they could no longer do so.

Earlier this morning I came across the list of Slate 60, listing the sixty most generous philanthropic donors for 2004. As I perused the list I couldn't help thinking how far removed from where I live these people live and move.

In this, the ninth annual compendium of the country's 60 biggest givers, let us take stock of the State of the Turner Sweepstakes. Back in 1996, when CNN founder Ted Turner, provided the inspiration for Slate's list of top givers, he expressed the hope that the competitive juices that have nourished America's great fortunes might spill over more generously into the cup of human kindness....Overall, the Slate 60 pledged, paid, and bequeathed a heart-warming $10.1 billion in 2004, up from $5.9 billion in 2003.

Ten billion dollars.
Ten. Billion. Dollars.
That's a bunch of change, you know. Between that end of the economy and the other end, there is a range of wealth. We are not, thank God, either rich or poor with not much in between. In America the economic plane is less steep, the top and bottom less extreme.
Somewhere up the ladder, somebody is making a bit more than ninety thousand bucks a years. Whoever they are, and going on up to about one hundred fifty grand, I don't think it is unreasonable to ask them to start chipping in a bit more for Social Security.

Raising the cap for "contributions" ( I still can't keep from putting that word into quotes) seems to me the most realistic and reasonable remedy for whatever ails Social Security.

Hootsbuddy's Profile -- 2004 to 2008

[This profile, archived February, 2008, ran with few changes since the blog started. Some blogs appeal to a community of interactive readers but mine does not. I'm pleased to get comments, both positive and negative, but they are few and far between and I have learned to blog without them. Nearly all my visitors are from searches. I used to be linked occasionally by other bloggers but I seem to have lost whatever appealed to them. Sigh. As far as I can tell I have fewer than fifteen or twenty regular readers which is very small potatoes in the blog world. I'm thinking about a new profile which will be more generic, less personal.]

"Semi-retired child of the sixties...now in his sixties. A career in food service had me working while others enjoyed a social life, but I managed over a thousand subordinates during my years in management, and dealt with the public for thirty-five plus years. I currently work in a retirement community. My blog is a way of keeping track of subjects that catch my interest. Your polite comments and constructive criticisms are welcome. Most of the hits to this blog are from searches but a handful of erudite people are regular readers. If you are a first-time visitor and have the time, feel free to look around. This blog is like a flea market...lots to see, lots to skip, but something for almost everyone. If you choose not to leave a comment I can be reached privately by g-mail addressed to Hootsbuddy."

[It is now March, 2009 and a new profile is going up. I'm tired of the old one and no one cares about a neologism (blusker) made up by me. The dynamic of my blogging has changed very little. The advents of Facebook, Twitter, "Followers," You Tube videos, group blogs and other techno-quasi-personal networking innovations are changing the face of the Internet. This is a great time to be alive.]

"Hootsbuddy's Place is a playground of eclectic interests (see blogroll) and a critical habit of mind. Traffic here is mainly from search referrals. One of two sitemeters is open for public viewing by the curious. This link leads to a profile of the blog host but you may think of me as a BLUSKER. That's an original neologism created by combining "blogger" and "busker" (an entertainer or musician who works sidewalks and parks for contributions). Hootsbuddy is a blogging counterpart, working search engines for traffic instead of networking. I give credit when due, but I'm not a link whore. Comments are welcome and subject to moderation, mainly to avoid spam. I can be reached privately via Hootsbuddy (at) G-mail (dot) com. Make yourself comfortble and enjoy your visit."

Ted Sorenson and Barack Obama

John F. Kennedy's famous speech writer and advisor, Theodore Sorenson, recognizes in Barack Obama many of the same qualities that Kennedy had. As he approaches the age of eighty his eyesight is failing but his political instincts and vision for the future are as positive as ever.

Younger readers who may not appreciate this man should know that as an advisor to and speechwriter for JFK it may have been Sorenson who penned the words "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." He may also have been the ghostwriter of Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage. When pressed about these questions he is coy. But there is no doubt that what he has to say carries a lot of weight.

This is about twenty-five minutes long. If time is limited, drag the time tab forward to twenty minutes and listen to the last five minutes of this program.

LINK to the Charlie Rose site.

LINK to the speech that Sorenson wrote in response to a request by Washington Monthly.

Finding the White Lobster

"People here now go beachcombing for miles, they walk until they find packets. Even the lobster fisherman now go out with the pretence of fishing but really they are looking for la langosta blanca - the white lobster."

Take a look at how the War on Drugs is going. There is so much money involved that a whole population finds prosperity in what is tossed overboard on the way to market.

At first glance, Bluefields in Nicaragua looks like any other rum-soaked, Rastafarian-packed, hammock-infested Caribbean paradise. But Bluefields has a secret.

People here don't have to work. Every week, sometimes every day, 35kg sacks of cocaine drift in from the sea. The economy of this entire town of 50,000 tranquil souls is addicted to cocaine.

Bluefields is a creation of the gods of geography. Located halfway between the cocaine labs of Colombia and the 300 million noses of the United States, Bluefields is ground zero for cocaine transportation. Nicaraguan waters are near Colombian territorial limits, making the area extremely popular with cocaine smugglers using very small, very fast fishing boats.
The US military calls them "go fast boats", which is a bureaucratic way of describing these mini-water-rockets. Typically these 12m boats have 800 horsepower of outboard motors bolted to the stern. A Porsche 911 Turbo, by comparison, has 485 horsepower.

While they are very fast, they are also very visible to the array of radars set up by roaming US spy planes, Coastguard cutters and helicopters which regularly monitor the speeding cocaine traffickers.

"With night vision equipment, I have seen a lit cigarette from two miles," a US Navy pilot said. "Or the back light from their GPS screen? It looks like a billboard."

When the Americans get close, the traffickers toss the cocaine overboard, both to eliminate evidence and lighten their load in an escape attempt.

"They throw most of it off," says a Lt Commander in the US Coastguard. "I have been on four interdictions and we have confiscated about 6000 pounds [2720kg] of cocaine, and I'd say equal that much was dumped into the ocean."

Those bales of cocaine float, and the currents bring them west right into the chain of islands, beaches and cays which make up the huge lagoons that surround Bluefields on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast.

"There are no jobs here, unemployment is 85 per cent," says Moises Arana, who was mayor of Bluefields from 2001 to 2005.

"It is sad to say, but the drugs have made contributions. Look at the beautiful houses, those mansions come from drugs. We had a women come into the local electronics store with a milk bucket stuffed full of cash. She was this little Miskito [native] woman and she had $80,000."

More at the link.

"Dreams from my Father" -- a Review

This morning Neal Boortz said in plain language that barring some unforeseen circumstance he expected Barack Obama to be our next president. Dick Morris was a guest on his program and agreed. I didn't pay attention to the rest because I was busy. But I listen to Boortz as a way of keeping my finger on one of many political pulses.

He also mentioned Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, which will now be widely read as people look into who this man is, where he came from and how he thinks. I was naive enough to imagine that I could go to my favorite site dealing with out of print books and order a copy for my collection at a reasonable price. Well I can (they start as low as seven bucks or so plus shipping) but first editions start in the five hundred dollar range and go up. One place is offering a signed first edition for nearly three thousand dollars. File those little factoids away for some party small talk.

It didn't take long to find a review from someone who has been inspired to read the book. In this case inspired is not a misused word. Read this by Sarah Aswell.

As Super Tuesday approaches and we try to separate empty promises and strategic moves from real, actual thoughts and goals, I couldn’t have read a better book than Dreams From My Father.

Here’s why: even though I didn’t realize it when I picked it up, Obama wrote this book over ten years ago, when he was fresh out of law school and long before he was worrying about what people wanted to hear. It is, I think, a great way to “get to know” the candidate outside of the media, the hype, and the confusion that comes along with a presidential bid.

The book follows Barack through his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, his community work in Chicago, and his journey to meet his father’s family in Kenya. Along the way, he has to come to terms with the death of his absent father, being raised primarily by his white grandparents (you don’t hear about this much), and learning the ropes of being a community organizer in inner city Chicago.

The thing that amazed me most about the book was watching Obama 1) work through problems and 2) analyze both sides on an issue. These two traits came through in two different ways in the book: in personal situations (how he comes to understand and accept his troubled father and his Kenyan ancestry) and in political situations (how he comes to understand the long-standing and deep problems facing the urban poor).

It would have been very, very easy to have bad guys in this book. Evil high-up government officials who prevent community centers and jobs from reaching the impoverished in Chicago. His adulterous and alcoholic father who seemed to abandon his loved ones at every turn. But Barack thinks his way through these simple binary good/bad categories and goes far beyond them. He is constantly striving to 1) understand situations from all points of view and 2) think his way through to a solution. He has an uncanny ability to step away from the emotions of a problem and then systematically chip away at it.

He understands very well that you have to know why things are as they are before you develop a plan about how to fix it.
The best example of this might be his work in Chicago. Although it’s unheard of for anyone to criticize the black ministers who organize the urban black communities in Chicago, Obama quickly began to understand the huge problems that come with church-based activism in black communities. Churches would rarely work together to solve larger problems and ministers would rarely do more than preach (which, to be fair, is their job). The action that should have followed a sermon simply wasn’t organized. Because many black leaders were ministers, many black leaders were also, essentially, just talk. What followed was three years of work in which Obama not only made major, innovative steps in Chicago but in which he also learned how to inspire both individuals and small groups into action.

I was also impressed by what Barack Obama didn’t leave out of the book. He made a lot of mistakes, he deals with a lot of anger, and he doesn’t succeed at everything. Still, you can not only see him learning from his mistakes, but immediately applying those lessons to his next challenge.

The book, as a more general read, was good as well. The writing wasn’t stellar (something Obama is quick to point out in the forward to the reprint) but it was still much better than one might expect from someone who isn’t primarily a writer. Getting to see the inner struggle of a biracial person growing up in 60s and 70s America was also really fascinating.

There are a lot of great candidates in the upcoming election, and I feel positive about more than two of them. But especially after reading this book, my doubts about Obama’s lack of experience are gone. He has something that trumps years in Washington: a stellar judgment and an almost eerie ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes and understand both sides of an issue. More than that, his ability to inspire individuals to action is something that America could truly benefit from. You can even see it in his campaign: ordinary people stepping up and acting, even if they’ve never been involved in politics before.

I know that after reading his book, I donated to a political campaign for the first time in my life. He’s nothing less than inspiring.

Follow up...

I bought the book and was impressed with the candor with which Obama tells his story. He comes across to me as someone who has nothing to hide and makes no pretense about who he is or is not. His style of thinking, discussion and inquiry seems not to have changed from years ago, even though his ideas and opinions continue to mature. I'm writing this follow-up in August, half a year after posting this woman's review, and find myself to be an enthusiastic Obama supporter.

Happy Valentines Day

Nina Simone is one of my vavorite singers.

When you get through here, go to last year's post.

Happy Valentines Day!

Hilzoy on the Clinton style

Up close and personal. This is one valentine that Hillary Clinton would be pleased not to get.

Hilzoy starts by admitting to a lukewarm but positive default attitude about Mrs. Clinton. But the last few days reveal [yet another] dark underside to her management style. Solis Doyle, HRC's former campaign manager, is put under a microscope showing her most conspicuous trait, that she was "the boss from hell."

Valuing loyalty over competence is a terrible trait in a manager. But so are other things that come through in this piece: putting off decisions that obviously need to be made, for instance, and letting personnel problems fester rather than resolving them, and having subordinates who "protect" you from bad news that you really need to know. But the one that particularly struck me -- which is why I quoted Greene at such length -- was this: In 2006, Solis Doyle first burned through an extraordinary amount of money in 2006 -- the NYT story Greene quotes says that the campaign spent "$27,000 for valet parking, paid as much as $800 in a single month in credit card interest and — above all — paid tens of thousands of dollars a month to an assortment of consultants and aides." She then demonstrably lied about the campaign's financial situation in ways that angered Clinton's base of donors. Various Clinton insiders, including (according to Greene) Terry McAuliffe and Maggie Williams -- tried to get her fired. And yet Clinton hired her to manage her Presidential campaign.

Rewarding incompetent people because they are loyal is bad. But rewarding incompetent people who lie to the public and to your donors is worse. Lying to the public is both wrong and stupid: it brings your name into disrepute, and that's not good for anyone, least of all a politician. Lying to your donors is also wrong and stupid: wrong, since you presumably ought to feel some loyalty towards the people who have donated to your campaign, and stupid because they are the last people on earth whose trust you should abuse. Solis Doyle's performance in 2006 should have meant that she was not hired for any position of responsibility ever again. Instead, Hillary Clinton made her campaign manager.

The comment thread is in this case instructive. Smart, thoughtful community of readers over there, but this is literally a sad commentary.

Clinton and Obama...Teacher and Apprentice

Mark Ambinder tells the story of Obama's entry into the presidential race in The Atlantic. He didn't make the decision until January last year. Before that he had presidential ambitions, but he appears to have come to the Senate with a sense of humility and disciplined patience, prepared to wait his turn, presumably after the Clinton power machine had come and gone.

That plan, if it ever got articulated, had to be put aside.

What caused Obama to suddenly decide to run? The conventional explanation is that Democrats implored him to. “It was the closest thing to a draft that I’ve seen in my years of participating in politics,” Axelrod told me.

The story reads like a novella.

In the spring of 2006, the presidency was clearly on Obama’s mind when he told his friend Martha Minow that his wife would have to give her assent to a run. “Michelle was the boss, and he said he couldn’t do it unless she agreed,” Minow told me. At the time, one of Michelle Obama’s friends told me that she worried her husband would be targeted by white supremacists and wind up a martyr like Robert F. Kennedy. She also worried that his advisers were pushing him too hard to consider a run and, knowing her husband’s healthy ego, that he wasn’t in the proper frame of mind to think seriously about it.

When Obama went on tour in the fall of 2006 to promote his second book, The Audacity of Hope, some of his friends encouraged him to be open about his presidential ruminations. The result was a sustained wave of national publicity. Time put Obama on the cover with the headline “Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President.” The public responded, too. An appearance in Seattle sold out in two hours, leaving scalpers to profit from Obama’s popularity. Appearing on Meet the Press in October, when Tim Russert played a clip from the January 2006 show in which Obama had said he wouldn’t run, Obama simply responded that he had begun to think seriously about it.

On November 8, the day after Democrats took control of Congress, Obama, his wife, and his brain trust crowded into a fourth-floor conference room in the brick building in Chicago’s Loop that houses Axelrod’s consulting firm. “I want you to show me how you’re going to do this,” Michelle Obama said, according to an aide. “You need to show me that this is not going to be a bullshit fly-by-night campaign.” A month later, at an all-day meeting in Chicago billed as “the Summit,” the would-be campaign manager, David Plouffe, returned with a budget, an outline of early strategy, and a list of tasks to be accomplished before any campaign could begin. The conversation in the second meeting “had an existential quality to it,” according to a participant. “Why do you want to do this? What does this mean for us? What’s our motivation? What will get us through the hard times?”

Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett

I am slowly making my way through Krista Tippett's book, Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters--and How to Talk About It. Her weekly radio program on NPR is one of the journalistic treasures of our time as she interviews a range of high-profile figures from all across a spectrum of what she calls "public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas." If I've heard that phrase once I've heard it a hundred times, but it sums up her genre well enough. The topic is broad but each segment is deep.

The following is an excerpt from the book Speaking of Faith
by Krista Tippett
Published by Penguin; January 2008;$14.00US/$16.50CAN; 978-0-14-311318-8Copyright © 2007 Krista Tippett

In a small, captivating essay about Genesis, Creation and Fall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer described biblical stories as "ancient, magical pictures that we need alongside modern technical, conceptual pictures if we are to become wise." In England, I began to see in these ancient, magical pictures a response to the deepest real-world confusions of my years in Berlin. I was aching with spiritual and moral questions I could scarcely articulate. I was reading mystical texts and Buddhist texts and they thrilled me. But this Bible on the bookshelf, long unopened, was the foundational text of my spiritual homeland and mother tongue.

The Bible, as I read it now, is not a catalogue of absolutes, as its champions sometimes imply. Nor is it a document of fantasy, as its critics charge. It is an ancient record of an ongoing encounter with God in the darkness as well as the light of human experience. Like all sacred texts, it employs multiple forms of language to convey truth: poetry, narrative, legend, parable, echoing imagery, wordplay, prophecy, metaphor, didactics, wisdom saying. In the Christianity of the modern West, we've largely left the vivid storytelling of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, in Sunday school. We've consigned it to the world of childhood figuratively and literally. And in our time a superficial Christian rendering of these biblical texts underpins false dichotomies that plague our public life -- chasms we've set up between sacred text and truth, between idealized views of the way human beings should behave and the complex reality of the way they do.

But when I came back to read the biblical text after many years away, I began to love the Hebrew Bible fiercely for the fact that it tells life like it is. It has no fairy-tale heroes, only flawed, flamboyant human beings as prone to confusion as to righteousness. Like us millennia later, they had trouble reconciling the political and the private, the sexual and the societal. King David -- the forefather by whom the New Testament theologians traced Jesus' lineage -- was, as the text tells it, brilliant and charismatic and passionate. He held God's favor. David was at once a great leader and also an adulterer. He was a military hero, and yet he sent the husband of his mistress to the front lines to die. These facts about him stand together and in tension with an air of sadness in the biblical narrative. They are neither reconciled nor do they cancel each other out.

Or consider Lot, who is famous in Sunday school around the world for heeding God's command to leave the sinful Sodomites without looking back, while his weaker-willed wife gave in to nostalgia and was turned to a pillar salt. We've internalized the unforgivable sins of Sodom and Gomorrah as sexual, and contemporary religious voices routinely equate private sexual sin with the moral decline of our nation. But in the Bible itself, that equation is inferred rather than stated. It states that not a single righteous person could be found among the Sodomites, and this was the reason for their destruction. There is one scene in which Sodomite men attempt to lure other men from Lot's household out into the street with them, presumably for sexual purposes. Our hero Lot, offers his daughters instead. But in a later biblical reference and analysis of the nature of the Sodomites' sin -- one of very few -- the prophet Ezekiel says that they were condemned because they had "pride, surfeit of food, prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy." What if, with reference to Ezekiel, we began to understand the depravity of "sodomy" to be about a nation's neglect of its poor?

One of my favorite characters in the Bible is also one of the most human and flawed. Jacob, the son of Isaac, the grandson of Abraham, is a quintessential late bloomer, conniver, and egoist. The Bible calls him "clay footed" and yet, through foibles and false starts, God's beloved. He tricks his brother out of his inheritance. He later falls in with another trickster, his future father-in-law, who cons him into marrying the sister of the woman he loves. He works slavishly, marries both sisters finally, and becomes a successful man. In midlife, full of both pride and regret, Jacob heads home to face his demons and past mistakes. He makes his way across the land in which he has spent his adulthood back to the land of his childhood. His sins were great and his absence has been long, and he is terrified of what will greet him on the other side.

Jacob crosses the Jabbuk river. And in a moment cathartic for the sweep of monotheistic spiritual history to follow, he there encounters a mysterious man whom he afterward recognizes as a messenger of God or God himself. The "man" wrestles with Jacob, even putting his hip socket out of joint. Jacob wrestles back. "I will not let you go," he tells this stranger, who turns out to be the very source of his life, "until you bless me." At daybreak, he receives his blessing and a new name. Jacob becomes Israel -- a word that suggests one who strives, or wrestles, with God.

This is a story beloved by many who have struggled with the gap between real life and religious ideas. True biblical faith expands and deepens as it incorporates mistakes, questions, catastrophes, and changes of mind and heart. Like Moses who "quarreled" with God, Jacob embodies the tense interplay of devotion and struggle at the heart of Jewish tradition. I've come to find in Jacob's story a model grappling honestly and productively with sacred text itself. It is true of the entire Bible -- and perhaps of any sacred text for its believers -- that if you sit with these bare-bones stories, pick over them, retell them, they begin to grow -- take on nuance and possibility -- before your eyes. One layer of meaning is lifted and another reveals itself. You sense that the text would respond to every conceivable question. In other words, if I stick with these texts -- if I wrestle with them and insist on a blessing -- a blessing will come. The only limitation is my time, my powers of imaginative concentration, and my capacity to listen to the interpretations of others.

Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from SPEAKING OF FAITH by Krista Tippett. Copyright © Krista Tippett, 2008

Unlike her radio programs, Krista Tippett's book is in some way autobiographical. Her interviews are more than a catalogue of topical subjects. They are steps she takes in a personal journey, a lifelong trip that for the inquiring mind will never end. It is really true that the journey is often more important than the destination.

It was her providential good fortune to be able to meet and interview Elie Weisel years ago when she was working for the New York Times in Germany, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think it was a tipping point in her life. She tells that story and a lot more as she reads from her book to a live audience, broadcast as one of her programs, Remembering Forward which is available on line.

Rich Karlgaard on Childless Talk Show Hosts

Rich Karlgaard is the publisher of Forbes Magazine.
He makes an observation worth noting about some talk-show hosts.
Not all of them, mind you. But enough to make the point.

No kids.

...Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and the other yakkers stand to gain if Obama or Clinton becomes president. Where do you think these political pundits' motives lie? Are they for America or themselves?

Let me make another point--sure to be controversial. What do Limbaugh, Coulter and Ingraham have in common besides their out-of-proportion attacks on McCain?

They are all childless.

Call me biased, but when one has children, one quickly learns the arts of compromise and patience. One thinks about the future in a different way. If one is going to be a successful parent, one must grow beyond adolescent narcissism and rigidity and become, in a word, an adult.

Many people can become an adult without having or raising children. Mother Teresa could. I admit that I couldn't have. I think most people are more like me than Mother Teresa.

The thrice-married and -divorced Limbaugh has no children. It's all about Rush, you see.

The never-married Ingraham and Coulter have no children either. Ingraham is essentially the same person now as she was in Dartmouth when, according to Wikipedia, she "once attended meetings of a gay student organization for the purpose of publicly outing them in the newspaper." Ingraham secretly taped a meeting of the Gay Students Association and published the transcript, identifying students by name and calling them "sodomites." That is hateful. Ten years later, Ingraham "tempered" her views on gays and moved on to other targets.

Coulter, in a speech last week, said, "I'm not comparing McCain to Hitler...Hitler had a coherent tax policy."

This is not how responsible grownups talk. But, then, Coulter is not a responsible grownup.

Jim Culleny -- "In My Museum of Busted Love"

Responding to Elatia Harris' Valentine's Day challenge, Jim Culleny penned this extraordinarily original poem. It's been a while since I was calm enough, patient enough and free enough to ingest a poem. This one took me three times through to appreciate.

Poetry is like good wine or live music. To get the full enjoyment you have to take it easy and pay attention. Italic type spoils the effect, so I am using a different color. If you're color-blind, just know that what follows is a quote...

In My Museum of Busted Love
Jim Culleny

1. Ring

In my museum of busted love
would first be the engagement
ring of inertia

the sign urged upon greenhorns
when the young pulse of biology
meets the traditional need to rein it in
and set it to the pace of Eros
in civilized society:

the circus maximus of fidelity,
the merry-go-round of oughts
of lust and love--the diamond ring I one day reclaimed
with an ardent,
whew!

Display that once dazzling rock
beside the big one called Hope
in the museum’s Hall of Almost,
and watch it diminish
in the glare of possibility
to the luminescence
of dull inevitability.

2. Car

And of course there would be my tiny TR3,
a courtship vehicle of desperate love:

its bucket seat of impossible sex,
its inconvenient gear shift,
its shock absorbers announcing
the illicit choreography within,
bouncing its comical, dead serious,
life-altering profundity.

Put it and all its dents upon a dais
at an car show under hot spots
next to a Porsche.

Adorn it with a fender babe
in plenty of flesh and lurid pout
and let it tell its fun-filled
soon sad but torrid tale.

3. Insight

And last(but way more than least)
at the gallery’s back door
near the broom closet
in a glass case unlit and forlorn,
passed by countless tenderfeet
hip and horny, tattooed, pierced,
bristling with ipods, iphones,
and lost in Myspace ,
seething with tech knowledge
but clueless as lovers
suffering the old implacable
urge of hormones in love
that doomed unwired Romeo
and foolishly unconscious Juliet
to live and die their misconceptions
in the pages of a play-write

… there upon a simple bronze base,
ignored but brilliant in its banality
sits the sweet fruit of my own

I-It
turf fight:

the Bubered wink of battered,
bruised, and tardy

I-Thou
insight

Lots more at the link.
Great recreational reading for Valentines Day. Or any day, for that matter.

Laila El-Haddad at Columbia University

Laila El-Haddad is a Palestinian journalist living in America whose blog, Raising Yousuf, Unplugged: diary of a Palestinian mother, I have been following for some time [long post; scroll down third item from the end]. Having lived in Gaza she knows the subject and her journalistic credentials are excellent. Some of my small group of readers may live or travel to the New York area and are able to hear her in person at Columbia Thursday where she will be participating in a panel discussion on Gaza.

"GAZA: The Biggest Prison in the World?"
A Panel Discussion

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 14th 5:30-7:30pm
Location: 702 Hamilton, Columbia University

The Gaza Strip has been consistently described as the biggest prison in the world, with approximately 1.5 million people living in 139 square miles enclosed entirely within security barriers, where all movement in and out of Gaza, whether of people or of essential goods, can be cut off at any time byblockades.

Please join the Arab Student Association for a panel discussion that will explore the ongoing crisis on the ground, bringing together academic, journalistic and humanitarian perspectives.

Domestic politics overshadows all that is happening in America, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being the only solipsistic diversions for most people. This sad commentary on the ignorance of our electorate makes me wonder if being the world's wealthiest and most powerful country is an unmitigated blessing.

Obama snapshot

No special reason for blogging this except as a piece of memorabilia from this race for the nomination. It's too good to skim over with an uh-huhmm...
Barack Obama won the Maine contest this past weekend, the same weekend that Hillary Clinton replaced her campaign manager. Put whatever construction you want on those events. Sunday morning's Washington Journal (C-SPAN) had a caller who couldn't stop gushing about Obama. I don't know who the guest was but I heard from the next room "...another Obama crush." Exactly. It's as though some people have a crush on the guy.

This is part of the reason.

I drove for two hours yesterday to Bangor with my sister and daughter to see Barack speak in Maine. I figured it would be interesting to see a candidate speak, when Maine is typically forgotten. We made the mistake of getting there about an hour before the doors opened to the Bangor Auditorium, as the population of the city had increased by a third for his speech. We waited in the longest line I had ever seen in my life for almost two hours. We met some wonderful people, many younger and surprisingly many quite a bit older. After all of that waiting, we were only a few hundred feet from the auditorium when we were told that the main room had filled to capacity as well as the overflow room. Just when we were ready to turn back, we were told that Barack would speak to us outside, and would do so FIRST.

So imagine a scene like the stump speeches only read about in books, people jostling on snowbanks, climbing fences, trees, even each other in the calm cold that was Maine yesterday to hear and see Barack, for only a few minutes. And did he deliver.

There was excitement, there was hope, and there were specifics. Talk of new ways to use our old industrial centers, dead and forgotten by the establishment. Talk of help with college tuition. Talk of thinking about our children and grandchildren first. He then spent time talking to and shaking hands with the crowd before going in.

I could not believe this was happening. No crowd control, no checking of bags, Barack in a potentially dangerous setting with no way for Secret Service to cover him. And he did it without hesitation. Anyone who will do this in a state with a population likely to vote for Hillary, a tiny, white, poor, lost in the back woods near Canada population, and for those foolish enough to show up "late", is someone who clearly gives a damn. He was comfortable with a chaotic situation, worked it to his advantage on the fly, and did it with grace and aplomb. Hillary speaks of worries about Barack being a likable guy, same as George Bush. She's right, and also dead wrong. Likable they both can be, yes. But George Bush is the man who drinks you under the table, then drives you all home and thusly off a cliff. Barack is the guy you follow into battle, ready to do what needs to be done to save a country in danger. This life-long Independent is ready to sign on to the Democratic party, participate in today's caucus, and follow this leader all the way to November and beyond. I exhort everyone else here to consider the same.

Scones and Biscuits Made Easy

I made a batch of scones using frozen blueberries for a fund raising event . The idea, unfortunately, was better than the results. The dough quickly turned wet and sticky and they puddled in the oven as they rose. But I'm told they were a hit and a couple of people wanted the recipe.

So here is more than you ever wanted to know about scones, biscuits (and other quick breads).

Like most cooking, the recipe is more than a list of ingredients. The results have more to do with how they are handled than what they were. Bearing that in mind, here are the ingredients:

2 Cups Flour
Soda
2 or 3 Tablespoons Sugar
a little Salt
1/3 Cup Butter
Buttermilk
1 Egg
Vanilla?
(a little more flour for dusting)
1 more egg for basting

As you can see, they're like biscuits, but with butter instead of shortening, and an egg is added. I think of scones as a cousin to Southern biscuits, although I think what we call biscuits are cousins to scones. Scones came first, and in the UK when they speak of biscuits they are talking about what we call cookies. But that's not important to the recipe...

Anyone who can make biscuits can make scones. They're almost the same. The main difference is that scones are not worked as much. Some recipes say divide the dough into two round portions about an inch thick, then cut each into six pie-shaped pieces, very different from punching out biscuits then re-working the trimmings, maybe two or three times, until the batch is used. Dividing the dough once eliminates re-working. No waste. Quick and easy. (Some You Tube videos show the dough being punched out into fairly big rounds -- about six to a recipe -- and being lightly re-worked but I like the triangles.)

Soft wheat flour is important. Hard flour works for loaf bread and rolls, but it has too much gluten for good quick breads. Too tough. Not light enough. I like White Lily, regular or self-rising. (It's possible to make biscuits using White Lily self-rising flour with only the addition of heavy whipping cream. It's expensive but for someone in a hurry it's easy. Whipping cream has enough butterfat that a soft dough of White Lily self-rising flour and cream makes smooth, rich, easy to manage little biscuits. Only two ingredients. Nearly fool-proof.)

Most cooks mix biscuits by hand, but I use a pastry blender. I like how it cuts shortening or butter into pea-sized pieces. And I like that my hands are not messy when I use a spoon to stir in liquid to make the dough ball. After that, it's hands on all the way.

Why do they rise?

Quick breads rise for several reasons. The main cause is that baking powder makes gas when it becomes hot. It is heat-activated and works in the heat of the oven. If you use buttermilk instead of regular milk, a little soda in the dry ingredients will add pockets of air to the dough as the acid of the buttermilk reacts with the soda. With a little practice you can feel the dough getting spongy against your spoon as you stir, especially when you first pour in the milk. (No soda for plain milk. And no spongy feeling.)

Another reason not to work the dough too much is that it presses out little air pockets which later expand in the oven making the dough to rise even better. (Also, liquids turn to steam, another factor in making the product rise. The reason the oven should be very hot is that the structure needs to get firm quickly so it doesn't fall.)

A few tips...

►Purists sift dry ingredients but it works okay to toss everything together and mix them with the pastry blender or spoon.

►Most recipes call for mixing the egg into the milk before adding to the dry ingredients. It works okay to make a little hole in the flour, pour in some milk, add the egg directly, then stir in more milk as needed to make the dough ball. The amount of milk will not always be the same and there is no way to know ahead of time how to measure it. No need to mess up unused milk with egg. The dough ball should be stiff, so it is better to have less liquid than more.

►Brushing the tops with egg makes for a nice finish, unlike biscuits which come out dry on top. (That's why a lot of cooks brush biscuits and cornbread with butter when they first come out of the oven. Scones don't need that.) I like mixing a little plain milk into the egg to make it spread better.

►Currants are an easy addition, better than raisins in my opinion. Try dried cranberries. If you use blueberries like I did, work fast before they get wet.

►Yes, I add vanilla. I haven't found it anywhere else but it seems like a good idea.

►The oven must be hot and pre-heated. Not all ovens are alike, but 400° F is a good place to start. Peek in at about 12 minutes and see how they look. By then they sould have jumped up and be looking close to done. If they aren't done in fifteen minutes your oven is not hot enough. (If they're too dark on the top, lower the pan next time. If they're burned on the bottom, move the rack up from the bottom of the oven next time.) (I dunno. Is that common sense? I've known people who couldn't figure that out.)

Serving...

I have seen products in coffee-house displays labeled "scones" that looked like paperweights to me. They were cute but dry-looking. Scones should not be dry. They should make you salivate to look at one...and served hot, they should welcome a blob of additional butter and a layer of fruit preserves, jam or marmalade. Traditionally they are split open and buttered hot, served with whipped cream like shortcakes.

I think of scones as finger foods, not too big and easy to munch. To that end, mine are not as high as most and cut smaller, making them easier to handle, with something sweet on top. Americans love honey buns, donuts, danish, bagels, etc., so holding and munching a scone comes naturally.

I covered the last ones I made with a good layer of cinnamon and sugar mix which stuck in the eggwash and made a nice pattern as they rose and baked. Not happy with the look, I then mixed powdered sugar, milk and a taste of vanilla into a smooth sauce and covered the whole batch with a white drizzle after they cooled.

I saw one recipe using a mixture of orange juice and powdered sugar to make a glaze, but your imagination is whatever you want to try. Now go make some scones. If they turn out well, find someone to share them with before they cool. Tell them it's time for a coffee break.

McCain/ Gingrich in '08?

One guess is as good as the next. I've been keeping an eye on Newt for a long time. He was my Congressman when he was architect for the Contract with America. And I know he's smart. Smart enough to know what to say and what not to say. If it happens, remember where you read it first.

One guy who's bound to get a look is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who's got a perfect blend of maverick and conservative credentials. Why would Gingrich do it, when he clearly has differences with McCain? Because he's a party warrior. "I clearly have disagreements, particularly with Sen. McCain on key issues such as amnesty for illegal immigrants or tax cuts or what I thought was a censorship law that was unconstitutional, McCain-Feingold. But if I had to look at the record of Sen. McCain over his career, compared to the record of Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton, he is vastly better for America's future than either of those two candidates," Gingrich told Human Events a few days ago.

Why would McCain pick Gingrich? The war in Iraq, for starters. It may not be at the forefront of voters' minds, if we are to believe the exits, but it still matters. Two thirds of Americans say they are against the war, no matter how well the surge is doing. McCain can straight-talk all he wants, but you don't get elected by telling two thirds of the country that they are dumb and ignorant. So he needs someone who can reach out on the Iraq issue. Gingrich can do that, because he's already been outspoken about the leadership failures in Iraq—and get away with it, because many in the party still harbor a touch of nostalgia for his role in taking back the House in 1994. Oh yeah, and as a former rep from Tennessee, he's got southern ties.

People are talking...

Hugh Hewitt on Townhall.com

World Net Daily

ABC News quotes Newt himself...

Looks like ya'll are short of help...

I've heard it a thousand times.
A line of hungry patrons stretches out the door, trash that would normally be picked up at once is collecting on the floor, the displays look like the wrath of God, unbussed tables are all that remain in the dining room and those on duty are busting their butts to keep up...And some smart ass says, "Looks like you're short of help."

File this one under D'oh.

Scott Hodes who maintains the FOIA blog looks at how the bureaucracy manages (or doesn't) similar challenges in his line of work, but in this case the reasons are transparent.

...maybe they should get more money to hire more so that these records can go to the people in a reasonable time. And the Post is naive to think that the White House doesn't know what it is doing here--they don't want to hire enough personnel because the longer the records sit, the better it is for them--

Reflections about Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, R.I.P.

This week a detainee died of natural causes at Guantanamo. It'll be a fate that will likely befall many other detainees. This particular one was accused of being a terrorist by people who held grudges against him and needed the bounty offered by the US government. He was never charged, never allowed to defend himself in court, and we'll never know just what he was guilty of doing. And if questioned, your leaders will tell you that his detention and death was necessary to protect your family. And you'll still believe that you live in a free society.

LINK to dday's post at Digby's blog

LINK to NY Times story

Here's something else to think about.

And this.

These links are probably not connected. But they very well could be. It is deeply troubling that so few people I know personally don't seem to care one way or the other.

Something John McCain said regarding torture rings in my memory. "We Americans are better than that."
I like that. I hope he does well.


If McCain were to win the nomination, Black said, his doctors would hold a detailed briefing for reporters describing his medical history. That history includes breaking both arms and a leg after ejecting from his fighter jet when he was shot down over Hanoi during the Vietnam War. He also suffered fractures to both shoulders, broken ribs and a severe injury to his right knee from being tortured during 5 1⁄2 years as a prisoner of war.

The result is that McCain cannot raise his arms above his shoulders to comb his hair. When it is very cold, his joints occasionally ache, something he rarely mentions, Cindy McCain said. His hair also turned prematurely white while in prison.

LINK to Energizer McCain keeps going and going



Digby looks at the issue of outsourcing torture to avoid legal problems. The world of legal jurisdictions allows a tempting menu of options to achieve just about any objective as long as the rules are followed (read evaded).

Considering that all this was done by people who had previously brought us secret wars in Cambodia and sold arms to our alleged enemies to fund illegal wars from a shadow government run out of the white house, it really shouldn't be surprising that they did what they did. And unless there is a reckoning, it would be criminally stupid if we are surprised the next time they get their hands on the white house and do it all again. It's what they do.

Sadly, very few people seem to think it's a problem.

Fred Clark (and Caitlin Wall): Translating Huckabee (Updated)

First posted January 22. I enjoyed Fred Clark's comments so much I stole his whole post. February 7 someone else takes note of the governor's rhetorical gifts. Having been spoon-fed this kind of language from childhood, I haven't paid much attention, but with the man's growing profile this not-so-subtle talent is worth noting.
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He said it so well I'm stealing the whole thing. I'm leaving out a couple of footnotes, so if you want to read those and check out the comment thread you'll have to go there. I first heard reference to "dog-whistle politics" about three years ago and have had my ears perked up ever since. Obviously Fred's ears have been trained longer than that. This is rich!

Doing my best impression of Barbara Billingsley in Airplane: "Oh stewardess! I speak evangelical ..."
.
Former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was very skilled at peppering President George W. Bush's public statements with so-called "dog whistle" language targeting evangelical Christian voters. These passing phrases and allusions wouldn't alter or confuse Bush's message to other listeners, but they would have an additional resonance for the evangelicals listening. The actual meaning of those phrases didn't much matter, what was important was that he came across as conversant in the local idiom, the insider's jargon.
To cite a famous example, when Bush said that he believed in the "wonder-working pow'r" of the American people, the message was simply that if Bush used that phrase he must know that song, so he must've sung that song, so he must've been to church, so he must be one of us. No one was supposed to, and few did, think too hard about the bizarre meaning of that statement -- which seemed to equate the American people with "the precious blood of the lamb," suggesting that we could, by rallying around our president, "be free from the burden of sin." That (heretical, arrogant, insane) implication wasn't the point of the allusion. The point was just to reassure evangelicals that he spoke their language, and was therefore on their side, without scaring off everyone else.
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Unlike Bush, Mike Huckabee really is a native speaker of the evangelical idiom. He isn't just parroting phrases spelled out phonetically for him by some Wheaton-alum speechwriter, he's talking the way he naturally talks. The effect for evangelical voters is thus the same -- they are reassured he is "one of us." But the effect for everyone else is quite different, because unlike Bush's dog whistles, everyone else can hear Huckabee's allusions too and non-native speakers have a hard time making sense of what he's saying.
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To take a trivial example, Huckabee has on several occasions mentioned that he reads a chapter from Proverbs* every day and that he carries his New Testament with him for this purpose. The book of Proverbs, of course, is not in the New Testament, but evangelicals are all familiar with the Pocket Testament League's tiny volumes, the size of a deck of cards, that include not just the 27 books of the New Testament but also the Psalms and Proverbs.** These editions were designed for convenience and not with the intent of dismissing the other 37 books of the Hebrew Scriptures as unimportant, although it's worth noting that most American evangelicals wouldn't notice if the prophets suddenly disappeared from their Bibles. (Evangelical reading tends to focus on Paul's Epistles, Proverbs and pselected Psalms, which is also why Huckabee earns points for his frequent citations from Proverbs but Barack Obama gets none for quoting the book of Amos, as he did yesterday.)
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More potentially confusing is Huckabee's reference to "a living God." He used this phrase in the comment we looked at earlier, in which the former Arkansas governor explicitly endorses theocracy. Here again is that comment, as reported by MSNBC:
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"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said.

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Over at Making Light, Avram Grumer has some fun with this juxtaposition of "living God" and talk of the Constitution. Since the idea of a "living Constitution" is often railed against by social conservatives who see it as a synonym for "anything goes," Grumer wonders if this means Huckabee believes in an anything-goes God as well:
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Wait, “the living god”? Wouldn’t that be some kinda wishy-washy progressive modernist God? I figured Huck for a strict constructionist God, an eye-for-an-eye guy who meant every word of Leviticus when he spake it. “Living God” implies some kind of dynamic, changing God, probably soft on crime, the kind of warm, fuzzy God from whom Words emanate with penumbrae.

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In the ensuing discussion, Grumer writes, "I'm just amused by the fact that the adjective 'living' seems to imply diametrically opposite things when you apply it to 'God' or 'Constitution.'"
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That's astute. The same could be said of the evangelical idiom "the living Word of God" as a reference to the Bible. "Living" there certainly doesn't mean all the wanton things they take it to mean in the phrase "living Constitution." But I don't want to get bogged down in the legal and legalist lit-crit, what I'm interested in here is what this phrase "living God" means.
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When a Southern Baptist preacher like Mike Huckabee speaks of "the living God," what he means is that God is active, busy, involved in the world, even that God intervenes in the lives of people and the affairs of nations. That's not in itself an unusual claim for us Christian types to make. I would probably disagree with Huckabee as to the extent and content and intent of that divine involvement, as well as over our capacity for understanding it (there's that effing ineffability again), but I wouldn't object to the use of the phrase "living God." What it means, essentially, is that he is not a Deist.
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I should caution, however, that I'm not entirely confident in my ability to translate Huckabee's evangelical-speak because I'm not entirely confident that he isn't using a different kind of dog whistle -- one to which my evangelical ears are not attuned.
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Bush's dog-whistle code-words were designed to appeal to evangelical Christian voters without scaring away everyone else. Huckabee isn't doing that -- he employs evangelical idioms without any apparent regard for how it sounds to those unfamiliar with it. But Huckabee may also be employing his own set of vague allusions to appeal to a particular subset of evangelical types without scaring away the rest of the people in the pews. Over at Daily Kos, dogemperor makes the case that Huckabee admires Bill Gothard. Huckabee has even proudly noted that he has been through Gothard's "Basic Seminar."
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Gothard is not well-known outside of his particular fiefdom, but Huckabee's expressed admiration for him -- and Gothard's attendance at a Houston fundraiser for the candidate -- is deeply disturbing. You know how, say, Christopher Hitchens gets a case of the howling fantods any time he hears anyone from the religious right speak? That's how most evangelicals respond to Bill Gothard. At the fundamentalist Baptist, and very Republican, church I grew up in Gothard's seminars were often criticized as a "cult."
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It may simply be that, as a politician, Huckabee is willing to accept support from anyone who is willing to offer it. I haven't heard any reports that Huckabee's daughter has been ordered to remain single until age 30, after which she would be allowed to marry only with her father's permission (yes, that really is something the Gothardites I've encountered believe), or any other indications that the former governor is truly a Gothard devotee. So his praise of Gothard and the Basic Seminar might just be a politician's flattery -- just as his praise for the World's Worst Books after receiving Tim LaHaye's endorsement might not mean he's a full-blown prophecy maniac. But both of these instances give me pause. Huckabee talks like a run-of-the-mill evangelical, but if he's really a fan of both LaHaye and Gothard, then he may be something very different and far more troublesome.
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* Many evangelicals seem to think that the division of Proverbs into 31 chapters was divinely inspired as a sign that we should read a chapter of this book every day. That entails skipping the final chapter five months out of the year -- nothing against Lemuel, but hey, he's no Solomon, you know? Contemporary evangelical piety might be a very different thing if the book of Ecclesiastes had also been divided into 31 chapters.
** I've kept one of these pocket-sized volumes in the glove compartment of my car ever since the day I found myself unexpectedly at a hospital bedside needing, but not having with me, the 23rd Psalm, and Psalm 139, and Romans 8, and 1 Corinthians 15. It turns out it's also a good thing to keep in one's glove compartment because troopers tend to look closely at everything you're pulling out of there when they ask to see your registration and proof of insurance.

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Caitlin Wall at FP's Passport blog posts How to speak Huckabee... Insightful variations on the same theme.

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As I watched Mike Huckabee's speech from Arkansas Tuesday night, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that he was speaking in some sort of code.

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Not all of Huckabee's images are biblical. Here he sends a message in Sportstalk:

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Now, it's tough for this old Razorback to say things like 'Roll, tide roll,' but I'm doing it tonight. And it's tough for this old Razorback to look over there to the state just to the east of us and anticipate being able to say that we're too, Volunteers. I think before the night is over, I'll even be singing 'Rocky Top.' This old razorback may even catch some bulldog fever before the night is over. And we're going to forget all about the Cotton Bowl and even be grateful for our friends to the north before tonight night is over, I'm fully believing."
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Huckabee is tapping the rich lexicon of southern college football to highlight his decisive win in Arkansas and herald his strong showings in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri. He ultimately took home all of the above, save the Show Me state.
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Translation: I am from Arkansas, but I also won Alabama and probably took Tennesee, Georgia, and maybe even Missouri.

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It's no accident that Southerners do well in politics, especially if they have a good foundation in religion. It is their birthright to say one thing and mean several without saying so...and get away with it.

I have come across observations that Barack Obama speaks in poetry while Hillary Clinton speaks in prose. How can I say this without sounding racist? Obama's oratorical gifts derive in part from his insights into black preaching that is the best of Southern poetry. He therefore shares a gift like Huckabee's that Mrs. Clinton does not have. She may have gone to Vacation Bible School, but it doesn't seem to have worked.

Cognitive Dissonance

Thanks to Google I have a personal metric by which to track public awareness of Barak Obama. A post I composed in December 2006, updated several times since then, usually appears on the first screen of results for any search for Barack Obama's religion. I have been able to watch the numbers rise and fall daily for over a year. And because the rest of my two-thousand-plus posts are so obscure, that post receives upwards of seventy percent of all hits, sometimes spiking as much as ninety-plus percent of the last rolling 100. My two hit counters run pretty much the same.

Observation: Interest in Obama's religion spiked after, not before the last two high-profile voting events. The Iowa caucus and yesterday's "Super Tuesday" both showed large spikes. This indicates more people paying attention AFTER the results than before voting.

If that's human nature, it's a sad commentary. When the voting is over it's a bit late to be doing homework.

Super Tuesday Snips

Everybody's an expert at speculating. You know what they say about opinions. These snips caught my eye this morning.

The Lovers And The Fighters by Digby

...the campaign will boil down to whether or not independents believe that the way to fix a broken system is through inspiration or confrontation --- in particular whether they believe that the radical Republicans can be tamed by inclusion and compromise or if it will take a metaphorical billy club.

McCain will make the case that he is a man apart, beholden to no one, the only person who can make both parties straighten up and fly right. He'll run as the fighter for America. Obama is making the case that he's a man apart, a leader of millions, who will make both parties work together for the common good. He'll run as the healer of America. It will depend a great deal on a non-partisan voter's personal temperament and worldview as to which one he or she will believe.

All You Need Is Hate by Stanley Fish, NY Times

...Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity. When the heading of a section of the “Hillary File” reads “Have the Clintons ever murdered anyone?” — and it turns out to be a rhetorical question like “Is the Pope Catholic?” — you know that you’ve entered cuckooland.

The Conservative No McCain Zone: Big Arguments for a Bad Idea by Vanderleun

...the culture war is over. And the conservatives have lost. Reaction? Consume your own.

Here's the news on "The Big 3 Issues:"

Abortion: Alas, this is a done deal. There will not come a time in the foreseeable future when abortion on demand will not be available in the United States. The best that can be hoped for at this point is a widespread understanding among the populace that abortion, though perfectly legal, is morally wrong except in certain, widely understood, circumstances. (And, no, I'm not going to spell those circumstances out -- that's up to you. Work it out with yourself, your family and your friends.)

The law and public morality are not coterminous, nor should they be. When they are the result is dhimmitude. Not really the state one is seeking, correct?

Homosexuality and gay marriage: This too is a done deal. To paraphrase Gay Rights activists from years ago, "They're here. They're queer. Get used to it."

Reversing Illegal Immigration: Done deal #3. I know that, like visions of sugarplums, visions of some sort of "fence" protecting America from the hordes of marching Mexicans dance in the heads of Americans who just want them all to turn around and march back. But, alas, that too joins the previous two issues in the category, "It Ain't Gonna Happen."

I know, believe me, all the designs for a kinder and gentler fence that will have hi-tech detectors and some sort of ready interdiction corps sitting on helicopter scramble pads across the southern border. I know all the arguments for expanding the ever-so-effective techniques used to stop the flow of illegal drugs to stop the flow of illegal aliens. None of these will prove any more effective than "The War on Some Drugs" we've be squandering billions on over the decades.

What would work would be some sort of East German wall 1,969 miles long. This monstrosity would have guard towers, mine fields, attack Dobermans, armored cars, and about 100,000 armed border guards with a shoot on sight policy (3 shifts of 17 guards per mile). After around 500 Mexican civilians were shot dead, this might have some effect on reducing the flow. I'm not quite ready for this draconian a solution. Are you?

Cindy McCain’s Painkiller Problem by Radley Balko

McCain’s condescending, dismissive attitude toward medical marijuana patients only exacerbates the hypocrisy. Cindy McCain’s powerful husband and high profile probably had something to do with the fact that she didn’t get the Richard Paey treatment. But as with Rush Limbaugh, prosecutors likely laid off of her also because she played the drug war game—she admitted she was an “addict,” repented, and sought treatment. Paey had the audacity to insist that he oughtn’t go to jail for treating his own pain, and that he wasn’t an “addict,” but a chronic pain patient who was dependent on the medication in order to lead a normal life.

Contra my friend Jeremy Lott, the problem with the hypocritical practice of letting politicians’ family members get off for drug crimes that land normal people in prison is that it doesn’t seem to do much in the way of making them more sympathetic. It just hardens them into more militant drug warriors. We have to throw Richard Paey in prison so we don’t get any more Cindy McCains. See the logic?

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters by Andrew Sullivan

Cover story. Long and big.
And nope, I didn't read it, but I think it's important.
I'm tired, tired of all the words.
I'm ready to change presidents and see what happens next. I can't imagine, Democrat or Republican, how it can get much worse.

FOX News Ratings Woes

This is more delicious than a box of cherry cordials.

...Fox News years ago made an obvious decision to appeal almost exclusively to Republican viewers. The good news then for Fox News was that it succeeded. The bad news now for Fox News is that it succeeded.

Frozen Grand Central Station

Improv Everywhere

On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them. Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos.

Back in 2006 we had around 200 people shop in slow motion at a Manhattan Home Depot. For part two of that mission everyone froze in place. As it turned out the slow motion was subtle, but the freezing in place was absolutely striking. I wanted to recreate the frozen idea, but this time in a larger, more open space. Home Depot had many aisles and multiple floors so you could never see more than a handful of frozen people at a time. At Grand Central’s enormous Main Concourse, we would be able to see everyone simultaneously.
We met in nearby Bryant Park and synchronized our watches. We would freeze at exactly 2:30 PM. A nice mix of people of all ages and races showed up, so we would look like any random sample of New Yorkers before we froze.

Willy Loman Lives

Radio blogging here...
This ten-minute feature by Scott Simon hit me hard this morning. Willie Loman and I are the same age. We have a lot more in common that most people might guess. But in many ways his story is that of everyone...sooner or later.

There's a transcript there, but don't read it. Allow yourself to listen so you can hear the deliveries of Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy in their own voices. It's just ten minutes.

Youth Radio's Paul Katzman on the Draft

This morning's Weekend Edition Saturday included a feature from Atlanta's Youth Radio by Paul Katzman, senior at Atlanta's Grady High School I don't know if this was broadcast nationally or was a local fill spot from WABE, Atlanta's NPR affiliate.

This young man observes that today's young people seem complacent to stories in the news that would have sparked outrage from the same age group a few years ago.

What has happened to student activism? Thirty years ago if it came out that the president condoned the treatment of some detainees that some considered torture, the youth of the day would not have sat idly by and accepted it.
Students used to riot over such injustices.
But today public outcries on political matters have been relegated to the arena of publishing punditry, forwarded emails and the blogosphere. What will it take for the youth of America to care about our immoral war? There's on e simple answer: a military draft.

He goes on the describe how unless and until more people see the results of war in a personal way, the loss of family members and others they know, nothing much will happen to bring about a change.

This young man is able to see a truth that too many people we call leaders either cannot see or don't want to admit.
Listen to his words and pay attention to what he says. Remember that he is still in high school and is referring to his own peer group.

I don't think he has been brainwashed or put up to this by anyone. He strikes me as a serious and patriotic youngster speaking his mind. And I agree with him. I was a draftee in 1965 and the experience changed my life. I have written about my experiences at some tiresome length on this blog as regular readers know.

I don't know how I can promote Paul Katzman's ideas and opinions as a budding journalist but if one man's blogpost will help, then here it is.

Meantime, I have been watching and waiting for the return of a military draft for some time. Sooner or later it will return.

Bill Noxid on the "Diebold Effect"

Hey, I'm a cautious guy, not given to conspiracy theories. Even when someone advances a first-person narrative so compelling that it becomes hard to swallow what is regarded as common knowledge, I am still able to go with the "generally accepted" version, if for no other reason than I'm not in any position to do much to change it.

But Bill Noxid's suspicions about voting machines is a nagging piece of work that won't go away. Think Freakanomicks, one chapter long. Comparing the New Hampshire primary results by paper ballot and machine ballot he discovered a discrepancy that is hard to accept.

What this clearly shows however, is where the 14% points some polls indicated Obama was leading by went. As you can see, the ballots that were counted by hand give Obama a 7.5% win while the Accuvote “count” gives Clinton a 5.5% win. The combined “shift” is 13%. Here is where the percentage points disappear that were expected right up to the casting of ballots. Not tears, not lazy young people, right here in this “shift”.

There’s no way to legitimately explain why this discrepancy would exist. These are people in the same state, voting for the same set of candidates, from the same party, and on the same day. Nothing happened to one group that didn’t happen to the other. One group doesn’t have information that the other group doesn’t have. One group couldn’t have been “moved” by the “tears” while the other was not. One group could not have had sudden “black-voting phobia” while the other did not, so these “news” people need to start looking for a plausible explanation. The only difference between these two groups is that one had their votes counted by hand, and the other by Accuvote. One group voted definitively for Obama, and the other definitively for Clinton… And as usual, after combining the two the ultimate margin of victory is too thin to be challenged and finding the truth is like finding a needle in a haystack.

If we were to apply the hand count as the standard, then the 5.5% win given to Clinton by Accuvote would actually be a 7.5% Obama win. Thus Obama would have won by nearly 15% and the pre-primary polls, the genuine voter turnout, and the pundits themselves would have all been right for a change. The real question then is which is harder for the American people to believe? The fact that every poll, every pundit, every voter interviewed, and every sensibility turned out to be so drastically wrong, or that Accuvote “flipped” the vote as it has done so many times before

Curious readers can read the details at the link.

This is one of those I-report-you-decide items.