P.S. A Column On Things

Back to school, round 9

If you had told me in August of  2003 that I would be starting my ninth year of teaching in 2011, I would have scoffed. I really didn't think my second career would last this  long. Imagine my surprise. I have gotten to be a pretty good teacher, with an excellent command of my subject and a growing command of my classroom discipline. The latter still needs more work than the former, as it has since day one.

I inherited my classroom from a wonderful teacher who had to resign at the last minute because of illness. I have spent eight wonderful years there, and I know every square inch like the back of my hand. Alas, the requirements of the school have doubled me up with Mrs. S, the teacher across the hall and a friend of mine for 30 years. Since she teachers periods 1-4 and I teach 5-7, I guess the administration figured it would work out fine. That remains to be seen, but for now we'll be living in each other's pockets, teaching our 90 students each as much about U.S. History (1492-1914) as we can in 180 school days.

In short, the gun is about to go off, and the marathon will begin again.

Politics: Economy: Bad options, Bad Choices

by Richard Dalton
I was outraged to hear that Massachusetts' own "progressive" Senator John Kerry, newly nominated to the six-person congressional deficit panel, had identified Social Security and Medicare as a central cause of our fiscal problems during a Meet the Press appearance:
"And the real problem for our country is not the short-term debt. We can deal with that. It's the long-term debt. It's the structural debt of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid measured against the demographics of our nation."

Hello?  Our treatment of retirees and our medically disadvantaged population is pretty minimal compared to other industrialized countries and we are supposed to cut back on these benefits to balance a budget that allows the wealthy and corporations to escape paying a reasonable share of the tax burden?
That got me to thinking about the major fiscal impacts of the last decade and the costofwar.com Web site I haven't checked nearly as frequently as I should have.  According to this well-documented resource, we have sunk close to $800 billion in direct costs of the Iraq war and another $444 billion in Afghanistan.  For the two conflicts, that's one-and-a-quarter TRILLION.

And those are direct costs.  Ongoing care of mentally and physically disabled soldiers plus the cost of restocking the military units whose equipment has been sadly depleted by these wars will add hundreds of more billions, maybe doubling the cost covered by direct allocations, according to estimates I've seen.  Altogether, it's a couple of trillion dollars that we obviously can't afford--whether we ravage social security and Medicare/Medicaid or not.

And we need to look at value.  Those expenditures uncovered Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, right?  And destroyed the Al Qaida and Taliban terrorist organizations, right?  And it's the Democrats that are to blame, right?

According to the National Priorities Project  27.4 cents of every tax dollar collected this year will go toward military expenditures.  The next two leading expenditures, health and debt service, account for 21.5 and 13.8 cents, respectively.

If military expenditures are a sacred cow and we look to Social Security as the "right" place to reduce expenditures, We will be talking about a resource that provides 50% or more of the income of two-thirds of the over-65 population.  For one-third of the people,getting SSA benefits, it's at least 90% of income. (2002 figures).

Frankly, it sounds immoral to me to hazard the financial stability of most people over 65 (disclaimer:  I am over 65) so we can keep munitions manufacturers and fat cats happy.

[a PR person offers this link: The Complete Guide to Social Security Benefits]

Political Briefs

• More bailouts?

Note on Midnight in Paris

Sometime in July, Midnight in Paris quietly became the highest-grossing Woody Allen film of his 45-year movie career. At $48 million last week and still rising, it easily beats out Hannah and Her Sisters, the 1986 film that was previously Allen's most popular. Plus, I think there's still a cherry coming on this sundae; can you spell Oscar?

The Help

5 stars out of 5
This was a difficult call. The Help is well-acted, well-written, about an important subject, and will stand up to multiple viewings. In my book, that earns it five stars. It  follows the lives of black women working in white homes in Mississippi during the early 1960s. It is adapted from the novel of the same name (and is faithful to the book, my wife says). It could be viewed as simplistic and as an exercise in stereotypes. I don't think so, any more than Uncle Tom's Cabin was. The difference is, of course, that Uncle Tom's Cabin came out in time to do some good, while The Help is history, rather than advocacy. Nevertheless, it is salutory for people to remember just how things were in the south in the 1960s, especially since the South is still fighting (and to an extent, winning) the civil war. If you don't believe me, ask Gov. Goodhair (Rick Perry), the great white GOP hope, about his threat to secede from the union. Apparently, the place where it is written that Texas can leave the union any time it wants is right next to the place in the instruments of confederate secession where it says the war wasn't about slavery--that is, in the imagination of the blowhard making the statement.

Richard Dalton notes Tea Party slippage, Dan Grobstein File

Richard Dalton checks in to point out the tea party is slipping in popularity.

Dan Grobstein File

• The Wisconsin Recalls
• Red State Welfare Queens
• Why are riots so often sparked by police action?
• Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago)  How can anybody not know who Bogart was? Movie classics are more available than ever, and less seen. 
• Negative Real Yields
• Margo Howard (@Margoandhow) With tongue firmly in cheek, a bitter satirical letter to David Cameron's parents.
• McClatchyDC (@McClatchyDC) Commentary: Florida's elderly, kids don't need stinkin' U.S. tax dollars
• David Waldman (@KagroX) It'll be interesting, post-riot, to have to justify continued austerity alongside throwing the world's most lavish party, the Olympics. 
• David Corn (@DavidCornDC) Florida's anti-Obamacare governor pays less for state-funded health insurance than janitors, cops, or teachers. 
• The Overhead Wire (@theoverheadwire) San Jose freeways as a tube map 
• Kevin Drum (@kdrum) Mitch McConnell then and now 
• felix salmon (@felixsalmon) Chip-and-PIN technology in the US: Still maybe 5 years off 
  Can't understand what is the hold up. We're #1 !!!!!
• In Weeks Before Labor Day, Pointless ‘Filler’ Columns Abound
• Samuel Cook III (@SamuelCookIII) Wait, Mitt--the federal government can define marriage, but can't decide who gets health insurance? 

End August 15 Column

Annual LA Trip

MONDAY
I flew to LA without incident. I got to my favorite B&B, the Venice Beach House, just 50 yards from the beach. My favorite room wasn’t available, so I made do with another one I’ve never been in. Beautiful, except for two small problems: no desk and lousy wifi. Other than that it’s perfect. What do I care for Wifi… Oops, I actually care a lot. There I go, whining again. So I fell down the Google hole, trying to figure out what streetcar line used to run parallel to Culver Blvd, a street I got lost on along the way (bad directions from Hertz). That killed a half hour. Sepulveda Blvd was a parking lot, so I got the N and C's house late. We went to McCormick and Schmick and I had lobster. C gave me an article from the NY Times about a Malian singer to send to Marlow.Got back and fell down the Google hole again for an hour—the amount of time being determined by the lousy connection. I am truly like the French royal family—I learn nothing and I forget nothing.

TUESDAY
Started off with a walk on the beach this morning. The tide was quite low. The breakfast here at the Venice Beach House was French toast and sausage—not exactly my usual. They also had yogurt. I probably should just have eaten dry cereal, but with all the sodium, it’s not so hot either. Drove down to Palos Verdes, just south of Torrance. There. I met my buddy JS, a professor at USC. We had a great time as usual, although we had to skip our usual walk! Normally, we walk an hour down to a restaurant in town. This time we drove. A disappointment, but it marked the first time in years he saw me dressed in something other than my walking clothes. He said I cleaned up nice. I had lime chicken salad for lunch. I had quiet evening, although I did spend an hour driving around looking at old Pacific Electric streetcar tracks. I decided just to have cherries for dinner; I’d had enough food for one day already.

WEDNESDAY
Got out at 7 and walked for an hour on Venice beach. Got back and had scrambled eggs and a bagel for breakfast. The eggs had cheese and spinach in them. The LA Times was here on time, so I got a chance to read both the funnies AND the front page. From my room, the Internet is interminable. Of course, that’s not as bad as “not available,” but it is a pain in the butt. I have to get dressed and go downstairs to get reasonable responsiveness. My goal was to get out by 9; I got out by 9:15, and got to Jerry Pournelle’s house in the San Fernando valley town of Studio City by 10:05 am. Jerry and I set out almost immediately on our walk, since the predicted high was 100 degrees. It got very hot, very fast, as we took his dog Sable up the very steep, twisty and dusty hill into the Santa Monica Mountain State Park. The round trip took two hours. We each drank a quart of water when we got back to the house. We drove over to the Good Earth restaurant in his neighborhood, where I had the bbq chicken pizza. Here's how Jerry saw the visit, from his blog:

I had a long standing appointment to hike with Paul Schindler, my BYTE editor in the days when BYTE transformed from a printed magazine to on-line, and today Paul and I took Sable up the hill. It’s a bit over two miles in each direction, and a 700 foot climb from Laurel Terrace to the heights above the Tree People at Mulholland and Coldwater. Not all that punishing, but for most of the month of July Roberta has been recovering from a severe sprain that keeps her from going on our morning walks, and despite Sable’s best efforts to talk me into going out daily, I haven’t been doing that much this month, mostly because it has been hot.

This hike has been scheduled for months, and Sable knows that Paul means hikes, so the weather was no excuse. It’s well over 90 out there, and there’s no water on the trail. I took a Baggie of ice cubes, and Sable got nearly all of them. A fur coat isn’t precisely the proper dress for this weather. Sable was fine, though. She loves that trail: there are fresh gopher holes ever few feet, and she keeps hoping to find a really stupid gopher. As long as she’s hunting I don’t worry about her reactions to the heat, and she left a trail of terrified gophers from bottom to top to back down again. She came home and curled up for a nap.

The upshot was that one thoroughly delightful time delayed another. I was 10 minutes late joining Neal at the Landmark Cinema in the Westside Pavillion at Pico and Westwood for The Guard, a fish out of water Irish comedy featuring Brendan Gleeson as a veteran Irish cop and Don Cheadle as a black FBI agent. Very funny stuff. After that, to the corner of Chautauqua and Pacific Coast Highway, to a newish seafood restaurant called The Hungry Cat. I had the crab appetizer, Neal had the octopus, and we both had the lobster roll entrée , topped off with the strawberry rhubarb crisp.

THURSDAY
One last hour on the Beach, chocolate chip pancakes and bacon, and off to LAX for an uneventful ride home. My wife picked me up at the airport, a lovely gesture as always.

Political Briefs

• Biden Compares Tea Party to Terrorists; Al-Qaeda Demands Apology
• Democrats Accept Major Cuts to Their Balls
• The economy isn’t recovering, and Washington has been worrying about the wrong things.
• Moody’s Downgrades US Credit Rating to “It’s Complicated”
• Krugman On S&P's $2T "Error" (Just As The Chief Justice Made A "Mistake" and "Forgot" The Presidential Oath Of Office)
  "In short, S&P is just making stuff up — and after the mortgage debacle, they really don’t have that right."
  Or someone is making stuff up for them.  From the new Department Of Non Sequiturs Section:  Can you say Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Jim DeMint, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Michele Bachman and John Paulson in one breath?
• Proposed Balanced Budget Amendment Makes No Sense 
• Standard & Poor’s Downgrade Raises One Legitimate Issue
• Dismantle the Empire
  
  

The Guard

4 stars out of 5
Some film memes are so good they never get old. The mismatched police partners is one of those. Throw together a boozy, cynical Irish copy (Brendan Gleeson) with a straight-laced, by-the-book American FBI agent (Don "Hotel Rwanda" Cheadle) and then the fun begins. In this case, it scarcely stops. John Michael McDonagh both wrote and directed this tight, amazing and amusing bundle of character development and funny lines. I wish American film-makers could do this much with a plot we've seen 1,000 times before. To make it fresh is an act of genius; if you wish to see such an  act, go see The Guard. Warning: a rather large number of f-words are dropped.

Paul's Top 5 Rank, Dan Grobstein File

As you may know, I am a regular contributor to the TopFive List feature on the Internet. I have been inactive for a while, but the lifetime rankings just came out, and I am 47th on the all-time list, appearing on 340 lists, with 15 Number 1s. The list is on hiatus at present, with a redesign in the works for the fall. I'll keep you posted!

Dan Grobstein File

• The Grand Crap Sandwich
• U.S.   | July 31, 2011
  The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement
  By ANDREA ELLIOTT
  David Yerushalmi has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Islamic law.
• Picking Through a Shit Sandwich
• U.S.   | August 02, 2011
  States and Cities Brace for Less Federal Money
  By ADAM NAGOURNEY and MICHAEL COOPER
  Governors and mayors were trying to figure out how trillions of dollars in spending cuts would affect them.
• We can live in fear or act out of hope
• The ridiculous, self-inflicted debt ceiling-fest cost the US government $1.7 billion dollars. That's the amount of additional interest the USG had to pay investors when it went into the market to see Treasury bills on Monday.
• Only 8% of Newt's Twitter followers are real.
• Billing for USA Today: Look for the fine print on your bill
• OPINION   | August 04, 2011
  Op-Ed Contributor:  Immigrant Identities, Preserved in Vinegar?
  By JANE ZIEGELMAN
  Immigrants' pickle carts as an assimilationist battleground.
• Harry S Truman (@PresHarryTruman)  The Republicans favor a minimum wage -- the smaller the minimum the better.
• S&P Collection
  • digby (@digby56) MT @jayrosen_nyu: S & P was a clown show during the mortgage mess.Wrong about everything. Stupid.Corrupt.Cost billions. 
  • Ezra Klein (@ezraklein)  This didn't happen because an earthquake wrecked our factories or a plague hit our workers. It was Congress. Particularly GOP in Congress.
  • Gaius Publius (@Gaius_Publius) There's a story with S&P. They're pressuring the O admin not to enforce new reg rules against them. This isn't pissy; it's pressure.
  • David Waldman (@KagroX) So they miscalculated but downgraded anyway? No wonder banks are foreclosing on the wrong houses & no one gives a shit.
  • We're a mess, but they're not the ones to judge. 
• Life in a liquidity trap: Bank pays negative interest rate
• The key to progress? No southerners. Their worldview is remarkably consistent and the same people control today's republican party and want to undo the Civil War legislation that built this country and the New Deal legislation that saved it.  How Capitol Hill's 37th legislative session, which sat from 1861 to 1863, laid the groundwork for modern America. 
•  It’s a pity that President Obama isn’t more like Richard Nixon, who always comes to mind on the anniversary of his resignation. 
• OPINION   | August 06, 2011
  Paul Krugman: Prattle and Prejudice
  By PAUL KRUGMAN
  Mysteries of WSJ economics.
• idyllick (@idyllick) Now all countries with an AAA credit rating have universal health care
• An I missing something? If a bank has excess reserves, has to charge large deposits a fee to recoup the FDIC fee on that money, wouldn't this not apply if they would loan it out?  The fact that they can't loan it out because nobody has an investment use for the money tells you everything you need to know about why the Feds should be sounding it on railroads and bridges and a manned mars mission.  There's no demand. And there won't be until people are working. And there will be no hiring until people have money to spend.
  FDIC, Fed Funds & Leen’s Lodge
  
• Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald)  Must-read: Drew Westin in the NYT: "What Happened to Obama"? 
  Near as I can figure he's spent his whole life as an outsider trying to get everyone to like him. I think the unprecedented unity and obstructionism of the republicans upsets him and he hopes that reasonableness and non-violence to his enemies will cause public opinion to rise up on his side and "change the ways of Washington." Wasn't Gandhi's advice to German Jews in the 1930s to follow his way? Lot of good that would have done.