After Nashville music critic Brian Mansfield was diagnosed with colon cancer, he found cancer "changed the way I hear music, more than any other life event except my marriage":
Songs I once appreciated only on a surface level now strike deep at the core of my soul. Some inspire me; some terrify me. Others that I might have liked before, I've got no use for now. I've also got more time to listen, whether it's during my morning exercise time or while lying in a hospital bed. These songs form part of the soundtrack to my cancer story.
Before my mastectomy, someone on Twitter told me that some study showed that patients who were able to bring a CD of music to the operating room, to be played during their surgery, had better recovery outcomes. I made just such a CD and brought it to the hospital. Didn't end up playing it, and I recovered well, but I share this anecdote because there have also been certain songs that I play to and from important medical appointments, certain songs I've cried to or just listened over and over to, to jolt me out of the awful darkness that comes with cancer.
My old Oxford chum, Boris Johnson, now mayor of London, could teach the Republican nominee a few things. Boris is a right old Etonian, and a moneyed, plummy-sounding toff, but he embraces it, makes fun of it and has endeared himself to millions by it. His Bullingdon accent, his sexual shenanigans, his amazing hair: it's all him, vowels and all. So when something wrong happens, he runs with it:
Unscripted and uninhibited, Boris is busy making conservatism more popular among those most alienated by some aspects of it. Which is why, in all likelihood, he will lead his party, and maybe country, some day soon. And why Romney – a man very few seem to understand or like – may not share the same fate. Personality matters. We elect people, not corporations. And they are, as Boris reveals, different things.
Just to piss Krugman off, James Kwak laments that the deficit has taken a backseat to discussions about unemployment:
For over a year now, the refrain of the left-leaning intellectual class has been that the only thing that matters is increasing growth and reducing unemployment, and any discussion of deficits and the national debt plays into the hands of the Republicans. It may be true that jobs should be the top priority right now, but the fact remains that many Americans think that deficits matter (and most of those left-leaning intellectuals would concede that they matter in the long term). Those Americans are currently getting a menu of proposals with Simpson-Bowles on the right, Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on the far right, and Fox News on the extreme right. There is no explanation of how to deal with our long-term debt problem in a way that preserves government services and social insurance programs and protects the poor and the middle class.
Dean Baker argues the opposite. Referring to an NPR interview with David Wessel, he says:
The piece included Wessel's unchallenged assertion that the deficit probably cannot be closed without cutting spending and raising taxes across the board. It would have been helpful to note that the deficit is projected to get to a level that is almost consistent with a stable debt to GDP ratio if the economy were simply to get back to full employment. If health care costs were contained by reducing protectionism in the sector and a tax was imposed on financial speculation, the deficit would be at a sustainable level.
I'm with Kwak, which is surely not a surprise. The best aspect of the latest Obama ad is his justification of an increase in taxes on the wealthy as simply part of a collective, shared effort to cut the deficit and debt. I definitely understand the perils of deficit-hawkery in a demand-driven recession – but Obama's chief failing in his first term, in my view, is his failure to describe his own long-term debt reduction plans, allowing the GOP to trumpet their far less practicable and far more radical proposals. The biggest fail? The fumbling of Bowles-Simpson. That's about long-term debt reduction. And until Obama shows how he intends to cut entitlement spending beyond untested and unproven pilot programs in the ACA, he deserves little credit for political courage.
He could still, of course, endorse Bowles-Simpson as a model for the future, call Romney's bluff on taxes and reposition himself more to the center. But he won't. For this Obamacon, it is easily the greatest disappointment of his first term.
A pot-smoker just became the most decorated athlete in Olympic history – proving that the “gateway drug” can indeed be a gateway to greatness (the presidency, for example). But Phelps has had to maintain the public line of shame and embarrassment and anti-marijuana bullshit. I bring this up because a reader just sent the Youtube above to me. It features the man who is such a national treasure in Britain he was the closing act of the Olympics Opening Ceremony. And his responses are so fresh, so real and so true one wonders why more people don’t deploy them more often.
"Much of what is wrong with the U.S.-Israel relationship today can be found in that Romney trip. In recent years, the Republican Party has decided to make Israel a wedge issue. In order to garner more Jewish (and evangelical) votes and money, the G.O.P. decided to “out-pro-Israel” the Democrats by being even more unquestioning of Israel. This arms race has pulled the Democratic Party to the right on the Middle East and has basically forced the Obama team to shut down the peace process and drop any demands that Israel freeze settlements. This, in turn, has created a culture in Washington where State Department officials, not to mention politicians, are reluctant to even state publicly what is U.S. policy — that settlements are “an obstacle to peace” — for fear of being denounced as anti-Israel," – Tom Friedman.
That group operating out of a Pheonix PO Box – which gave more than $40 million dollars to politically active non-profits in 2010 – is called the Center to Protect Patient Rights. Also, the point that Mayer makes about shared staff and facilities is rapant, and it doesn’t just apply to super PACs. Take FreedomWorks, for example, which has a 501(c)(3), a 501(c)(4), a super PAC, and a regular PAC. They all live at the same address and have the same staff. FreedomWorks’ charitable and “social welfare” arms pick up costs for each other, and FreedomWorks “social welfare” arm is the largest donor to the super PAC. They are by no means the only ones.
Jane’s previous videos are here, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.
There's a good chance another self-inflicted economic wound has been averted (for the moment, that is). The six-month stopgap is relatively unexpected for a reason, notes Jennifer Steinhauer:
The emerging deal is a sharp contrast to previousoccasions when House Republicans used the approach of a spending deadline to insist on deep spending cuts in exchange for their votes, once avoiding a shutdown by a matter of hours. But with the Oct. 1 deadline for enacting spending bills for 2012 coming so close to the election, Republicans leaders were eager to avoid a government crisis that they could be blamed for by voters at the polls.
The bill will be good for the GOP, argues Sahil Kapur:
The deal, if successful, means Republican leaders have dodged a bullet — averting a shutdown fight just weeks before the election, despite the fact that House conservatives have signaled a desire to go down that road. A quiet appropriations process would be a relief for top Republicans who fear another standoff would damage their hopes on Election Day.
In other words, the only reason the GOP is not interested in creating another crisis that damages the entire economy is that it might hurt their electoral prospects. They couldn't care less about hurting the country as a whole – and merrily stopped the recovery in its tracks the minute they got leverage, and thought it could hurt Obama. But their own party? They are remarkably disciplined, aren't they?
I know I'm a broken record, but this degenerate bunch of fanatics nauseates.
My only real interaction with the man was a review I wrote of his awful 2000 novel, The Golden Age, where he accuses FDR of setting up Pearl Harbor in a conspiracy to go to war with Nazi Germany. Yes, he was not just a 9/11 skeptic but a Pearl Harbor truther:
It is difficult to make a solid argument about America's imperial temptation when you willfully discount the darkening world that greeted the fledgling superpower in the 1930's and 40's. It is difficult to make an argument about American history when you write a novelistic account that makes grand claims about the American past, but then neither defends them by accountable historical methods nor disowns them as mere fiction.
Vidal wants it every which way. In fact, he wants to be Shakespeare (Vidal draws the analogy himself). ''Why do you keep letting Shakespeare leak in upon us?'' Peter asks late in the novel. ''Why not?'' is the answer. ''He gives names to things, real and unreal. He understands how the actors — the Roosevelts and the Trumans — are simply spirits and once their scenes are acted out, they melt into air, into thin air, as we shall presently do, still hankering after what was not meant to be, ever.'' But Roosevelt and Truman didn't melt into thin air. They were not invented; and they didn't live long enough ago to be turned into enduring myths. They lived lives and made choices that deserve fearless scrutiny, not snooty, cynical attack. And, by any reckoning, they helped make the world what it now is — a far freer, brighter place than anything concocted on the strange, orbiting planet called Gore Vidal.
He subsequently dismissed me as a foreigner and therefore unqualified to review his book (the most baldly nativist comment directed against me in a quarter century of living here). Vidal was also a fierce opponent of the gay rights movement in America, denying that homosexuality exists at all, a tic of his generation that he typically refused to relinquish in the face of overwhelming evidence. Then this, of course:
But I must say that his extreme hostility to the American Empire – sustained relentlessly through the decades – looks much less repellent to me than it did before Bush-Cheney. He ruined his case by exaggeration, and absurd moral equivalence. But he was surely onto something from the perspective of the 21st Century. And his willingness to court public outrage and disdain in defense of his ideas is a model for a public intellectual, it seems to me. As a historical novelist of the Roman past, he was superb – even peerless. No one can or would dispute his profound erudition. And his astonishing memoir, Palimpsest, is better than any writer has any business aiming for.
But he also, it seems to me, let his passions outweigh his reason more than a thinker as gifted as he was should. This emotionally turbulent quality seemed to me to be related to his woundedness as a brilliant scion forced by his homosexuality into a marginalization he learned to adorn with enormous style. He never, perhaps understandably, learned to let go of resentment. But this very rebelliousness was, in some ways, the flipside of a deep and romantic patriotism. You can never be that angry if you have never been that naive.
And that combination of love of country – and vein-bulging disgust with it – strikes me as related to his homosexuality, lived bravely in an era of cowardice. The displacement of being gay in a very straight world created a dynamic of rejection and longing that extended to more than a family. It extended to a country. And it was a bit of a show. He returned to the country he loved to die. And he will be buried, we are informed, in a grave next to his partner of many decades, whom he would doggedly refuse to call his husband:
The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Harry Reid's claim that a Bain investor told him that Romney didn't pay taxes for 10 years is pretty obviously BS:
Neither Reid nor his office will divulge the name of the Bain investor in question. In fact, Reid himself acknowledges that he has no idea if his anonymous source is correct, or has any way of knowing this information. You’d think if Democrats had disgruntled Bain investors reaching out to them, they’d give them some media coaching and put them before the press, on the record Additionally, the Romney campaign has come close to denying speculation that Romney paid no taxes whatsoever.
[Reid's rumor] sounds like something out of a junior-high cafeteria, but then again there’s also an easy way for Romney to knock it down. Which again raises the question: What can possibly be in the returns to make them so dicey to release?
Lurking behind that question, though, is a related one that has gotten less attention: Why in the world did someone who has been running for president since late 2006 not years ago rid his personal finances of anything that could cause problems in a campaign—Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island shelters, questionable IRAs, and whichever even more troublesome features lurk in the unreleased returns? After all, Romney is nothing if not a cautious, details-oriented fellow—this is someone who held a videotaped family summit before deciding whether to run for president. Why would he not have fixed his finances as carefully as his coiffure before venturing out onto the stage?
MacGillis goes on to outline a theory that Romney "may be cautious, but he is also, famously, a penny-pincher." Meanwhile, Allahpundit reflects on the mild-mannered Reid:
He specializes in these tactics during presidential campaigns. In 2008, he made more noise about McCain’s temper being a sign of possible derangement than any other major Democrat. (He also insisted that he couldn’t stand McCain as part and parcel of the demonization effort, even though the two had been known to socialize.) He’s an unusually nasty character, even by normal political standards, when he wants to be; gratuitously accusing George Romney of being disappointed in his son is simply [standard operating procedure].
The fact that the Obama campaign released the above ad the same day as Reid's interview hardly seems like a coincidence.
DICK MORRIS: I guarantee you, Sean, based on what I’ve heard from third parties or I’ve spoken to that William Jefferson Clinton is going to cast his ballot for Mitt Romney.
HANNITY: Wow!
MORRIS: However, he's going to open his mouth for Barack Obama because his wife is hostage. They have her under lock and key as Secretary of State, and he is scared that Obama will lose and blame him if he undermines Obama. So he’ll do everything he asks him to do and then he’ll jab him whenever he can.
Here's his prediction from four years ago in July. As usual, there is no accountability for years of wild errors in predicting political events. Just Hannity's "wow" at the latest fantasy.
The Dish 