Meanwhile, Back On Planet Earth

I know it’s boring, but Norm Ornstein does boring really well. You think Obama and the Dems have accomplished nothing in one year? Look closer:

[T]his Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president — and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment. The productivity began with the stimulus package, which was far more than an injection of $787 billion in government spending to jump-start the ailing economy. More than one-third of it — $288 billion — came in the form of tax cuts, making it one of the largest tax cuts in history, with sizable credits for energy conservation and renewable-energy production as well as home-buying and college tuition. The stimulus also promised $19 billion for the critical policy arena of health-information technology, and more than $1 billion to advance research on the effectiveness of health-care treatments. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has leveraged some of the stimulus money to encourage wide-ranging reform in school districts across the country. There were also massive investments in green technologies, clean water and a smart grid for electricity, while the $70 billion or more in energy and environmental programs was perhaps the most ambitious advancement in these areas in modern times. As a bonus, more than $7 billion was allotted to expand broadband and wireless Internet access, a step toward the goal of universal access.

Any Congress that passed all these items separately would be considered

enormously productive. Instead, this Congress did it in one bill.

Lawmakers then added to their record by expanding children’s health insurance and providing stiff oversight of the TARP funds allocated by the previous Congress. Other accomplishments included a law to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco, the largest land conservation law in nearly two decades, a credit card holders’ bill of rights and defense procurement reform.

The House, of course, did much more, including approving a historic cap-and-trade bill and sweeping financial regulatory changes. And both chambers passed their versions of a health-care overhaul. Financial regulation is working its way through the Senate, and even in this political environment it is on track for enactment in the first half of this year. It is likely that the package of job-creation programs the president showcased on Wednesday, most of which got through the House last year, will be signed into law early on as well.

Most of this has been accomplished without any support from Republicans in either the House or the Senate — an especially striking fact, since many of the initiatives of the New Deal and the Great Society, including Social Security and Medicare, attracted significant backing from the minority Republicans.

A Democracy With Accountability

A stark contrast to the US where those who launched the Iraq war and instituted torture are deemed unprosecutable, immune from public accountability and many of them given platforms as if they have nothing to account for and nothing to apologize for.

Blair did well; and nothing probably will come from it; but just forcing these officials to defend themselves in public after a war that was and is a fiasco is itself a sign of a healthy democracy.

A Superbowl Ad That Once Ran

So this is acceptable for the mainstream, because it features a man-on-man kiss which is then promptly stigmatized, but the Mancrunch ad, which shows no such graphic kiss, is turned down … because it present homosexuality in a less stereotyped light.

You see what CBS is doing: catering to homophobia, while also allowing explicitly political ads – including those run by the virulently anti-gay “Focus On The Family” to broadcast its message to millions.

When Poets Write Fiction

Brian Beglin reviews Margo Berdeshevesky’s Beautiful Soon Enough and debates the nature of fiction:

Does making such a stark distinction between poetry and prose really matter? For my money, it does. Fiction comes with expectations, just as poetry and hip-hop and meatball subs do. Some authors thwart those expectations to great effect: look at Padgett Powell’s newest, for instance. The paradox is that books like that thrive largely because they feel as though they must be fiction, as though the function demands the form. I’m not sure Beautiful Soon Enough works the same way. Consider a beat from “For Flame and Irresistible”: “She’s stirring coffee with a feather.” As an image in a poem, this is lovely. In a story, it upends the scene. Part of me couldn’t shake the feeling, while reading, that I hadn’t ingested a collection of stories so much as I’d been denied a phenomenal collection of poetry.

When The Pollster Becomes A Pundit

Michelle Cottle reviews a new book by Frank Luntz:

[H]e warns against putting too much pressure on the individual, and he certainly is not interested in a larger role for government. Instead Luntz dreams of a new era of “familial responsibility,” noting that “the family is the perfectly scaled security net for every human being.” If this doesn’t warm the heart of every “Leave It to Beaver”-nostalgic, Palin-crazed conservative out there, I don’t know what would. But, like so many of Luntz’s assertions and interpretations, this prescription has less to do with the unvarnished views of the American public than with the ideological preferences of the author. I have little doubt that Luntz has come to believe that he has got the inside scoop on the American soul. But after reading his book, I am mostly convinced that Luntz continues to aggressively conflate what Americans really want with what he really wants them to want.

All The Atoms In The Universe

Garry Kasparov studies the complexity of chess programs:

The number of legal chess positions is 10 to the power of 40, the number of different possible games, 10 to the power of 120. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can't solve this ancient board game. They are also handy, and I am not above doing this myself, for impressing people with how complicated chess is, if only in a largely irrelevant mathematical way.

[Typos now corrected, thanks to many readers. Apologies.]