Jamie Malanowski's Blog, page 8

MR. MAYOR’S WILD RIDE

Rob Ford has been thrown out of a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game for being drunk and belligerent. He groped a female politician at a fund-raiser for a Jewish community group, and was asked to stop coaching a high school football team after having a violent confrontation with one of the players. He has admitted to drinking too much. But until Tuesday, Rob Ford, the mayor of multicultural, eco-conscious, politically correct Toronto, had vehemently denied a persistent report about a video that showed him smoking crack cocaine.

“You asked me a question back in May and you can repeat that question,” Mr. Ford told a crush of journalists, photographers and camera operators. “Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine. But no, do I, am I an addict? No. Have I tried it? Probably in one of my drunken stupors, probably approximately about a year ago.”

During his brief, impromptu news conference outside his City Hall office, Mr. Ford, 44, insisted that he had not been lying since May, when he first denied reports that he had used crack. At that time, the blog Gawker and The Toronto Star both said their reporters had seen a video from a man trying to sell it that apparently showed the mayor inhaling from a crack pipe and making homophobic remarks about another politician. . . .“I wasn’t lying; you didn’t ask the correct questions,” Mr. Ford said Tuesday. “No, I’m not an addict and no, I do not do drugs. I made mistakes in the past and all I can do is apologize, but it is what it is.” — Iaan Austen, The New York Times, November 5, 2013

Probably in one of my drunken stupors?

PERFECT FOR HOLIDAY SHOPPING

Among this year’s projects, coffee table books for The New York Times, Life and Time, as well as The Book of Levon. All four titles are available in print or electronically from Amazon, except The Book of Levon, which is available in print from lulu.com Trat you rafmily, treat your froends, treat yourself.

TIE A STRING AROUND THE GOP

Anyone who believed that the GOP would carry the shutdown around its neck like a dead albatross into the 2014 elections has surely begun to grasp what a bit of wishful thinking that was. Already people have begun to move on–the shortcomings of the health care act, eavesdropping on Angela Merkel (I’ll admit it: I want to read the transcripts. I want to know if know if it’s a boring as it sounds.) The point is, if the Republicans are going to have to pay for their 2013 folly, someone is going to have to make it happen. Someone, frankly, as Grover Norquist.

Norquist, as we know, turned himself into an influential figure in our politics by devilishly demanding that political candidates sign an oath swearing that they would oppose all tax increases. Having obtained a pledge, Norquest has been able to aim it like a bazooka at the head of any legislator who thought of increasing revenues.

The Democrats need someone who will go around to candidates of both parties and ask them to sign a pledge saying that if elected, they promise not to shut down the government.

Candidates would be free to sign or not, and of course, to explain why. This seems like a good way to make sure that the GOP’s act of malpractice gets addressed at the polls.

LOU REED, 1942-2013

As we all know, the idealistic sixties died in the selfish eighties.The spirit of “All You Need Is Love” was cooed away by the spirit of “Material Girl.” In the eighties, the spirit of making money was wild upon the land. Big takeover companies took over businesses and fired all the employees to raise the stock price. Big real estate companies gouged local governments for subsidies, and mom and pop real estate companies did coop conversions in which some people got rich and other people got thrown onto the street. All of this had the blessing of the ideology of the market, the belief that knowing what the market will bear is better than common sense, human feeling, self-sacrifice, generosity, or any other idea or emotion–and this is the idea that rules our country even now, long after its massive discrediting. In 1989, Lou Reed, a rebel and a romantic and a true artist, released an album called New York, and in its fourteen songs, there is such a sneering outrage against the ugly, selfish attitudes of the times. It was such an interesting statement from Reed, whose best work is mostly about freedom–not only the freedom to explore sex or drugs or–that great euphemism, alternative lifestyles–but the freedom to be oneself, whatever that means (“Doing the Things That We Want To,” “New Sensations,” “NYC Man.” But people didn’t have the freedom to take advantage of one another, to lie or steal or exploit, no matter how cleverly you can spin your rationale. “Somewhere a landlord is laughing until he wets his pants,” Reed wrote. New York was a great document from a great artist. Thanks, Luu.

WILL OBAMA BE AN OUTLAW HERO?

America loves its outlaw heroes. We love them when they are rebellious misfits like Bob Dylan, Holden Caufield and Huck Finn. We also love them when they are action heroes, like Batman and Dirty Harry. In our political life, some of our greatest figures have been outlaw heroes like Martin Luther King, who spoke truth to power and effected a change that America will wear in its crown of glories.

By outlaw heroes, I do not mean criminals or gangsters, people who break the law. I mean people who see gaps in the law, holes in the law, alternatives to the law, people who understand that there are times when the arrangements we have created for ourselves are stopping us, limiting us, crushing us with their illogic and their ineffectiveness. In America, it’s notable that our greatest presidents have been outlaw heroes.

Abraham Lincoln, for example—the man who is honored as the president who saved the union Except that Lincoln didn’t save anything. More properly, he transformed it, by entering a broken political system and combating the crisis with powers previously unrecognized in the system. The results were astounding. By the end of the war, the institution of slavery was finished. The rich and powerful class of slaveholders who had dominated the country since its inception was eliminated, the source of their wealth. Black Americans were accorded citizenship. And the union? It was intact as a legal entity, but it was destroyed it as a concept. The Civil War made the idea passé. We were no longer states that had entered into a union; instead, we were a country, a nation, led by a president and a central government stronger than it had ever been. And it was Abraham Lincoln who shattered the roadblock of inadequate laws and dysfunctional politics and inadequate options that had stymied lesser men.

When the southern states began to secede in 1860 and 1861, President Buchanan was flummoxed. The Constitution is silent on the question of secession—doesn’t say a state can, doesn’t say it can’t. Buchanan studied the issue, and decided that a state could not secede, but that a president had no authority to stop it. A perfectly logical, perfectly ineffectual answer.

Lincoln found the power he needed, in the presidential oath of office that is written into the constitution, in his solemnly sworn obligation to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. From that, he found the authority he needed to raise troops, establish martial law, spend money, and do what needed to be done to combat the emergency. None of those powers were explicitly his, but he acted.

Later, he suspended habeus corpus in order to break up rebel conspiracies. Lincoln clearly violated the constitution when he did this. But his reasoning was unassailable. “[T]he whole of the laws which I was sworn to [execute] were being resisted…in nearly one-third of the states. . . . Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”

In coming days, President Obama may have his own outlaw hero moment. If the rabid right wingers in the House of Representatives–a gerrymander-created and protected minority segment of one House of Congress– refuse to raise the debt ceiling, as they have threatened, America’s creditworthiness may be endangered. The harm to our economy would be literally incalculable, possibly devastating. Our entire way of life could be destroyed. As Sean Wilentz demonstrated in the Times yesterday, Obama has a completely legitimate way to stymie that dangerous gambit, by continuing to pay bills as provided under the 14th amendment.

The Republicans who are threatening the debt ceiling are nearly as dangerous as the secessionists who once wanted to pull the country apart. Obama reportedly has some misgivings about this 14th amendment gambit, but he should ask what would happen if the government collapses. Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?

Time to find the path through the impasse, Mr. Obama. Time to be an outlaw hero.

THE RABID RIGHT WING SHUT DOWN

The government has been shut down for a week now, and I feel nothing but disgust.

I don’t want to repeat what everyone else is saying, but I find the Republican tactics in thie matter shameful, bizarre, selfish and patently un-American. The cabal, led by the Koch Brothers, the odious Ed Meese, the Club for Growth, the Heritage Foundation’s political action committee, was detailed in a New York Times article on Sunday. The piece shows that months ago, these rabid right wingers devised a plan to defund the Affordable Health Care Act by putting a gun to the head of the federal government and threatening to pull the trigger.

Before we even get into the substance of this tactic—namely, shutting down the government unless the Democrats agree to postpone implementing Obamacare for a year—let’s just ask what echo chamber these nuts are living in? The thought that the President and the Senate would sit for this, the idea that even most Republicans would want this, is patently delusional, almost unreal in a bizarro universe kind of way. It is an objectively so implausible, so practically unobtainable as to cast down on the sanity of anyone who advocates it. The only thing that one can say is that these are the fevered `Hail Mary’-type plans that seem plausible only to the truly desperate. In this case, let us remember, that these radical right-wingers are, behind their smug smiles, truly desperate. They are from the far right wing part of the political spectrum that has opposed National Health insurance for the better part of three quarters of a century. They have fought it long past the time when all other western democracies have instituted some kind of plan. They have fought it long past the time when they have paid lip service to supporting it.. They opposed it when Clinton proposed it. They declined to put forward a plan when they controlled Congress, and instead put forward a plan to privatize Social Security. They opposed this particular plan in in two elections, in two houses of Congress, and before the Supreme Court, and they lost, each and every time, and in every venue. And they have no respect for the fact that they have been told in no uncertain terms that they are wrong.

One of their basic arguments is that the American people do not like this plan. Well, I for one do not like this plan, but that doesn’t mean I want no plan. I prefer a single payer system. First, as Jimmy Kimmel demonstrated so brilliantly, most people don’t even know what is in this plan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx2scv... Personally, I think most people don’t like plans in general. Plans involve choices, and most people don’t really like to make choices unless it involves making a choice about things they like, like ice cream flavors of iPhone cases. They don’t like choices when it comes to thinking about what happens when we have leukemia, or have to get hooked to a dialysis machine, or whether they’d rather pay more per month in order to pay a smaller co-pay when they’re actually sick. The unpopularity of Obama’s plan is directly related to unpopularity of discussing illness and bills. Hey, I’m here to help you figure out how to pay for your cancer. But I believe that once the plan starts rolling, everybody will get behind it and think it’s fine. It will be the program. We’ll be happy to have it, and even if somebody comes up with something better, a lot of us will be grumpy and dislike it because it involves change.

SENTIMENTAL FAREWELL

A Yankee season that was by turns surprising, lousy, exciting, and disappointing has a sweet and affectionate close as New York said goodbye to two stalwarts of the team’s most recent golden era. The peerless Mariano Rivera–the Great Rivera, of 19 seasons and 652 regular seasaon saves and 42 postseason saves with an astonishing 1.34 postseason ERA–had announced that he was going. He got two goodbyes at the stadium–a formal ceremony two weeks ago at the stadium, and then, on Thursday, a final vintage performance, where he got four outs in a must-have game that the Yanks were not going to get. When Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte, his friends and brothers, came to pull him, the crowd roared and Rivera wept. It had been a brilliant career, conducted in dignity, with many triumphs, and even defeats that were borne with honor. Two nights later, Pettitte bid adieu, in a meaningless game in Houston that was suddenly invested with significance, just because a fierce competitor chose to honor himself, his team, and his game by playing hard and holding nothing back. He earned his 256th career win in the process. We won’t see anyone like Pettitte again for a long time. We’ll never see another Rivera.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WASHINGTON ARROWS?

Peter King, the most eminent NFL writer in America, has let it be known that he will no longer use the nickname of Washington’s football team in his column. (I swore off some time ago.) He says he has no desire to insult people gratuitously. Team owner Daniel Snyder is adamantly against change. “We’ll never change the name,” he has said. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.” Is it just me, or does that phrasing remind you of George Wallace saying “ I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”?

Today Commissioner Roger Goodell began the process of throwing Snyder under the bus. Back in June, Goodell wrote a letter to Congress defending the Redskins team nickname, calling it “a unifying force that stands for strength, courage, pride and respect.” On Tuesday, he put some space between him and Chief Snyder. “If one person’s offended, we have to listen,” Goodell said, via the DC Sports Bog. “And ultimately, it is Dan [Snyder]‘s decision. But it is something that I want all of us to go out and make sure we’re listening to our fans, listening to people who have a different view, and making sure that we continue to do what’s right to make sure that team represents the strong tradition that it has for so many years.”

Makes you think of that old joke whose punch line is “Who you calling kemosabe, Paleface?”

Why not just rename the team the Washington Arrows? It’s the best of both worlds–a connection to the Washington football tradition that is itself ethnically neautral.

And no one is offended.

GOP BRAIN DRAIN: IGNORANT AND PROUD OF IT

The other day Paul Krugman talked about the sad and diminishing state of Republican brain power:

“How many Republicans know, for example, that government employment has declined, not risen, under President Obama? Certainly Senator Rand Paul was incredulous when I pointed this out to him on TV last fall. On the contrary, he insisted, “the size of growth of government is enormous under President Obama” — which was completely untrue but was presumably what his sources had told him, knowing that it was what he wanted to hear. For that, surely, is what the wonk gap is all about. Political conservatism and serious policy analysis can coexist, and there was a time when they did. Back in the 1980s, after all, health experts at Heritage made a good-faith effort to devise a plan for universal health coverage — and what they came up with was the system now known as Obamacare. But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative. It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.”

Unfortunately, I see nothing that will change their advantage. The redistricting that protects the GOP advantage, that is the bedrock of the GOP advantage, will be in effect for the rest of the decade, through the election of 2020. I don’t think President Obama will achieve anything in the rest of his term, and I’m not really optimistic that President Hillary can conquer this wall. This is going to take hard-fought trench warfare, getting Democrats elected to state legislatures in red states, along with all the money that is going to cost, to stop this ignorant minority from clogging our political process or our future. It’s a grass roots war, and the Democrats need to start waging it today.

THE PRIMARIES

In Tuesday’s very interesting New York City primaries, Bill De Blasio, a low key guy with the nearly invisible job of public advocate, came very close to winning the forty percent of the vote he needed to avoid a run-off, and be named as the Democratic mayoral nomination. De Blasio ran hard from the left directly at the Bloomberg administration, and his election stands as a rejection of Bloombergism, or perhaps an embrace of New Face-sim. If he wins, he will be the first lefty to win since David Dinkins, whose performance was poor enough to get Rudy Giuliani elected. I’m very skeptical that New York City should be in the higher taxes, lots more services game. I do remember what New York was like in the seventies, when it was poor and dirty and dangerous. I support reigning in the banks–I just don’t support New York City reigning in the banks. Some hypocritical self-preservation is sometimes necessary.

Meanwhile, New York’s Katzenjammer Kids, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer, both lost. Weiner was drubbed, Spitzer was defeated narrowly, 52% to 48%, but I’m kind of afraid that it’s over for both of them. It’s a shame about Spitzer, who has strong political instincts and a real appreciation of how Wall Street works, i.e., steals. I have no real insight into his thought process, but his entry into the race was a surprise; my guess is that when he saw the favorable early impression the similarly scandal-infected Weiner received, he thought that he, too, could overpower the little-known Scott Stringer and get back in the game. The plan kind of worked, until new revelations about Weiner came out. Carlos Danger and Sydney Leathers were not only too much for Weiner to survive; they were also too much for Spitzer.

And so exits Weiner, flashing the finger, with Lawrence O’Donnell catcalling “What’s wrong with you as he exits?”, with Huma Abedin absent and Sydney Leathers and her cleavage trying to crash his wound-licking party. Weiner should host and AM radio show.

What a great election.