Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 20

Michelle Obama and the nanny state | Michael Tomasky

About a decade ago, sitting around thinking about Hillary Clinton and some of the more fantastical attacks on her, I had a screenplay idea. It would concern a first lady of the US. Her campaign (first ladies always have anodyne campaigns - literacy, historic preservation) would be healthful eating.

It would start out all well and good. She'd get more green vegetables into school lunches. She'd set an example of her own by snacking on unbleached nuts and so forth, which would send the unbleached nut lobby over the moon and would otherwise offend no one so much, because it's not as if the mighty potato chip (crisp) has much to fear from drab almonds. Everyone applauds her efforts. End of Act I.

Matters were to darken considerably in Act II, when my FLOTUS (that's the Secret Service name for any first lady) is no longer satisfied with school lunches and extends her malevolent, busy-bodyish glare into the private sector. She starts bugging the major US family restaurant chains - Cracker Barrel, Applebee's, Outback Steakhouse, etc. - to put more vegetables on the menu. It's a hard fought battle but she succeeds! Next up, the fast-food chains. McDonald's offering broccoli as an alternative to French fries? Now she's verging on something un-American.

By Act III, she's getting a bit more messianic, and she's encouraging media exposes into the meat industry, and that's where she crosses a fateful line. The beef lobby takes out a contract on her. It would have been a fantastic dark comedy.

Well, reality has caught up with me, in a way. These conservative attacks on Michelle Obama for the crime of trying to encourage healthier eating are probably beyond my ability to have parodied.

These people are really parked in some tree that the rest of us never climb. Honestly. It's nanny-statism for the IRS to offer tax deductibility for breast pumps? Breast pumps are expensive: $250 or more. Some women don't need them. But some absolutely do. And at that price, poor women can't afford them. Good for the IRS!

TNR's Jon Cohn wrote a great post about all of this in which he quotes the first lady as saying not too long ago:

Nearly two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or obese. More than 60 percent of Americans do not get enough physical activity. … The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has estimated that overweight and obesity alone cost American families, businesses, and government approximately $117 billion every year. … The good news, though, is that there are things that each of us can do -- as individuals, as family members, as caregivers, as heads of business, and leaders of government -- to take better care of ourselves, and the people around us. The federal government is doing its part by educating Americans about preventive measures that can save their own lives.

Wuh-woh. That wasn't Michelle Obama. That was Laura Bush.

I predict here and now that, should either Mike Huckabee or Chris Christie be the GOP presidential nominee in 2012, all this will become a fairly high-ranking campaign issue and Barack Obama's thinness will be advertised on Fox et alia as a literal physical manifestation of his weakness.

One can hear the arguments, right--that Obama's slightness indicates a kind of fussiness one expects from liberals, a dainty and soft quality, something not quite manly about it; whereas Christie and Huckabee, why, these are red-blooded men, men of appetites, enjoyers of a good steak who like the rest of us don't mind once in a while defying their doctor's orders and slathering the sour cream on the baked potato...writes itself, as all their copy does.

Michelle ObamaMichele BachmannMichael Tomasky
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Tomasky Talk: Obama's budget, Donald Trump and a Taser teaser

Michael Tomasky discusses the week's big stories in US politics, including President Obama's budget and news that Michigan is considering a law permitting citizens to carry Taser guns

Michael Tomasky

Friday quiz: Uber alles, liebchen | Michael Tomasky

For our previous quiz, you'll recall, we did France. You seemed to enjoy it. So I'm thinking, well, if we're on the subject of continental Europe, one can hardly do France without doing Germany. Seems unfair to me somehow.

The one place in the world that I haven't yet been but that I want to visit more than any other: Germany. But I mean really visit. Spend three weeks. Berlin of course, but Weimar to see Goethe's study, Bonn to see Beethoven's, Leipzig to see the organ Bach played, Jena to stand on the spot where Hegel watched Napoleon ride by, Wittenberg to see where Luther (allegedly) posted the 95 theses, Hamburg to see the Beatles' Grosse Freiheit haunts; the small medieval towns; a train ride through the Alps. I'd love to explore England in the same way some day. I am especially keen to visit the two walls, Corn- and Hadrian's (ha ha). But it's funny I don't have a pressing similar urge about France. I guess I'd like to see Aix, but there's something about Germany, the birthplace of so much that is brilliant and also much that was horrible, that stabs at my brain a little more sharply.

We're going to skip around 1933-1945 here, as that period may well demand its own quiz one of these days. So let's start by revving up the wayback machine.

1. The book Germania, written by the Roman Gaius Cornelius Tacitus in about 98 AD, was the first ethnographic description of the cultures of the lands west of Gallia and north of Italia and Illyrium. But the name Germania had come into use about 150 years before, when this Roman emperor employed it to describe settlements east of the Rhine:
a. Claudius
b. Julius Caesar
c. Trajan

2. The German language is related to English but departed from it in the third to sixth centuries. Which of the following languages was German also closely related to until these "sound shifts" occurred?
a. Dutch
b. Hungarian (Magyar)
c. Polish

3. What happened at the famous Diet of Worms, which was held four years after Martin Luther wrote his 95 theses challenging the Catholic Church's handing out of indulgences?
a. A resolution was drafted in support of Luther, and Protestantism became the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire
b. A trial was held at which Luther was found guilty of heresy and hanged
c. An edict was issued calling for Luther's excommunication and arrest, but because of popular support for Luther and his views, it was never enforced

4. This 1648 settlement gave princes the right to determine the religion of their own states, choosing among Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism; guaranteed freedom of worship to religious minorities; and granted exclusive sovereignty of each state or principality over its people and land. Pope Innocent X reportedly called it "null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time."
a. Peace of Augsburg
b. Congress of Vienna
c. Peace of Westphalia

5. Match the composer to the work:
Johann Sebastian Bach
Franz Josef Haydn
Ludwig von Beethoven
Felix Mendelssohn
Johannes Brahms

Egmont Overture
Violin Concerto in E minor
St. Matthew Passion
The Hungarian Dances
"Farewell" Symphony

6. What work opens with these lines?
Ah! Now I've done Philosophy,
I've finished Law and Medicine,
And sadly even Theology:
Taken fierce pains, from end to end.
Now here I am, a fool for sure!
No wiser than I was before:
Master, Doctor's what they call me,
And I've been ten years, already,
Crosswise, arcing, to and fro,
Leading my students by the nose,
And see that we can know - nothing!
It almost sets my heart burning.
I'm cleverer than all these teachers,
Doctors, Masters, scribes, preachers:
I'm not plagued by doubt or scruple,
Scared by neither Hell nor Devil –
Instead all Joy is snatched away,
What's worth knowing, I can't say,
I can't say what I should teach
To make men better or convert each.

a. Heinrich Heine's Junge Lieden
b. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust
c. Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace

7. When was Germany finally unified as a modern nation-state?
a. In 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War
b. In 1848, after the revolutions
c. In 1884, after a lightning quick Hohenzollern victory over the Hapsburgs at Linz

8. Who said the following at whose 1883 funeral: "On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep—but forever":
a. Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer
b. Ludwig Feuerbach, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
c. Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx

9. For what liberal reform is Otto von Bismarck notably remembered?
a. Conceiving the first-ever old-age pension system
b. Permitting socialists to participate in the governing coalition
c. Ending compulsory military conscription

10. Hanna Hoch, George Grosz and John Heartfield were part of:
a. The Weimar-era literary movement known as Der Neue Arbeiterin
b. The Dada artistic movement
c. The Weimar government toppled by Hitler

11. List the correct order in which these four West German chancellors served:
Helmut Kohl
Konrad Adenauer
Helmut Schmidt
Willy Brandt

12. The name of Gunter Schabowski, a member of the East German politburo, should never be lost to history. In November 1989, what did he do to help facilitate the fall of the Berlin Wall?
a. He heroically stood up to Erich Honecker on East German television and insisted that the wall be torn down.
b. He drove a military truck through Checkpoint Charlie, smashing it open as delirious crowds followed, attacking checkpoint soldiers who were shooting at him.
c. He famously and mistakenly said at a press conference that the border crossings were to be opened "as far as I know, effective immediately"; this had not been the East German government's intent, but no one had told him, and once he said that and it was reported in the West German media, the massive flow became impossible to stop and the wall effectively fell.

Well, that's quite a fascinating history, no? And of course we barely scratched the surface. Let's have a look.

Answers:
1-b; 2-a; 3-c; 4-c; 5: Bach = St. Matthew, Haydn = "Farewell," Beethoven = Egmont, Mendelssohn = E minor Concerto, Brahms = Hungarian; 6-b; 7-a; 8-c; 9-a; 10-b; 11: Adenauer, Brandt, Schmidt, Kohl; 12-c.

Notes:
1. Knowing when Julius Caesar reigned, which was around 50 BC, was the way to get this one right.
2. Seems obvious to me; I gave you easy fake answers here, I think.
3. Not sure I would have known this, been a long time since I read that stuff.
4. An easy one to me, by the date if nothing else.
5. I chose some second-tier works here to make it a little harder than it might have been. For example, how many of you know the lovely Egmont Overture? I knew all of these except Brahms and Hungarian dances so would have got that by process of elimination.
6. Shouldn't have been too hard given the choices.
7. If that wasn't a gimme to you, you're in trouble. I totally made up c.
8. C was the straightforward choice; you missed this only if you outfoxed yourself.
9. Social Security, baby!
10. I love the Dadaists. I made up a. No such movement.
11. Obviously, Der Alte (Adenauer) was first. After that...well, Kohl was Reagan's contemporary and was there for unification, so then it was just a matter of choosing between Schmidt and Brandt.
12. Great, great, great piece of world history trivia. Hold on to it!

Tell us how you did, and share with us your thoughts on Deutschland and all this spectacular history, and especially your stories from your travels there. I know you Brits go there a lot, don't you? I like what John Lennon said once, in the mid-60s. I prefer flying Lufthansa from Germany to England – you can be sure the pilots know the way.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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The Wisconsin situation | Michael Tomasky

I'm sure that you've been following the Wisconsin situation, especially if you're an American. If you haven't and you are not, in sum: the new Republican governor proposed a budget with tax cuts and various tax breaks (especially for the well-off and corporations), huge cuts to education and other services and most controversially a provision that would strip public-employee unions of the right to bargain collectively for anything except wages (not benefits, not vacation days, etc.).

As a result, Democratic state senators have literally left the state rather than be hauled into the chamber to permit a quorum that could vote on the budget (there are 33 state senate seats, and the GOP controls 19, one short of a quorum; word is that one Democratic state senator is holed up in his office, being protected by protesters lest he be marched down to the floor to be the crucial 20th present member). There are massive protests outside and inside the state capitol building, teachers calling in sick and refusing to work, general rage, etc.

Some of this seems to have to do with Walker's apparently heavy-handed approach. Here's Howard Scweber, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (i.e. the main campus), writing at HuffPo:

Enter Scott Walker. Newly-elected GOP governor of Wisconsin with GOP control of both houses, it is understandable that he didn't think he had to ask for permission. But this was way, way over the top, both in terms of procedure and substance.

In terms of procedure, it does not play well to announce a radical bill that will devastate long-standing promises of economic security and then allow only three days for debate before the final vote on ratification. Asked why he did not give the unions even an opportunity to negotiate, Walker's answer joins the litany of the greats along with Richard Daley, Sr., and Huey Long: "To those who say why didn't I negotiate on this? I don't have anything to negotiate with. We don't have anything to give. Like practically every other state in the country, we're broke. And it's time to pay up."

That position was slightly undercut by his insistence that the only alternative would be to lay off 6,000 state workers. It does not quite do to insist that there is nothing about which to negotiate and then to identify a point of negotiation in the very next sentence. All of that, of course, was right before he said that the National Guard is standing by to intervene if public employees try to strike.

If you check out the Madison Journal's web site today, you see the following rotating headlines:
School officials: anticipated cuts could be 'devastating'
Senate Democrats leave Wisconsin in bid to derail plans
UW-Madison could see hefty tuition increases because of budget cuts

A $17.5 million hole in Madison's K through 12 education budget? So that Walker can reduce the state's intake from corporate taxes by an estimated $187 million (out of a total of $630 million annually). He and the legislature also passed a provision requiring a two-thirds supermajority to pass income tax increases, meaning that such will likely never pass again in the foreseeable future, which in turn means merely that property taxes will go through the roof or that services will be slashed to pieces.

As for the unions, I am not among liberals the world's biggest defender of public-employee unions, but Walker's proposal is obviously designed in terribly bad faith and is a first step toward trying to bust the unions altogether, an unspoken but cherished conservative goal of longstanding. Making public-sector employees pay a larger share of their healthcare premiums is one thing. Doing what Walker is trying to do is appalling. He's just making scapegoats of hard-working people who contribute no less to the economy simply because they're employed in the public sector.

You can bet that governors and legislatures all over the country have their eyes fixed on Madison. People are using Cairo comparisons. That's a bit overblown, but there is no question that what ends up happening in Madison will set a template for other states and determine how hard other Republican governors press their luck, knowing that unions are unpopular and that they'll probably be retired by the time the people really feel the full effects of their policies.

Quiz coming later today.

United StatesWisconsinMichael Tomasky
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More on Obama and Egypt (and Bismarck) | Michael Tomasky

I also finally caught up with this Niall Ferguson column from Newsweek I've been seeing referenced hither and thither, harshly attacking Obama's handling of the Egypt situation:

The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak's cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn't end there. America's two closest friends in the region—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, are appalled at Washington's failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration's apparent cluelessness.

Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo's Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy.

This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration's lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried. The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues.

This is kind of over the top, no? First of all, the Herzliya conference isn't a Peace Corps meeting; it's a pretty strongly neoconnish and right-leaning gathering, to varying degrees of seriousness; the closing night speaker this year, reports Matt Duss in The Nation, who attended, was none other than Haley Barbour. So of course the prevailing opinion there was bound to be that Obama had handled it disastrously.

Then he launches into this whole comparison of Obama to Bismarck, noting that Bismarck immediately declared himself on the right side of history, no waffling about. All right. I haven't read my German unification history for a good 25 years, I admit, so I'm sure there's a lot I'm forgetting, but there is the fundamental fact that Bismarck was supporting the forces for German nationalism that were right there in central Europe and united by a culture and a language, whereas...what? Obama is supposed to be able to do the same with a country a third of the way around the world? It just seems silly.

I've written thousands of columns over the years. I know how it goes. Sometimes you get a bee in your bonnet and you let it rip. Every once in a great while you hit what we Americans call a tape-measure shot (please explain, someone). But time generally instructs that you should let those columns sit for a day and read them over once you've calmed down.

Oh yes, and then there's the part where Obama and Hillary ought to be acting more like Kissinger. Would that be the Cambodia Kissinger? Chile? East Timor? Or the one who lengthened the Vietnam war in Paris?

Ferguson wants "grand strategy," you see. Hey, he's Niall Ferguson. I'm just me. But what if we live in a post-grand strategy age? Grand strategies (by which he means realpolitik, mainly) ensured stability, chiefly. Stability is good. But so are other things, and we are now in an age, quite unlike the 1970s, when the peoples of the developing world want more: freedom, opportunity, economic self-determination. The world can't be contained in the old Kennan sense these days, and should not be.

I stand by what I said last week, and what both the Economist and Clive Crook say. Obama handled Egypt fine. The outcome, so far, is a positive one. The US didn't mess that up. Ferguson voices the frustrations of the Cairo protesters, the Israelis and the Saudis. But it's impossible that any US position could have satisfied all those players. You do the best you can. In the end, the protesters won, and the US didn't hinder it.

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Obama and the budget: giving away too much? | Michael Tomasky

I have not sunk my teeth into the budget numbers yet, as I was parked on the beach when the budget was released and was trying to be serious about not reading any news stories and having a real vacation, even though I did make an exception and read the one about how Clarence Thomas hasn't said one word from the bench in the last five years.

So I'm just catching up. But I notice that this blog post by Jon Chait, riffing off of this WSJ column by Jonathan Weisman, is getting lots of attention today.

Weisman reports that Democratic and Republican Senate negotiators are discussing a deal that would be built around $1.7 billion in cuts (over 10 years) and $180 million in tax increases over the same period. If Congress failed to come up with even that $18 million a year in tax increases, further cuts would be triggered.

Chait is apoplectic:

...the deal calls for nearly ten times as much spending cuts ($1.7 trillion) as higher revenue ($180 billion.) Do you know how little $180 billion over ten years is? It's essentially nothing. It's one-quarter as much as the cost of extending the Bush tax cuts only on income over $250,000.

What makes this all the more bizarre is that Democrats hold the whip hand on revenue. The default course of action is for the entire Bush tax cuts to expire after 2012, which would nearly solve the medium-term deficit problem all by itself. That is enormous leverage for the Democrats. I've been arguing that President Obama should use this scenario to take care of the deficit -- simply refuse to extend the tax cuts that exclusively benefit the rich, and the Republicans will refuse to extend the rest of the tax cuts.

At the very least, Democrats need to assume that just the tax cuts on income over $250,000 will expire, and negotiate any revenue increases over that baseline. What they cannot by any means allow is to lock in the Bush revenue levels as a baseline. That's madness.

Seems quite right. Obama started with $1.1 trillion in cuts. Now we're at $1.7 trillion, and counting.

The political problem is that Chait's "default course of action" would raise taxes on all households, not just those over $250,000. Republicans know this of course, so they'll spend 2012 saying Obama is going to raise your taxes, and he's going to have to spend 2012 denying that, so in other words it won't happen.

Or will he spend 2012 denying it? Maybe he'll say something like: Look, folks. I held your taxes down in my first term. The greatest financial crisis in 80 years, with no money coming in - and I actually lowered most of your taxes. Lowered. Now things are different. We've cut to the bone over these last two years. We've cut 10 times as much as we've raised. That's out of balance. So the promise I made in 2008 is one I can't make again in 2012. My opponent will make you that promise. And I can guarantee you, either he (she?) will break it, or he (she?) will bankrupt this country and destroy Social Security. That's your choice.

It's always nice to day dream like that, but that stuff only happens in the movies anymore. Actually, it doesn't even happen there, although if Hollywood (where I'm told I have a few devoted readers!) is interested in a riveting budget drama, I'm totally up for writing it.

Obama administrationUS taxationMichael Tomasky
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Lara Logan, Nir Rosen, Debbie Schlussel and the age of exposure | Michael Tomasky

I expected you've heard the hideous news that Lara Logan of CBS News, above, was sexually assaulted in Cairo. And I expect you've heard that Nir Rosen, the left-leaning journalist who is like Logan a war correspondent, distastefully joked about it on Twitter. You're probably less likely to have heard about Debbie Schlussel's comments, more on which later.

Rosen, who has written for Rolling Stone, the New Yorker and various other publications, lost a prestigious fellowship at the New York University Center for Law and Security because of his tweets. He has been issuing apologies left and right, most notably in this interview with Media Bistro, where he went far beyond the usual bromides:

I heard that Ms. Logan was roughed up like many other journalists, I had not realized it was something more serious. I thought I would provoke a friend on Twitter, childishly, and then the exchange grew and suddenly statements that I could not possibly mean were being taken seriously and I was hurting people I didnt even know without any intention. I am not suggesting that making such jokes are ever okay. I have known women, and actually quite a few men, who have been sexually assaulted, and in the last eight years I have often reported on such abuses. When you're in war zones you develop a black humor and make jokes about your death, other people's deaths, other terrible things, writers and photographers do it, as of course do Bosnians, Iraqis, Somalis and others as a coping mechanism. But taken out of context this can be deeply hurtful, especially when made by a man. A man should never joke about women being abused or harassed.

There's a great deal more in that vein. A great deal.

Rosen has some controversial views, but he is a reporter who goes into war zones. Schlussel is a right-wing blogger whose specialty is fulmination, I believe from Michigan, about the subhuman qualities of Arabs. And she does up clever things like this.

She wrote that she was glad Logan was attacked:

So sad, too bad, Lara. No one told her to go there. She knew the risks. And she should have known what Islam is all about. Now she knows. Or so we'd hope. But in the case of the media vis-a-vis Islam, that's a hope that's generally unanswered.

This never happened to her or any other mainstream media reporter when Mubarak was allowed to treat his country of savages in the only way they can be controlled.

Now that's all gone. How fitting that Lara Logan was "liberated" by Muslims in Liberation Square while she was gushing over the other part of the "liberation."

Rosen (whom I know very slightly, and ran into in the BBC Washington office not long ago) said some deeply unconscionable things and deserves a healthy stretch in the penalty box. But at least he's remorseful about what he said. Schlussel is plainly an egomaniac and in an update to her original post just laid it on even more thickly:

As I've noted before, it bothers me not a lick when mainstream media reporters who keep telling us Muslims and Islam are peaceful get a taste of just how "peaceful" Muslims and Islam really are. In fact, it kinda warms my heart. Still, it's also a great reminder of just how "civilized" these "people" (or, as I like to call them in Arabic, "Bahai'im" [Animals]) are...

We live in an age in which every instant thought can be sent out into the world. Some people try to learn from it. Others take advantage of it for the purpose of spreading their name. What odds should I lay down that Murdoch properties Fox News or the New York Post, where Schlussel appears, will make her submit to any penalty?

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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The US higher education mess | Michael Tomasky

True to my word, I will recommence post-vacation blogging today with a post that is not just about big-P politics, that is substantive, that is about a topic we rarely visit here but is important, and that will not in any way mention a certain former half-term governor.

The NYT reports this morning that Sewanee College, a well-regarded private liberal-arts college in Tennessee, is doing something unheard of in the US in higher-education circles: It is lowering its tuition for next year. The Times:

The college, formally Sewanee: The University of the South, is betting that the drop in tuition — which at this point it can afford — will help it compete on two fronts: with the public universities that are siphoning off a growing share of the students it accepts, and with other private colleges where tuition is likely to increase by 4 to 5 percent this year, as it has for the last two years.

"The university has made a bold and perhaps risky move," said John M. McCardell Jr., who became vice chancellor of Sewanee a year ago. "But given the realities of higher education in the current economy, we believe that some college or university needed to step up and say, 'Enough.' "

Sewanee's move has not been tried by any other institution in the top tier of U.S. News and World Report's liberal-arts college rankings. And according to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, no college has reduced its tuition this year, and only about a dozen colleges have frozen it.

"Sewanee's stepping up and out of the box, and it will create some reverberating effects," said David L. Warren, president of the association. It is a sign of the times — a move prompted not only by the recession, but also by the degree to which small private colleges now compete with large public universities, whose tuition has been rising quickly because money from strapped state governments is declining.

The article goes on to note that out-of-state tuition at the University of Georgia - a fine institution, certainly, though not one of America's really elite universities - is now $27,000 a year, not counting room and board. That seems like a heck of a lot of money to me, for a state university.

The US higher education problem is usually discussed in terms of these skyrocketing costs. And they're terrible. But the real problem is whether students and their parents are getting their money's worth. And on this point, no one really knows.

In Democracy, the quarterly journal I edit, we ran a fantastic piece a couple of years ago by Kevin Carey on just this question. Carey's argument in a nutshell is that our universities are ranked according to their research grants, their physical plant, any number of things. But they're not ranked according to how well they teach, because no one knows:

Why is the quality question so obscure, when the cost question is so well-known? In part because it has been masked by the American higher education system's unchallenged reputation as the best in the world. Unfortunately for the average collegian, this notion is entirely driven by the top 10 percent of institutions and the students who attend them–Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and the like. Much of the rest is a sea of mediocrity, or worse.

But the biggest culprit is the lack of objective, publicly available information about how well colleges teach and how much college students learn. Nobody knows which colleges really do the best job of taking the students they enroll and helping them learn over the course of four years. After decades of inaction, some recent efforts have been undertaken to collect that information: It now exists, but colleges and their powerful (and virtually unknown) lobbies will not permit the public to see it. As a result, colleges are far less focused on student learning than they should be, and consumers haven't a clue what to do and have come to believe, mistakenly, that the most expensive colleges are also the best.

In other words, tuition is a false economy. If no one knows the quality of teaching, how can an education be priced fairly? It would be as if we the public had no way of knowing the commodity price of wheat. Bread makers could charge anything they wanted.

If we knew that recently collected but hidden information to which Carey refers, tuition prices would come down, because we'd all see, for example, that:

...only 31 percent of adults with bachelor's degrees are proficient in "prose literacy"–being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example. More than a quarter have math skills so feeble that they can't calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalogue.

I remember the first time I ever heard anyone say "publish or perish," which is the dictum by which tenured professors in the US must live. I thought, that's kinda weird. Aren't they, you know, teachers?

Is it like this in the UK? Not Oxford and Cambridge, but places like Leeds, East Anglia, whatever. Are measurements of how well students are being taught made public? This would be an amazing reform in the US if it ever were to happen. Maybe Sewanee's move inches that process forward a bit.

How's that for a different and substantive post? And goodness no, we did not change her diaper on a public dining table! She never left our laps, and anyway it was, how to say it, a small kind of diaper change, not a big one.

United StatesUS domestic policyMichael Tomasky
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My almost Larry David moment | Michael Tomasky

So we were strolling around Old San Juan one afternoon, and the time came to give Margot a changing and a feeding. It was hot, we were tired, a bit grumpy. And we happened across a restaurant/bar on the Calle San Francisco that looked perfect. It wasn't crowded. It was open-air, and dark and cool, with a bracing breeze blowing across the main room.

There was a large table where a police officer was sitting alone. We took a small table up near the bar. But the cop left. Well, I said, let's go sit at that table. What with the stroller and all the gear, the space would come in handy. The people are the bar were incredibly nice. The cop had left his hat on the table, but I figured if he came back and saw us changing a diaper (nappy) or measuring formula out into a bottle, he'd understand and vacate, or at least share it with us.

On the table sat a cruet set, little oil and vinegar dispensers. We began to lay out Margot's various necessities. Bottle. Other bottle, of water, to pour into the baby bottle. Formula dispenser; a handy device for the road. Baby food pouch. Baby bowl and spoon. Wipes. Every so often a gust kicked up. But basically, things were humming along marvelously.

We were feeding the baby when suddenly a massive blast of wind shot through the place. The baby bottle toppled over, as did the water bottle. The pouch of baby food. But most disastrously of all - the vinegar and oil. Ka-boom, the glass against the hard wood of the table. The oil dispenser landed smash on top of the policeman's hat.

It's amazing how quickly the mind sequences ahead in such situations. I had already composed in my head the first third of my explanation to the local precinct's sergeant when I ginned up the courage to look. And this is why I say this was my "almost" Larry David moment. You know the little metal pour spouts they put on cruet bottles? For some fortuitous reason, the gods that day assigned the spout on that olive oil bottle to hit the table pointing upward. The hat got not a drop.

Imagine if it had been pointing downward. Worse still, imagine that it had been screwed on indifferently and had plopped off as it fell. That's what would have happened in a Larry David episode, right? They'd have set it up, even, with an earlier scene in which Larry was in the bar a few days before when the bartender was refilling the cruet bottles, and Larry would have said, "Uh, you're not screwing those on very tight, are you?"

But alas, I escaped any unpleasantness with the San Juan police. And any other unpleasantness besides. What can go wrong in mid-February when it's 82 degrees (interestingly, and palindromically, that's 28 Celsius)?

Actual blogging resumes tomorrow. But I will take this opportunity to say that I read the What can I do better? thread, or enough of it anyway, to reach two conclusions. First, I will write about a broader range of subjects: a little more policy, some history, political philosophy and ideas, American culture, stuff from the heartland and so forth. Second, we'll have less Sarah Palin. Notice I didn't say no Sarah Palin. But less Sarah Palin.

By the way, were you aware of the ethnographic disaster that is an English-language navigation system in a Spanish-speaking country? At one point the navvy instructed us to turn left on Calle Caribe. To you and me and any halfway intelligent English speaker, that's KAI-yay Kuh-REE-bay. The woman's voice on the Garmin said "Kal Kuh-ribe," the first syllable rhyming with "pal" and the last syllable rhyming with "jibe." And there was something weird about the way the syllables were joined together, as if out of a Twin Peaks dream sequence. This is one of those things you'd have thought they'd have figured out, don't you think?

United StatesPuerto RicoMichael Tomasky
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US can celebrate Egyptian people's triumph | Michael Tomasky

Critics say Obama didn't lead, he followed. This was appropriate: Egypt is on a path to democracy and no one got invaded

• Obama's speech, on CNN

My God, what a moving day this is. To think that just 18 days of largely peaceful protests can accomplish this. Remarkable.

President Obama's remarks on Friday afternoon were appropriate and powerful: the people of Egypt have inspired the world. For all the understandable frustration on the part of Egyptian protesters over the fact the the US wouldn't commit to them more fully earlier, I think Obama and his people ended up playing this rather well. They turned up the heat incrementally, and but for one or two missteps, the timing was actually pretty good.

Critics, neocons especially, will say he didn't lead, he followed. That's true. And that was appropriate. It was up to the Egyptian people to lead this, not the United States.

And the Egyptian military. Someday, we'll get the back story on how, in just 24 hours, the military went from evidently backing Mubarak to ditching him. This was crucial, and I doubt very much the US played no role in this. I'd wager that Pentagon chief Robert Gates and Mike Mullen, the heads of the joint chiefs of staff, had quite a lot to do with that.

With the Egyptian army relying on US military aid basically to exist, their words surely carried weight. Maybe all that aid over years, excessive as it has been in many ways, paid important dividends in the last two weeks. The army behaved professionally, not like some tinhorn's personal secret security service. That was one of the most breathtaking things about this, and could stand as one of the most hopeful in terms of serving as a model for future situations like this.

There's a long way to go from here, of course. This is a happy beginning, not a happy ending. But now, the US can and should start playing the less ambiguous role it took on, as of Thursday night. We need to be on the side of democracy and rights and freedoms, and stay on that side, and we do need to continue to be concerned with the positive aspects of regional stability to which Egypt has contributed. There are more needles to thread.

Finally: no, I will not say that Obama deserves much credit for this. At the same time, I have no doubt in my mind that if President McCain had given a speech on democracy in Cairo 20 months ago and now this happened, the neocons and Fox News and the usual suspects would be calling it "the McCain Revolution" and baying about how it proved that a bold stance by an American president had made all the difference.

I won't parrot that kind of inanity. I'll simply say that, from his Cairo speech until today, Obama has helped this process more than he's hindered it. And we didn't have to invade two countries, either. That's the right side – for him, and for us, the people of the United States. Now, we need to stay there.

This is a great opportunity for the US, and all of the west, to help a people learn the habits of freedom, and for those habits to spread.

EgyptBarack ObamaObama administrationUnited StatesUS politicsUS foreign policyJohn McCainRepublicansProtestMiddle EastMichael Tomasky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds