I see it all the time at USC, when I talk to the really smart athletes in my undergraduate lecture. Ultimately we all want play for the winning team.
But Mr. Obama’s 68 percent job approval rating is higher than that of any recent president at the 100-day mark. Mr. Bush had the approval of 56 percent of the public at this juncture.
I see it all the time at USC, when I talk to the really smart athletes in my undergraduate lecture. Ultimately we all want play for the winning team.
But Mr. Obama’s 68 percent job approval rating is higher than that of any recent president at the 100-day mark. Mr. Bush had the approval of 56 percent of the public at this juncture.
Certain commentators seem stumped as to why Dick Cheney is taking such a high public profile against the Obama Administration. Even his own Republican partisans question his judgement.
“Generally speaking Dick’s voice is probably not going to move the ball forward,” one prominent Republican, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said.
But one must remember that Dick Cheney’s political crucible was Watergate. He was Rumsfeld’s hatchet man in getting the Great Society Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon and then fled to the investment banking business as Nixon’s presidency began to unravel in scandal.
In 1973, while Nixon was self-destructing, Cheney, then thirty-two, got a job at the investment firm of Bradley, Woods and Company. “Dick needed to make some money,” Bruce Bradley explained. “He and Lynne and their girls lived in a modest house, and he drove a used Volkswagen Beetle.” Both Bradley and Cheney were Republicans, but they differed on Watergate. Bradley recognized that Nixon had violated fundamental American values; Cheney saw Watergate as a power struggle. They even debated each other, in a forum arranged for Bradley’s clients.
“He claimed it was just a political ploy by the president’s enemies,” says Bradley. “Cheney saw politics as a game where you never stop pushing. He said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls. If you get ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back.”
What Dick Cheney is truly afraid of is that he might find himself in front of a Congressional committee raising his right hand and swearing to tell “the truth, the whole truth” about America’s descent into the torture chamber. Because if Pat Leahy is this era’s Sam Ervin, Cheney won’t arrive in the dock until Jay Bybee and John Yoo have shown that David Addington (Cheney’s Counsel) was calling the tune (you know the secret email chain requesting revisions in the torture memos is devastating). And then Addington will have to put the responsibility at the foot of the Vice President.
Even though Cheney is out of office, he still has the lesson of Watergate in his head. If Nixon had pushed back harder at the outset, he never would have had to leave office. Cheney and his allies at the Wall Street Journal like Peggy Noonan will spin the following line.
Hearings, especially, would likely tear up the country as we descended into opposing camps. They would damage or burden America’s intelligence services, and likely result in the abuse of those who acted from high motives, having been advised their actions were legal. As for the memo writers, some of whose constitutional theories were apparently tilted to the extreme in favor of the executive, it is hard to see how it would help future administrations, or this one, to have such advice, however incorrectly formulated, criminalized.
This is nonsense, and as my colleague Larry Gross has pointed out, Noonan had no such reservations hauling Bill Clinton into the Impeachment Dock, even though she acknowledged it would split the country. She thought those hearings would be healthy.
So Dick Cheney is on a mission to cut the investigations off before they ever get started. But it’s a mission that will fail and within a year we will see Mr. Cheney reluctantly raising his right hand and swearing to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” That will be healthy for our democracy.
Adam Berg’s short film Carousel. It’s an ad for Phillips flat screen TV’s and it’s damned impressive.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ3D4CqHbJM&eurl]
In researching my book I have been reading the work of an economist named David Galenson, who is trying to understand the life cycles of artisitic creativity. In his book, called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity
As I was trying to apply this schema to music I put Bob Dylan in the Conceptual innovator camp and Louis Armstrong in the Experimental innovator group. And then in the midst of my sadness over the sudden death of a friend, I found myself listening over and over to a piece of Dylan’s late work called Workingman’s Blues #2. It showed me that an artist can burn bright and hot in his early years (for Bob almost too hot) and still have the great later work of a Cezanne. Here’s the last verse of the song.
Now I’m down on my luck and I’m black and blue
Gonna give you another chance
I’m all alone and I’m expecting you
To lead me off in a cheerful dance
Got a brand new suit and a brand new wife
I can live on rice and beans
Some people never worked a day in their life
Don’t know what work even meansMeet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues
It has been my contention since the beginning of this economic crisis that the political economy of America must pass through a turbulent Interregnum before we can move on to a renewed economy of America 3.0. This morning Richard Stevenson lays out what Obama’s vision for this Post-Interregnum Capitalism.
In a series of comments in recent weeks, Mr. Obama has begun to sketch a vision of where he would like to drive the economy once this crisis is past. His goals include diminishing the consumerism that has long been the main source of growth in the United States, and encouraging more savings and investment. He would redistribute wealth toward the middle class and make the rest of the world less dependent on the American market for its prosperity. And he would seek a consensus recognizing that an activist government is an acceptable and necessary partner for a stable, market-based economy.
“We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand,” he said last week.
Though there have been considerable debates on these pages about the strategic execution of Geithner and Summers in the Credit Crisis, the goals expressed above seem right in line with opinions expressed by the majority of this community in the last 14 months. As I have tried to argue, we need to look to a more Natural Capitalism. This is not an easy task and may take many years, but I hardly know how progressives can argue with the long term goals outlined above.
Our favorite “Nationalize the Banks” Cassandra, Paul Krugman, can never admit that he’s wrong, so he prepares his accolytes for a reversal, by slowly saying things have changed. To the bitter end of the Democratic Primary campaign, he was a Billary true believer. He never conceded that Obama was the better candidate. And now that Citibank, Wells Fargo, GE and JP Morgan have all reported better than expected earnings, he’s trying to slowly back away from his demand that the only way out of the Credit Crisis was to nationalize all the big banks–”Maybe the banks really have swung from deep losses to hefty profits in record time. But skepticism comes naturally in this age of Madoff.”
Bernie Madoff is his excuse for crying “fire” in a crowded theater?
As I’ve said before, Krugman and Roubini’s speaking bookings have gone way up since they started writing about the coming New Depression. In a couple of months they’ll be like Gilda Radner’s Emily Latella.
“Never mind.”
A japanese stop motion artist, Takeuchi Taijin, creates something truly magical, reminiscent of Hockney’s polaroid photo montages but in motion.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmkLlVzUBn4&eurl]
To all my academic colleagues (from this week’s New Yorker):
