The Politics Blog

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On Monday, President Obama will talk about protecting children during his speech. But he knows that over the next four years he will be asked to make decisions that will result in the killing of the children, not because he is an evil man but rather because he has readily and rationally accommodated himself to the necessity of evil.

In the days following the massacre in Newtown, CT, there was a genuine sense of moral panic in the United States — the sense that we had lost the ability to protect our children from evil. At the same time, there were stirrings of a moral confidence verging on triumphalism, a sense that the relativism said to beset modern America might at last give way to clarity. At Sandy Hook Elementary, evil had done us the favor of staring us in the face. We could no longer deny either its existence or its nature. We could resist it only by embracing the idea of it. We could even define it without provoking the usual partisan disagreements:

What is evil? Evil is what murders children.

It is a handy definition because it is an unequivocal one, and it has framed the argument that has arisen in Newtown’s wake. The NRA has used it to promote its idea that the only answer to a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun; President Obama has used it to lend urgency to his Administration’s attempt to differentiate between the guns used by good men and the killing machines used by bad ones. Before the President introduced his gun-control proposals last week, his spokesman Jay Carney said that ‘if even one child’s life can be saved by actions taken in Washington, we must take these actions”; indeed, before the President introduced his gun-control proposals last week, he introduced four children who had written letters imploring him to protect them and their kind and whom he had invited to be on hand for his speech. It was a feat of political stagecraft meant to deliver the implicit but unmistakable message that at stake in the President’s call for meaningful legislation was nothing less than their very lives, and it made clear that children, too often the victims of gun violence, would now occupy the moral battleground in the gun-control debate:

“This is our first task as a society, keeping our children safe,” the President said. “This is how we will be judged. ...Because while there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil, if there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there is even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try.”

And so tomorrow, on the day set aside for the remembrance of Martin Luther King’s birthday, the man who will be inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States will be a man who accepts — and has been energized by — the idea that evil can be identified as that which kills even one innocent child. He will also be man who has killed innocent children himself, by the dozens and perhaps by the hundreds, as a direct consequence of his orders...

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Second-Favorite Canadian.)

And, as I set out towards Washington to spend the weekend at the Great Gathering Of Gobshites, and the second installation of our Kenyan Muslim King, I walk through South Station in Boston and see giant billboards everywhere announcing that the Bruins season is finally starting, stark evidence that the National Hockey League has embarked on the hard sell to regain the love lavished upon it by the fans it otherwise holds in contempt. Hockey's back! (Along with being a public school teacher, my father was a high-school hockey coach, so I grew up loving the game and this is my blog, so we're going to talk about hockey a little.) Actually, 48 games is a respectable season, just as a 154-game baseball season would be. The Bruins and the Rangers play twice in the first couple of weeks, and that's really old school. I think they should have agreed to a 48-game season, but limited it to the Original Six. The Maple Leafs would still finish last, so not much really would change.

It's January, so this also means we're starting to hear the first faint rushing of the annual spring flood of baseball books. Ordinarily, I make it a rule to run for high ground until the wave passes and begins to recede. However, this year, there are two that intrigue me. The first is by Ed Achorn, who wrote a great book about Charles (Old Hoss) Radbourn a couple of years back. This one's about the completely lunatic Chris von der Ahe, a St. Louis brewer who founded an entire league for the purpose of selling booze and succeeded so wildly that, very often, his players were more sockless than the fans in the stands were. (Von der Ahe is also a star of the most underrated baseball book of all time: Douglass Wallop's Baseball: An Informal History.) Also, too, Allen Barra has a new one coming out tracing the parallel lives and careers of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. If Barra's other work is any indication, it's going to be about a helluva lot more than that, Barra being a top-notch social historian. So this book overwhelms even my visceral revulsion toward books about the glory days of baseball in New York.

I think Atlanta's got enough to beat San Francisco at home, and I'm still not sold on Colin Kapernick, but I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen with Baltimore and New England. The Ravens should have won up there last year, and a lot depends on Joe Flacco's being able to outplay Tom Brady again. One thing I can predict with confidence -- the paeans to Ray Lewis, unconvicted accessory after the fact, are going to make the gorge rise. One of the nicer things in sports is that Missy Franklin, who won five medals at the last Olympics, is back home in Colorado, swimming for her high-school team. At least, I think it's nice. The other teams in the league seem to be concerned about competitive balance.

The American Experience miniseries on the abolitionists is well done, and the abolitionists through whom they tell the story very well-chosen. (I didn't know that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin at least in part to allay her grief at the death of her young son.) It's a bit of a kick to see Richard Brooks -- still beloved here for having been Paul Robinette on Law And Order -- doing Frederick Douglass. Which gives me an excuse to link to what is unquestionably the greatest TV commercial of all time.

The list of performers for JazzFest in New Orleans was released this week, and I know that all the real treasure is to be found on the satellite stages, and that the big name performers on the main stage make the satellite stages possible but, honestly, JazzFest. Billy Fcking Joel? Have some pride, will you?

Next time you hear from me, I'll be inside the Beltway. I can feel Responsible Centrism descending on me already. Be safe this weekend and play nice, ya bastids, or I'm telling your imaginary dead girlfriends all about you.

Really, gang.

What part of "I Will Not Play Games With The Debt Ceiling" do you not understand?

What part of "You Have No Power To Dictate Terms" do you not understand?

What part of "You Clowns Are Less Popular Than Cholera" do you not understand?

The first step to fixing this problem is to pass a budget that reduces spending. The House has done so, and will again. The Democratic Senate has not passed a budget in almost four years, which is unfair to hardworking taxpayers who expect more from their representatives. That ends this year.  We must pay our bills and responsibly budget for our future. Next week, we will authorize a three month temporary debt limit increase to give the Senate and House time to pass a budget. Furthermore, if the Senate or House fails to pass a budget in that time, Members of Congress will not be paid by the American people for failing to do their job. No budget, no pay.    

This is a political ploy straight out of drivetime AM radio. Again. That's the reason that congressional pay is in there as a cheap aside. (We've got 'em now, by golly!) Cantor knows he's got enough sheep in the pen to get anything passed that he wants to get passed. He's still trying to make the Democrats own the spending cuts that the Republicans want, and he's floundering around trying to get the political calculus changed so that the country doesn't blame the Republicans if the entire economy blows up next month. (According to whose calculations is "the first step" in the process passing a budget that reduces spending? And what reductions are we talking about? If we're talking about the budget the House passed last May, that's the plutocrat's wet dream that kept the military budget bloated while cutting food stamps and Medicare, and which every Republican in the country ran away from last fall.) If Cantor were any more transparent, he could swallow a flashlight and you could use him for a Japanese lantern. Come away from colonial Williamsburg, folks. I think your bodkins are too tight.

UPDATE: The amazing things about electing cheap suits to Congress is that they fold like, well, cheap suits.

It's been quite a week for John Mackey, arugula peddler and dispenser of overpriced food rung up by underpaid cashiers. First, he goes out and compares Obamacare to "fascism," apparently in the belief that, if his employees have any serious health problems, they can do what everyone else does and shoplify natural herbal cures from the pharmaceutical aisle. (Or, we can adopt his own model which, for all Mackey's professed "libertarianism" is straight off the floor of the stables at the Heritage Foundation.)  Now, he's weighing in on climate change and, boy howdy, has he flipped his cilantro on this one.

Contrary to what has been written about me I am not a "climate-change skeptic." Climate change is clearly occurring, and based on what I have read global temperatures have increased about 1.5 degrees Celsius over the past 150 years. We've been in a gradual warming trend since the ending of the "Little Ice Age" in about 1870, and climate change is perfectly natural and not necessarily bad. In general, most of humanity tends to flourish more when global temperatures are in a warming trend and I believe we will be able to successfully adapt to gradually rising temperatures. What I am opposed to is trying to stop virtually all economic progress because of the fear of climate change. I would hate to see billions of people condemned to remain in poverty because of climate-change fears.    

Poor people already are starving because of climate change. Poor people already are suffering epidemic disease because of climate change. Poor people are already suffering the most from drought, from floods, and from Biblical floods because of climate change. The only thing that John Mackey knows -- or cares -- about poor people is that they work cheap.

I suggest the the progressive community respond to this guy's nonsense by declaring Bad Food Day in which we all eat as much mass produced basic American junk, preferably bought at convenience stores, as we can. Doritos for breakfast! Spam on Wonder Bread for lunch! The logical day for our collective action on this front is, of course, Super Bowl Sunday. I'm just sorry that Hostess went belly-up. We would have had a sponsor.

(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Michael Gerson, who once concocted perfumed lies for the worst president ever, and who now has a column in The Washington Post because Fred Hiatt gives them away as a premiums to everybody he sees buy a copy of the paper out of a box on the sidewalk, laments today that the Republicans missed a golden opportunity when they failed to take advantage of the immense (if largely theoretical) stature of Mitch Daniels, Indiana's value-sized ex-governor, and the former budget director in the deficit-exploding administration for which Gerson once concocted perfumed lies. Everything that goes around comes around.  And it generally hits you in the back of the head.

Just before noon Jan. 14, Mitch Daniels ceased to be governor of Indiana. By 2 p.m. he was in West Lafayette conducting a meeting as the soon-to-be president of Purdue University. A true Hoosier calls that a promotion. But his elevated new stage is a smaller one. And as national Republicans contemplate the second half of the Obama era, they wonder what might have been.Daniels pronounces himself "at peace" with his decision not to run for president - the sort of thing a man says after many restless nights. "I made the right decision," he tells me. The objection of his family was "a showstopper, in and of itself." And remaining on the job as governor "allowed me to fulfill a commitment, to get some big stuff done right to the end."

Oh, mother of god, just stop. Even if we forget for a moment that the "family considerations" that allegedly kept Mitch from running were positively baroque,  the reason he didn't run was that it was likely that he would lose, if only because the stench of the Avignon Presidency was still upon him, as it should be upon Gerson, but isn't, for reasons known only to god and the Kaplan Test Prep people. I will leave the deconstruction of the Indiana Miracle that so impressed Gerson to its most doughty and indefatigable chronicler, Mr. J. Doghouse Riley, but I will say that everything that Gerson cites as an achievement by Daniels in governing Indiana -- balancing budgets, working across the aisle -- makes precisely the same case against the fields in 2008 and 2012 as the original one made by the partisans of one Willard Romney when they talked about his time as governor of the Commonwealth (God save it!) And this...

He remains an advocate for a "truce" on social issues - "leaving aside some irreconcilable debates to focus on a few priorities, such as the fiscal crisis" - and notes that most Republicans have implicitly adopted this approach already.    

...is absolute hooey. The first chance he got, Daniels defunded Planned Parenthood. And let Gerson go out into the states to see how the Republican majorities in the state legislatures are observing the "truce" on the social issues. Let him go to Mississippi and see how a woman's right to choose is faring these days.

So, had Daniels run, after everyone got through chewing over his Twilight Zone marital history, and after a month's exposure to the Republican primary electorate, he would have been in the same spot Romney was in, grovelling for the votes of the fever swamp and running commercials about how he squashed birth control for poor women in Indiana. By the end of the process, he would have looked like as much of a jackass as Romney did, albeit a little bit less like G.I. Luvmoney. It's not like Mitch Daniels has the intense personal charisma and leadership skills that Romney somehow lacked. The more people like Gerson tell the party that the problem is not its ideas, but that it keeps picking the wrong people to sell them, the longer the party will lose presidential elections. Mitch Daniels rides the only white horse that needs a booster seat.

I remain fascinated by the unfolding saga of Manti Te'o and the alleged death of his imaginary girlfriend — Who exactly got the white roses he sent to the funeral anyway? — partly for the pure schadenfreude of watching the perpetual-motion Notre Dame mythmaking machine sputter and wheeze, leaving gears and tiny springs and pieces of itself all over the landscape as it augers in spectacularly, and in full public view. (And the Gipper was a gambler and a bounder and drank South Bend dry. Pass it on.) Even if you believe Te'o to be a grifter's mark when the whole thing began, and I am less sure of that almost by the hour, he certainly realized he had a good thing going and kept up his end of the bargain even after he says he'd become aware of the con. This is doubly true for the institution he represented. At a spectacularly ill-advised press conference, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick got all teary-eyed talking about how his dogged team of investigators had proven that Te'o was an innocent victim of the Intertoobz. In addition to infantilizing the player, Swarbrick's lachrymose maundering served to remind the country that Notre Dame had been a helluva lot less diligent in trying to get to the bottom of a sexual assault allegation made against one of its players by a woman named Lizzie Seeberg, who got threatened over the phone for her trouble and ended up taking her own life. However it all shakes out for Te'o, and he'll be playing on Sundays no matter what happens, this means that the response of "Fk Notre Dame anyway" is still valid in the context of this story, and that's all for the good.

There also is, or ought to be, a lot of soul-searching going on at the various media outlets that passed along this barrel of bushwah...

...a power, which more than any other, ought to produce universal alarm, because it is levelled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.  

-- James Madison, Virginia Resolution, December 24, 1798. 

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

(And, This Week, Because It's All About Guns! Guns! Guns!, Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post)

Welcome back to our weekly survey of what's goin' down in the various states where, as we all know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and the beauty parlor is full of sailors and the circus is in town.

Of course, the real action this week is the rising tide of resistance to the tyranny of presidential suggestions regarding our love or our shootin' 'arns. So hang onto the running board, Martha, it's nutpickin' time!

Let's begin in Oregon, just to show that we're not entirely prejudiced against the "traditional gun culture" of the south (which we all must respect), where Sheriff Tim Mueller of Linn County was the first one on his block to leap to the barricades. He made it quite plain to Assistant King Joe Biden that the "noble cause" entrusted to him by the nearly 29,000 people who voted for him the last time he ran unopposed empowered him to decide what's constitutional and what isn't in Linn County. He also is not too find of "politicians," which I always find a curious position for people who run for office to hold. And I wish him luck in his theoretical standoff with imaginary jackboots. How this is different from George Wallace in the schoolhouse door is beyond me.

Sheriff Tim, however, is not alone in his bold stand for government-by-whackadoodle-chain-email. Sheriff Denny Peyman, down there in Jackson County -- where even Yvette Mimieux rarely was welcome -- goes Sheriff Tim one better. This week's reading, apparently, was from the Book Of Smith And Wesson.

"If you take out part - it's kind of like the Bible - either you believe it or you don't believe it...The Constitution, either you believe it or you don't. Either you live by it or you don't."

Sheriff Denny, presumably, keeps a kosher home and celebrates Passover every year. Also, too, he unfortunately lost this page of his Constitution.

Either you live by it, or you don't.

Let us fire up the Packard again and head on down to Texas, where you knew we'd be getting eventually, and where a state legislator named Steve Toth at least has read his Constitution as far as Article V, but apparently hasn't gotten to Bruce Catton or David Blight yet...