"If Europe has one defining cultural characteristic, it is that it has none."

This is a very amusing overview of the way various European nationalities see one another. Plus maps!

Thanks to the tireless (i.e., unemployed) Carl P for his continued service toward keeping this blog alive. He knows not what he does...

Winners because they refused to lose.

I posted the link over on the liquid Diet site because, quite simply, a lot more people are oging to see it there but I'd be remiss if I didn't direct those of you who (for shame!) don't visit both locations regularly to the excellent look into the psyche of the 2010 Philadelphia Phillies which appear in the newspaper today.

Sad songs are meant for Friday nights.

Moses/Charlton Heston says the mosque madness is anti-American (even if he didn't mean to).

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Sad Songs are meant fo Friday nights.

When "broke" isn't broke...or broken (the big Social Security lie).

This long excerpt from yesterday's edition of Bob Somerby's always interesting, sometimes infuriating Daily Howler dismisses the Big Lie simply and effectively and deserves wider attention, and so I've posted it here. I also wanted to have a copy accessible to forward or print out and hand to anybody who throws this old canard at me going forward...

Special report: The thirty-year itch! PART 2—ALAN SIMPSON’S CON (permalink): Will Social Security “still be there” when Mike Hatchell, age 52, retires? Plainly yes, barring national melt-down. (Unless enough people start thinking it won’t be, in which case radical “reform” to the program becomes much easier to sell.)

On last Thursday evening’s Countdown, Hatchell said he had to spend his existing retirement funds during 59 weeks of unemployment. (His wife has also been out of work. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/16/10.) He volunteered an intriguing thought when asked about his retirement prospects:

HATCHELL (8/12/10): Obviously, I mean, with the unemployment—after 59 weeks without a job, you know, I mean, the IRA accounts, you know, that got drained. We basically have no retirement other than, hopefully, the government will have Social Security. We all know how vague that might be in the future.

Hatchell seemed like a very bright person. As we watched him, we kept thinking that he would make an excellent national spokesman for a range of political/issue groups. But, like millions of other people, he has heard all kinds of stories about what a fraud Social Security is. As early as 1994, a large number of younger voters had been conned into believing that they would never get Social Security benefits (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/16/10). Like millions of other Americans, Hatchell seems to retain this fear.

People have heard a welter of claims about Social Security, as we noted in yesterday’s post. But for the most part, people who fear the demise of the program have been misled by two basic cons.

Ironically, the two major cons are semi-contradictory. The first con says that the program’s trust fund doesn’t exist. The second con explains what will happen after the trust fund is gone:

First con—the trust fund: On the one hand, people have heard that the Social Security trust fund is just “an accounting fiction”—“a pile of worthless IOUs,” “the left hand borrowing from the right hand.” (The money isn’t there—we’ve already spent it!) Since Social Security is supposed to start drawing on the trust fund in the next few years—since the trust fund is supposed to allow the system to maintain promised benefits through the year 2037—this suggests that Social Security might be on the verge of a near-term collapse.

Second con—after the trust fund is gone: On the other hand, people have heard that Social Security will “go broke” or “go bankrupt” once the trust fund expires in 2037 (according to current projections). For most people, these terms suggest some sort of cataclysmic collapse, after which the Social Security system would have to be shuttered. Presumably, this explains why so many people, for so many years, have seemed to assume that they will never draw any benefits.

Those are the two basic cons. People like Hatchell have heard these cons for at least the past thirty years.

It’s easy to address the second con—to explain what happens after 2037. Alan Simpson is the Republican co-chairman of Obama’s deficit commission. Back in June, he said Social Security “will go broke in the year 2037” in an interview with Alex Lawson. But as soon as Lawson challenged that language, Simpson described the actual facts—the facts these scare merchants have known all along. John Berry did the reporting, for the Fiscal Times:

BERRY (6/20/10): Lawson asked if the [deficit] commission was working on Social Security, and Simpson replied, "We’re really working on solvency… the key is solvency."

"What about adequacy? Are you focusing on adequacy as well?" asked Lawson.

Replied Simpson: "Sure. We have to take care of the lesser in society. I don't know where you get all the crap you come up with. ... We’re trying to take care of the lesser people in society, like we always have in this country, and do that in a way without getting into all the flash words that you love to dig up, like cutting Social Security, which is bullshit. We’re not cutting anything. We're not cutting anything, we’re trying to make it solvent. It will go broke in the year 2037."

[…]

Lawson continued the interview by asking, "What do you mean by ‘broke’? Do you mean the surplus [the trust fund] will go out and then it will only be able to pay 75 percent of its benefits?"

"Just listen, will you listen to me instead of babbling?" Simpson said. "In the year 2037, instead of getting 100 percent of your check, you are going to get about 75 percent of your check. That’s if we touch nothing. So if you'd like that, fine.”

Duh. After making the frightening claim that Social Security “will go broke in the year 2037,” Simpson explained what would actually happen. Since payroll taxes would keep rolling in, the system would never “go bankrupt” or “broke,” unless you’re reinventing the language. Instead, payroll taxes would keep rolling in, and benefits would keep going out, although the system would be able to pay only 75 percent of scheduled benefits. Those scheduled benefits are higher than the benefits which are currently being paid (even when adjusted for inflation), but this would not be a desirable circumstance. That said, Mike Hatchell would still be receiving benefits, even after the trust fund expires—though his benefits would have to be cut at that point, barring some new source of revenue.

This would not be a desirable outcome—but Social Security would still “be there.” It would not go belly-up. If we’re still speaking traditional English, it wouldn’t be bankrupt or broke.

When people like Simpson use words like “bankrupt” and “broke,” they deceive people like Hatchell. Unfortunately, they’ve been at this game for a very long time, over at least three decades. As a result, many people are very confused about the program’s long-term prospects. They’ve heard that the system is “going broke.” They think they will never get benefits.

That’s the bad news, but here’s the good news again: This long-term situation is extremely easy to explain. You can see how easily Simpson explained it—but only after he was challenged about his claim that the system “will go broke.” Can we talk? Barring some sort of national meltdown, Social Security will never go broke in the way Hatchell seems to fear. Barring some sort of national meltdown, Social Security will always be there—though we may need to find new revenue, if we want to keep future benefits at their promised levels.

The long-term situation is easy to explain. This raises an obvious question: Why has no one ever explained it to Hatchell? Quite plainly, Hatchell is a very bright person; watching him, we kept thinking how good a spokesman he would be for various groups. But he seems to think that Social Security may not be there when he retires. (“We all know” such things, he said.) Thirty years of “liberal” ineptitude, indifference and fecklessness explain this situation.

The long-term situation is easy to explain; you can see how easily Simpson explained it. But so what? Over the course of the past thirty years, your “liberal” “intellectual leaders” have been too stupid and lazy to do so. As early as 1994, people like Hatchell had been conned. In the sixteen years since then, your “liberal” “intellectual leaders” have continued to nap, snore and fail.

Sad songs are meant for Friday nights.

Sad songs are meant for Friday nights.

Kind of brilliant.

I was quite taken with the words below. It is the text from the opening page of The First Wave #3, a comic book from DC Comics written by Brian Azzarello. The words are the musing of an unnamed character:

I have a recurring dream...
about a mudskipper...
who had the will to be something different.

Why? Perhaps his lot in life...wasn't a lot.

In my four hundred million-year old dream, this little fish drags himself out from the primordial soup and does something impossible.

He takes a breath...
and makes us possible.

...I can't imagine humanity every doing anything greater.

As simple and poetic a vision of the beginning of the human race as I've yet stumbled across.

P.S. Why the logo reproduced inside the post itself? Stay tuned.

"If Roman Polanski were a priest, he’d still be working here."

Maureen Dowd this morning in the New York Times on the latest sad bit of foolishness released by the Vatican last week.

"Our greatest exports are Wall Street-style greed, Will Smith action films, and Schnuckie or Schmuckie or whatever her name is on MTV." Happy Fourth of July, America.

Buzz Bissinger, the guy who wrote Friday Night Lights, the best book about football ever and the source material for one the great (ignored by the masses) TV series ever, is a cranky bastard. Given that, you may not be surprised to hear that I admire and like him.

This section, from his "Half Empty" column in today's Philadelphia Inquirer strikes me as a sad but accurate message about the state of the nation today and a most appropriate slap of reality for the Fourth of July when everybody thinks about hamburgers, beer and fireworks rather than what the day really means. It was written during a visit to Jordan while visiting his ex-wife (part of a set, collect them all):

We are a nation of vast pride. There is much to be proud of. But we are also a nation of vast blinders, dismissing other countries as irrelevant pebbles in the shadow of the great monolith that we believe we still are. Patriotism is wonderful, but not when it becomes arrogant and regressive. Too many Americans think that the Grand Canal shopping complex at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas is the real one, and that depressing ignorance applies tenfold to the Middle East.

Because of the dangerous zealotry of Rumsfeld and Cheney and their feckless toad W., there is a conception that everyone who lives there is an Islamic fundamentalist looking to score a little plutonium at the spice bazaar to obliterate us. It is an absurd stereotype. Instead of dismissing so many countries as filthy backwaters, we need to learn to respect their cultures, maybe even learn from them.

Without exception, every Jordanian that wife No. 3 and I met expressed their like for Americans. It is the foreign policy of W. they hated, and while they think Barack Obama is better, they also think he has been ineffectual and weak.

The literacy rate in Jordan is 91 percent. And the Jordanians we met know more about American politics than most Americans. Their leader, King Abdullah II, is a man of enlightenment, although I venture to guess that the number of Philadelphians who know who the king of Jordan is is less than the age of Jamie Moyer.

The problems in Jordan, or what I like to think of as the old Philadelphia, are quite similar to the problems here, only in some cases with better solutions. The economy is in the tank, leading to new taxes on luxury commodities, gas, coffee, and cell phone services, which is a lot bolder than anything we are doing. Education reform is at the forefront without the debacle of South Philadelphia High School. Citizens are tired of having to grease the wheel every time they need a building permit, a government tradition in which the new Philadelphia probably was used as the model. The main roads are better, the rest stops are cleaner. Many women are covered, but given the obesity epidemic in Philadelphia, it might not be a bad idea if both men and women were covered here, or at least wore robes.

Let's not be too rose-colored. Jordan has its share of very troubling attitudes much like the rest of the Middle East. A poll taken by the Pew Research Center showed that a shocking 20 percent view suicide bombing as justifiable, up from 12 percent in 2009. Fourteen percent support Osama bin Laden, which is also terribly disturbing, but at least a 50 percent drop from 2009. Women are still very much treated as fourth-class citizens and that may never change. In Amman, police have been issuing tickets to motorists hanging flags from their cars in the throes of World Cup Fever, which, if tried in Philadelphia, would create a mass riot. And there is still Jordan's animosity toward Israel since a large swath of the country is made up of Palestinian refugees.

It is easy to use this poll as justification for enmity, but it is too easy. America is still the gatekeeper of democracy, the world's greatest legacy. But we are also in an economic free fall that started under President Bush and has not radically improved under the puzzling and disappointing leadership of President Obama. Our greatest exports are Wall Street-style greed, Will Smith action films, and Schnuckie or Schmuckie or whatever her name is on MTV. Otherwise we don't have much concrete to offer in goods or lifestyle. We are in a war that cannot be won in Afghanistan, forcing our values on a country forever ill-equipped for them; our economic backbone, the middle class, is dying; our students are shockingly lazy and ill-informed; our politicians worse and worse because gossip has become the focal point among the media rather than substance and we lap it up.

So wave that American flag tonight. Watch the burst of fireworks igniting the stars. Be moved and feel a swell in the heart. Say a silent prayer for the 1,125 U.S. soldiers who have lost their lives in the nine-year war in Afghanistan. And then say one for the 1,807 who have been murdered in the new Philadelphia during the past five years alone, some of them publicized but most of them not because that's the cheap cost of life in the pockets of poverty spreading over the city like runaway weeds.

"The distinctive ethnic group that opened its doors to all."

Anyone who has known me over the years is likely aware of my deep disdain for WASP culture and the ways they (in my eyes) screwed a lot of things up. I have to say that this column in last Friday's New York Times has given me pause and caused me rethink and reevaluate that position. I haven't changed my mind quite yet, but my eyes have been opened to a broader perspective that I have not not previously considered.

Having one's assumptions challenged is a good thing.

What a strange day.

Even Maureen Dowd has a column this morning which is not her usual sacrifice of content in search of clever. Worth a read and, with the Paglia column linked in the previous post, makes the NYT two for two in actually being useful and relevant today.

"Continuity easily turns into inertia."

I have spent a lot of time in recent weeks trying to figure out exactly what I think about Barack Obama and his presidency at this point. Garry Wills' review of David Remnick's new book, The Bridge, in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review suggests that the manner of his rise to the Oval Office  hold the key to understanding why his first year in office, the time when a landslide victor with both charisma and party control of the Congress might have been expected to achieve a myriad of goals, was instead marked by turmoil and disappointment.

Yes, the mindless obstructionism and near-criminal demonization of the new president by his opponents played a crucial role and the ruined economic landscape left him by his inept and disinterested predecessor played an an even larger part. But it was not only exterior forces that thwarted Obama.

His long, foolish and obviously doomed effort for "bipartisanship," as if it were some sort of moral value rather than merely a political tactic, allowed much of the energy to escape from his historic election. Many of the people he surrounded himself with, especially on his economic team, had played significant roles in the disaster that may yet bring him down. The fire and passion of his arguments for new policies and directions, until very recently, was dimmed.

The central theme of Remnick's books, from all accounts, is that Obama's solution to his always being the outsider, the newcomer, has been to ingratiate himself by the oldest social rule of them all, to get along, go along. And especially in seeking the presidency and then assuming the Oval Office, that predilection was often paramount. He could never risk being the Angry Black Man on the campaign trail; he wanted above all to embed his presidency in the long history of the office even if it was undeniably a demarcation from all that had gone before.

Wills is one of my favorite intellectuals and the final two paragraphs of his review provide a summary of what he took from The Bridge and what that might portend:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.

The last time this sad excuse of a nation and what it used to be awoke from its stupor and put someone in charge to pick up the pieces left in wake of a destructive Republican non-stewardship of the nation, we chose The Man from Hope. If it turns out that this time we've chosen The Man form Inertia, then the broken heart of hope could turn out to be the least of the pain we will reap.

The girl with the cinematic future.

You will recall that I have been more than a little excited about Steig Larrson's award-winning Swedish trilogy and the forthcoming adaptation of the books to film.

Well, the first movie was released in Sweden this week and, after reading this very favorable review, I asked my friend Andersson Anders who lives there what his impressions were. His response:

The pool of good Swedish actors is too small, so you'll recognize everyone in every movie.

The explicit sex scenes tend to be just scenes, suddenly it's not the character you see, it's the actor. The best erotic scenes are the ones where you are left with some imagination of your own ...

Violence. The older I get and the more I think about how much is accepted today as "entertainment" the more depressed I am. So I don't watch those scenes.

The first point shouldn't affect you unless you have a secret collection of Swedish contemporary movies and TV-series.

I've just seen the first episode (90 min in SVT, no commercials!) and it is very good. Noomi Rapace IS Salander. From what I've heard the first movie is the best and then it's declining a bit. I hope the extra material in the TV version will be beneficial ...

I guess the whole series will be on a Swedish DVD very soon after it's finished on TV. I'll let you know if I think you should get it (depending on subtitles and region codes, of course).

I've already reserved my copy from NetFlix.

Whatever became of journalism?

Former NYTimes Ex Ed Howell Raines (in, of all places, the Washington Post) on the nature of Fox News and the failure of "real" news sources to challenge the lies and phony narrative:

[Fox] has sold a falsified image of the professional standards that developed in American newsrooms and university journalism departments in the last half of the 20th century.

Whatever its shortcomings, journalism under those standards aspired to produce an honest account of social, economic and political events. It bore witness to a world of dynamic change, as opposed to the world of Foxian reality, whose actors are brought on camera to illustrate a preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality. Now, it is precisely our long-held norms that cripple our ability to confront Fox's journalism of perpetual assault. I'm confident that many old-schoolers are too principled to appear on the network, choosing silence over being used; when Fox does trot out a house liberal as a punching bag, the result is a parody of reasoned news formats.

My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox's financial power and expanding audience, as well as [Roger] Ailes's proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him.

I write "of all places" re: the WaPo not just because it was the Times' biggest rival during Raines' tenure but because it is one of the primary failed entities he is citing, it's opinion pages more and more a neocon fantasy land and its political coverage either pure he said/she said or silly simpering over the latest distraction.

More Ebert.

To accompany and provide some perspective on  this long post by Roger Ebert that I called to your attention earlier this month, I now call to your attention this long post about Robert Ebert from the current issue of Esquire.

The Eyrie Mansion in Jermyn Street.

Some of the best writing on the web these days is being done by film critic Roger Ebert. This long, extensively illustrated piece about times spent at a wonderful old hotel in London has been grand reading in the early hours of a day when snow blankets as much of the world as I can see from here; I feel safe in suggesting that it will be equally satisfying at any hour and under any conditions and recommend it to your attention.