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The Payroll Tax Break Is Kind Of Dumb. And So Is Not Extending It.

So a while back, the Democrats wanted to pass a tax break for "working families" (I'm sorry, I am a lifelong Democrat and I will stand up and cheer when someone, someday, kills off the phrase "working families". It just makes my teeth grate), and they came up with this kind of silly idea: they would lower the payroll tax.

It's a dumb idea because, first, the payroll tax is the funding mechanism for Social Security. This is the same Social Security that politicians like to claim is in "danger" when it isn't- though funding Social Security payouts long term has some fiscal problems... in any case, the way to keep Social Security solvent does not involve underfunding it.

That's okay, one can reply, because the Payroll Tax Cut had a funding mechanism in which the lost revenues are replaced by "general funds". This is usually called Robbing Peter To Pay Paul, or in this case, using tax receipts collected for one purpose to pay for other tax receipts that should have been collected but weren't, while borrowing money to make up for the shortfall.

This is really dumb. This is why department stores won't let you buy gift certificates, and then use the gift certificates to pay off your department store credit card bill.

Anyway, it's also a dumb idea to cut the payroll tax by a small amount because the small windfall most taxpayers receive is a) largely unnoticed, and b) probably not used to do things like pay down debt or improve savings. Because our economy is consumer driven, what they want people to do is shop. Which means buying things you don't need and probably can't afford. As opposed to taking some of your paycheck, and paying it into a savings plan that will pay out when you retire.

Oh, never mind.

The problem is that the payroll tax rteduction was put in place for a year, and it's now set to expire, and when it does, everyone will notice that their taxes went up. And Democrats - or more specifically, the President's reelection team - is worried that less money in people's paychecks will make them grumpy and grumpy people vote for Newt Gingrich. Or Rick Santorum. Or something.

Naturally, Republicans are in no mood to extend a tax break that makes the President look good (cue the natural segue into how Republicans Hate Working Families), and also are kind of mad about several other things, notably this plan to build a pipeline across the country north to south so that Canadian oil shale can be efficiently delivered to refineries in Texas. Oil shale is also a pretty dumb idea (slightly less dumb than fracking, but still), and the pipeline could probably be rerouted, but mostly, this "debate" is a lot of the smae thing we get these days of terrible, useless Washington politics. One dumb idea in exchange for another. None of which really addresses the problems we actually face.

I don't really care about any of this - which is why I don't write daily about the dramatic brinksmanship going on in DC - and frankly, I'd be fine if the payroll tax went back to normal and someone actually took brinksmanship over, and past, the brink. Perhaps then, something might change, a bit. I know, it's a foool's notion. But I remain optimistically foolish. Just for spite.

In any case, the payroll tax break is a dumb idea, but extending it is probably better than not extending it... but frankly, it's the fact that we're all standing around talking about this stupidity that just floors me. And also why I'd probably rather eat Christmas cookies, watch reruns of SVU, and hope the whole thing just goes away. Who's with me?

Not Knowing Herman Cain, And Knowing Him Well

Like so many things about his campaign, Herman Cain's suspending of it was a lot of theater with no payoff. I'm not sure he fully realizes the power of presence he brought to his public appearances, and how those very expectations are, much of the time, what derailed him. In any event, I suppose, it kind of hardly matters now.

I've been sort of fascinated - and I've said as much a couple of times - with the fascination with Herman Cain, next to no one's idea of a really viable candidate for President. I think Cain brought a wild card note to the race last seen, maybe, with Ross Perot: the very unlikely quality of the choice to run, it seems, can make you a serious contender... until you're not. Then the crazy starts to catch up with you, and your past - which probably reflects similar bouts of hard to explain behavior - catches up to you. Or something.

The soap opera quality of the Cain implosion - first with the multiple cases of sexual harassment stretching back to his years running the National Restaurant Association, then the recent revelation of a 13 year "relationship" outside his marriage - was obvious catnip to political reporters, especially since this race has been dull, dull, dull, and everybody seems to sense it. But like so much else, the soap opera didn't mean much; the black Republican businessman with no real chance of becoming President aparently has issues with women. As Michael Douglas said in The American President... and what was the fourth story on the news?

Cain's candidacy was probably most interesting because it was, well, interesting, in a year when not much about politics is interesting. Cain spoke too often and too loudly, and tended to suggest things that made no sense - an electrified border fence, a plan for a national sales tax, a general failure to know anything about the nuances of foreign policy. These off the cuff remarks make for great television, and give pundits things to discuss... but they reflect an inherent lack of seriousness. 

A lot of people, it seems, could never figure Cain out, when it came to that unseriousness: was he just shilling a book, aiming for a Fox News pundit gig? (frankly, he neednt have gone to those lengths, I think.) Was it just, as Rachel Maddow claimed, a "performance art project", a wink and a nudge to the wasted time spent watching candidates be generally boring? 

I tend to think neither - I tend to think that Cain, much like Perot, tends to believe his own press. I think he thought he'd make a fine President. I think he thought that the more he polled well and the more people out in right wing-landia took him seriously, that their seriousness made him serious. I think he honestly believes a lot of those wild ideas (including, and especially "9-9-9"). And I think all of that speaks to the vast divides between right and left these days, which made Herman Cain, in many ways, a wake up call to the left, that actually woke a few people up: no really, they're serious. And he's being taken seriously.

Until he wasn't. The bigger problem for Cain, I suspect, is that behind all the bluster, all the self confidence... I'm not sure Cain knows himself all that well, and I don't think he was all the interested in having the public get to know the real him all that well, either. In that, I suspect, he was more like Obama then either one might care to face: I think black men in this country, outside of the entertainment industry (and media hounds like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, maybe), tend to be leery of the spotlight, the public eye, of getting to be too well known (come to think of it... how about Colin Powell?). There's a reticence, and along with it, I think, a fear of bad things. Everyone knows, in some sense, that bad things happen when a black man thinks he's won the public's heart.

As much as he liked people paying attention to his bluster and his "forthrightness", Cain was obviously uncomfortable with a lot of personal questions (which cropped up long before the harrassment and affair allegations), and generally viewed the press' role in examining public figures with disdain and distaste. Yes, in some sense that played well in the "anti-MSM" mood of pop culture, especially on the right... but it also backfired. It's what helped let the charges stick, and it's what hampered his ability to get his version of events out to the public. If you don't like being questioned, if you don't trust reporters, if you don't want to be known... how on Earth can you really fight the fight Herman Cain had on his hands?

And so, we lose Herman Cain - though he threatens to stick around, the reality is that this dalliance was already ending, and in general, politics and the press has moved on and won't look back. And, in the end, I think we really don't know much more about Herman Cain, really, than when we started. Even as we think we knew him well.

The Waiting Game

The waiting is the hardest part.

For days, weeks, depending on where one puts the start of it, the Occupy Wall Street supporters have complained about being ignored. As it turns out, "critical mass" is not something a movement can define for itself; and the past few days have moved the various Occupy protests - I know, hundreds! - to center stage. The question becomes... now what?

Waiting for an answer to that - whether these protests gel into something more coherent and concrete, dissolve and wash away, or possibly get out of hand in some form or fashion - is the hard part. America is an impatient culture, full of impatient people (which is why, on the edges, I worry most about the "get out of hand" aspect), and nothing is quite so impatient as a social movement full of energetic people lacking a sense of where to go.

Of course, one reason Occupy Wall Street is attracting more coverage is because, just now, there's so little to cover. It's talk about OWS... or offer deep thought on Herman Cain's rise in the Republican polls. Or live coverage of Amanda Knox. Or live coverage of the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor. Can you sense the excitment? 

As we have been for much of this year, there's this pervasive sense - I'm not making this part up - that we're stuck. every few weeks, between what seem like awfully long recesses, Congress blows into DC, they all stand around and point fingers about who's failing to address the economic crisis, and then they do vey little. Before OWS, there was a lot of anxiousness around the "debt deal" and the "Super Committee." Now, I think, a lot of people are realizing what some us figured out when the Super Committee was announced: that plan to kick the can further down the road (so many cans, so much kicking... such a long road) was pretty much a plan to deliver failure. And right on cue... it seems clear the Super Committee will never reach any kind of a deal.

And if that seems like a problem... you may not want to know about Congress' failure to pass spending bills for next year.

This endless breath-holding, standing on the precipice, I think, is really making us turn blue; we're running out of breath to hold, time to wait, patience to wait any longer. That, as I've said, seems like a lot of what's caught on about Occupy Wall Street as a pop culture event, in New York and all those other places - nothing to do? feeling bored and impatient? Come down to the urban core and hold up a sign! There's food! and frisbees!

None of this is to dismiss the underlying seriousness of these protests - and BTW, I happen to favor food, frisbees and sign holding - but like many (and we are many)... I wonder what we're waiting for, what we're waiting to have happen here. We can't go on playing the Waiting Game forever, despite the way many in Congress seem determined to never address spiraling debt, revenue and spending problems, but I think a lot of people sense that after waiting... might come the abyss.

And if that's our option, I think a lot of people would choose to wait a while longer... thank you very much. Trouble is, aside from the bad parts about us holding our breath til we turn blue, we are running out of time to do nothing... but wait.

 

 

It's Not The Occupation Of Wall Street, It's The Time Spent Occupying

"Occupy Wall Street?" Seriously?

I've honestly been struck near speechless by the daffiness of the "Occupy Wall Street" protest. I can only imagine how inane it looks on Facebook; on Twitter, I get minute by minute tweet updates, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing at all.

But hey... don't blame Twitter.

There's a reason to be worried about "Occupy Wall Street", though the idea that it will have any kind of impact on government policy, financial regulation or banking reform is beyond absurd. If there's a reason to worry - and G-d knows, I hope at least police officials are worried - it's the question everyone should be asking about the occupiers... why are so many people so able to spend pretty much all day every day hanging out in a park in lower Manhattan?

Our political life in this country is in such a brain dead state that yes, it's easy to misconstrue Occupying Wall Street as doing something brave, bold, and confrontational. In fact, it's mostly tae, unfocused, and incoherent. If you don't like the way things are going in this country, if you hate what rich bankers are doing to the financial system... hey, let's stand around for a while!

Mellissa McEwan wrote Friday:

I really don't understand the concern trolling from other progressives about how Occupy Wall Street needs to have a "cohesive message" or a "set of demands" or a "list of proposed solutions" or wevthefuck. There's a lot to be said for a good, old-fashioned awareness-raising event, and, with 90% (ninety percent!) of USians saying the economy stinks, this protest ain't happening in a void of evident motivation. Making some goddamn noise is as good a place to start as any, and better than most options we've got anymore.

...which is, for my money, about as good a sum-up of lefty uselessness as we've got, just now. Occupy Wall Street doesn't "raise awareness" - plenty of people are goddamn well aware that the economy stinks, that financial companies are profiting on people's misery, and serious reforms are needed. "Making noise" is an ineffective approach to activism, and activists - surely someone as knowledgeable, focused and capable of self expression as Melissa - should know well enough that anger requires action, and action requires a sense of purpose. Occupy Wall Street lacks all of this.

Here's a shortlist of ideas you could propose, just off the top of my head:

1. We could centralize lefty anger around an alternative candidate for President
2. We could agitate for the return of Glass-Steagall
3. We could hold Democrats in the House and Senate accountable for their failure to promote an ambitious reform agenda, and replace a generation of aging leaders who have become to tied to the inner workings of Dc and party politics, and lost their connections to the real concerns of real people.
4. We could have significant tax reform, ending the Bush tax cuts across the board, and closing the major loophole that allows Hedge Funds managers to book their salaries as profits on investing, for starters
5. We could back "too big to fail" legislation that would require the breakup of large, poorly performing entities like Citigroup and Bank of America, returning banking to a more locally based enterprise.

I resent the suggestion that just because one is on the left and finds a pointless exercise like Occupy Wall Street to be absurdly off point, that one somehow does not care passionately about financial reform. We need reform desperately. And its a disservice to the issues we have and the reforms we desperately need to throw up a black box around the seriousness of these issues and say, hey, it's fine if you just run around and scream aimlessly. No, it's not.

Still, the point of concern is that all these people milling about is, in its way, significant. The ability of Occupy Wall Street to generate a crowd of people, milling about, angry and bored, is the start of a recipe for a kind of social unrest that could be terribly destructive on societal order. That's obviously fine by a lot of proto-anarchists who think that "tear it all down" is a starting point for our discussions of how to make change; but I've said before, and I'll say again, Americans are deeply insulated from the unrest much of the rest of the world is experiencing, and the potential for violent uprisings and conflict is a kind of arson to our social fabric that more people should take more seriously in all its negative prospects. The potential for Occupy Wall Street to get out of hand, for things to heat up and spill over is very real; and that, really is the underlying problem of inequality, unemployment, and economic hardship that's become the reality in so much of America today. It's why thinking, well spoken activists really ought to be ashamed of not doing more to fight for serious solutions, and seriously holding people we trust more to account. The "Occupation of Wall Street" will, most likely, fizzle, if we're lucky; but if it does, that's really only a temporary reprieve... and I don't think anyone's got a good answer, still, about how to affect the kind of change that would give the Occupiers something to do instead, long term.

What's Black And White And Red All Over?

I promised myself not to write anything about the News of the World "phone hacking" scandal until Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of News International, resigned. I did that because, ultimately, any piece before she did would amount to " Rebekah Brooks will have to go".

And now she has. And she's been arrested to boot.

I've been following the phone hacking story for months, at least; I kind of remember being interested back when Sienna Miller first filed suit in 2007, claiming her phones had been hacked, messages deleted, and details related to the messages showed up in the News of the World. But since then, watching this story unfold, it's fascinating and truly compelling to see how one minor incident has snowballed  into the calamity that may take down Rupert Murdoch's empire, his livelihood, and possibly his career. 

But if you're lloking for me to join in vocal outrage over the phone hacking details... well, you should know I don't do outrage a lot. Also that I tend not to take the familiar, obvious line; in this case, I'm not especially sympathetic to cries that "reasonable expectations of privacy" are really the story of the phone hacking scandal. Indeed, the unfolding of the phone stories has reinforced a faith I have that the belief in a "right to privacy" is actually kind of a vague all purpose shield that tends to wilt under close scrutiny.

No, what's really unfolding out of the revelations of phone hacking is something much more fundamental, especially for the British, whose culture, after all, is actually quite different from Americans. What's fundamentally unraveling in England, and may drift over to American shores, is a fundamental reassessment of just what constitutes news and what we deserve to know. In some ways, yes, that's the flip side of "privacy", but it's really the more relevant, more controllable question. Just how freely should the press rummage about in people's lives, and what amounts to going too far? 

That's the real question that "phone hacking" has generated. And it's why, really, the phone hacking scandal probably begins and ends with Milly Dowler.

Anthony's Song (Tweeting Too Hard Gives You A Heart Attack-ack-ack-ack)

I started this blog - purely by chance - as the sudden scandal and resignation of Mark Foley unfolded. You remember Mark Foley, right? Congressional pages? Male pages?

Never mind.

America is a nation with a curious culture when it comes to sex. It's about puritanism, and guilt, and voyeurism, and capitalism, and it screws with our heads, ruins our public discourse, and fascinates us, all at once. We are the nation that the French think of as uptight prudes, and the ones with enough experience and sense to arrest Dominique Strauss-Khan rather than look the other way. We are the nation of some of the most virulent antigay bigots and the largest gay pride parade in the world.

In short, girl, we are a hot mess of a nation when it comes to sex.

Some people say it's Republicans who can't handle allegations of sex and scandal in their public officials. I tend to disagree - I don't think they like it (and I do mean sex), but I think they know how to handle it. Democrats, on the other hand, like to think we can "handle it", but I think part of the lefty charm is actually that Democrats are often deliberately, sweetly naive. We don't have any idea what to do with affairs and sexting and fetishes and so much more (SO much more), because, every time, it all just seems so new and unexpected. Arnold Schwarzenegger cheated on Maria Shriver? Bill Clinton let an intern flash her panties? Anthony Weiner sent some girl a picture of his hardon?

Really?

It's not that liberalism is somehow equivalent to "no moral compass"; it's just that, well, we need a minute to put the new data into some sort of perpective. This can often be labeled "overthinking it."

Democrats like to say we "handle sex scandals differently" - than those uptight, prudish Republicans - but really, we don't "handle" them at all; and in that, I think, we reflect, more fully, the national muddle when it comes to sex and acting out sexually: mostly we'd rather not know... and when we have to know, it's mostly how can we make this go away, and quickly. It would be a much better story, really, if the liberal view of sex were, in fact, demonstrably liberal: that we felt people should talk, freely and openly about sex and sexuality; that the free expression of love and desire among people is perfectly natural and understandable; that what we deplore is sexual acting out that involves force, coercion and lack of consent.

We don't do that. But liberals like to pretend, often, that we do.

Anthony Weiner's place in our odd discussion of sexuality is not new; his song and dance about "I couldn't possibly have sent some girl a picture of my hardon that accidentally wound up going out over the internet to everyone on my twitter feed" is not new and didn't seem true pretty much the minute he said it. He lies badly. And hypocrisy, really, is the standard for American scandal that can't really be overcome.

There will be a lot of "I can't judge Anthony Weiner" comments from lefties, which isn't really true, either (Rachel Maddow's take on the scnadal was a good barometer, really, of how to deftly manage the "I'm not judging" while reveling in every tacky seamy moment of his fall). Of course we judge. Of course we look. Of course we stare. That's what we do. That - the staring part, the quietly judging part - is who we are as a nation. Voyeurs, who think it's rude to stare, but would often pay extra for the privilge of staring longer.

Whether Anhony Weiner stays in Congress or resigns in disgrace - or some other yet to be seen scenario unfolds - doesn't really fascinate me (I'd love to say the naughty pictures don't fascinate me... but pictures of boys on the internet are life's little joy, these days). What fascinates me about this "scandal" is what makes it "scandalous" - a notion about sex as dirty and hidden and shameful and naughty that we can't, as a culture, seem to shake. And our choice, really, is to adopt, as conservatives already do, a kind of rigid, inflexible standard for behavior that's often unrealistic and needlessly cruel, or adopt a kind of senseless, messy "anything goes" notion of permissiveness that creates as many or more problems than it solves.

Or we could, painfully and mostly haltingly, try to continue a national process of growing up, of treating sex and sexuality more openly, a little more honestly, and with some sensitivity and humanity. That kind of approach might, in the end, help us to separate what's not so important in this case - the fact, say, that he was aroused - from what might be kind of inappropriate - sending unwanted, highly sexually charged messages to people we find attractive.

I mean it's just a thought. And it seems like a waste of time... but that's what it's all about.

That's That

Overnight, the months-long story of Republicans flailing in a weak sea of bad Presidential candidates became much clearer. Republicans may as well pick a decent sacrificial lamb (I'd go with Mitt Romney, myself) and give in to the inevitable: the near-certain reelection of President Obama.

If there's one thing you get for being the Democrat who got Osama Bin Laden, it's reelected.

It may seem crass to immediately take a major event like finding and killing Bin Laden and reduce it to simple political arithmetic, but what else is there to do? Hours, days, months will naturally be spent un packing and taking apart what Bin Laden's death means to international relations, future concerns about terrorism (God forbid there's another successful terrorist event in the US in the next 18 months), and the US role in the Middle East... but the tangible result of ending "The Hunt For Osama Bin Laden" is reallly much more directly and succinctly summed up in what it means fo the President. Success is rewarded. And this, clearly, defines "success."

Republicans have only themselves to blame for setting up this level of expectation, having taken the aftermath of 9/11 and used it, unapologetically, as a sledgehammer for political gain. "Democrats are soft on terrorism" has been their rallying cry ever since that day. If anyone had the nerve and instincts to find Osama Bin Laden and stop him cold, they said, it was some sort of gun toting Republican ideal. From the underpants bomber to the Fort Hood shooting to the Times Square car bomb that wasn't (and numerous examples in between), conservatives have spent the Obama Presidency searching out examples of "failing to fight the War on Terra" to buttress their case. And underpinning all of it was an argument that barely needed uttering: Osama Bin Laden is still out there - probably in Pakistan - and the Obama Administration would never find and stop him.

Overnight, the notion that only the right wing could handle fighting terrorism fell apart.

There's a case to be made - several, really - against reelecting President Obama. The problem, as I keep insisting, is that there's no one to make it. Republicans have been in poor shape to offer a compelling alternative despite the gains made in the 2010 elections. For years, conservatives and Republicans have ignored the disintegration of their own side, papered over their inherent problems, many of which stem directly from the disastrous, failed Presidency of George W. Bush. And failing to find Osama Bin Laden - the one job he he said people could expect him to finish - is just the most basic, lurid, example of his failures.

Republicans can't put together an argument for retaking the Presidency in 2012, because they haven't got one. They can't even seem to stop the sideshow that is Donald Trump (and how irrelevant does the idea of a Trump candidacy look this morning, anyway?). And now, combine the wildly unpopular choices of Paul Ryan's budget proposals with a lost argument as the only people who can fight terrorism... and seriously, they've got nothing. You can't fight something - even something as visibly flawed as the Obama Presidency - with nothing.

Nothing I say here should be construed as chest thumping, rah-rah support for "getting Osama." Sending in a covert ops team to hunt down and kill an "enemy of the US government" on foreign soil is an act so rife with questionable choices that it makes my blood, too, run cold. That said... as someone who lived through 9/11 in New York City, I know enough of what it was to go through those dark days to know that "we found Osama Bin Laden and had him killed" will satisfy something very basic and primitive in the American psyche. I'm not happy about it, I'm not proud of it... but I'm not blind to it, either. This is justice, and it was overdue. That's that. And being the President who got Osama Bin Laden on his watch? That's pretty much a guarantee of reelection. Game over.

 

This Is What An International Coalition Looks Like

I find the hand wringing over international intervention in Libya fascinating. So does my mom. It's one thing to see conservatives completely flummoxed, yet again, by President Obama's ability to confound their expectations; it's another to see lefty progressives struggle to figure out how to be both pleased and angry at once.

When the history of this is written, I'm convinced that it will probably be anything but the way it appears now: stories that suggest that a "reluctant" President "finally" signed off on intervention miss, I think, that the President's foreign policy team seemed determined to develop an international coalition all along. There was never a chance that the US would, unilaterally, announce airstrikes or a no-fly zone. At the same time, I suspect the moves to convince European and Arab allies to lead the way on just such a plan has been going on for months.

Fears of America being drawn into yet another "Middle East war" strike me as overblown: nothing that has been happening in the past week or so looks anything, to me, like Iraq under George W. Bush or even Iraq under George H.W. Bush. It does, I think, look a lot like Sarajevo and Bosnia... but I think it's the sense of preventing another country's "ethnic cleansing" that will be different. A lot of what's happening right now, after all, is about, of all things, Rwanda; no one wants to see the world stand by as a national army murders its own people.

The reality that Muammar al-Qaddafi planned to kill his enemies, and the reality that his money and his army could achieve that goal is a plain spoken reality that many progressive critics seem determined to minimize or ignore. I'm astonished that bloggers I generally like - and even the bigger, less useful ones like Josh Marshall and Steve Benen - see to suddenly have lost their ability to evaluate complex ideas and deal in more than simple sentences. It's entirely possible to both want to stop a massacre and not want to  tajke over the fight in a civil war. And, as well, I think it's possible to avert a terrible tragedy, and possibly even oust a dictator... without being an invading force.

It's been less than ten days, and for more than four of them, liberals have been sharply critical of the plan to "turn over" leadership of the intervention in Libya to an international coalition (and, naturally, conservatives wonder why we would do such a crazy thing at all). It's as if George W Bush and his terrible Presidency erased nearly all memories of how international cooperation, diplomacy, and consensus work. (I've been especially amused and amazed by experts like Rachel Maddow, who actually study international relations, approaching this action as if they've never seen an international episode before.)

This, what we're going through, is how international coalitions work - or, alternatively, don't. It's process by committee, it's slow and sometimes painful and it's hard to get a lot of disparate groups with disparate interests to find common ground and agree on a plan. What's been remarkable, to me, is that pretty much every promised milestone - establishing a no-fly zone, making sure that airstrikes and flyovers have a multinational component, are actually happening. Within a day of launching these attacks, Bengazi was both safe and a massacre averted; within 3 days, Qaddafi has lost almost all of his airstrike capability. It seems to me... that's what everyone moaned about wanting all along.

Our army is not going into Libya, because we can't (we have no troops for it) and because we don't want to. It's reasonable to be concerned about how the Libyans can possibly form another government, and reasonable to wonder if Qaddafi, even after all this, can be convinced to leave (I tend to think he can, and he will). In the end... these are not our problems. But from an international standpoint, it is everyone's problem to stand by and do nothing when a dictator announces a plan to go into his nation's second largest city and kill everyone in it. This does not strike me as a hard call.

Since the Tunisian uprising, Americans - and some Europeans - have been looking at unrest all across the "middle east" as one big, identical event. In fact it's many different events, with many different factors in play in different countries, and more pointedly, this is a different story when we talk about North Africa - i.e. Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, versus actual middle eastern peninsula nations like Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Bahrain. One of the primae failures of teh GW Bush years was an undifferentiated, blanket assessment of the threat of "Muslim" extremism. There are a lot of Muslims, a lot of sects, and many tribes.

What might - or might not - happen in Libya isn't going to be so much about what we, as Americans do, as part of an international coalition. This is a civil war, and the ultimate result will be decided between Qaddafi's army and rebel forces. The events in Libya are, after all, the worst case scenario many feared for Egypt and Tunisia (and still fear in places like Syria and Bahrain): some despots will do anything to maintain their hold on power. Anything. And thus, the question becomes: can we stand by, or must we get involved?

It's fair to ask, as liberals do, why Libya and not other nations (especially pointedly, why not African nations like Congo, Sudan or Somalia)... but that, too, is no excuse to argue, as an alternative, that the answer when faced with Qaddafi's threats is to not go into Libya either. Go somewhere. Do something. Start somewhere. We spent a good ten years, as a nation, going it alone, disrespecting international relations and organizations like the United Nations. It takes years, a generation even, to get things back on track. The alternative of going nowhere, doing nothing... that too is no answer. Start somewhere. Start here.

Tomorrow night, President Obama will give a speech. I suspect, for once, that this may be his first real speech - a speech which does not arrived preapproved, its fan base preconditioned to call it his "best ever." This is a speech that will actually have to do the work of winning people over who don't already agree. Oddly, I'm not one of them. I won't need much convincing. I'm already there (and yet, I suspect the speech will be something of a dud, too). This is what international intervention looks like, how an international coalition is formed and how it works. And we don't know how Libya will turn out... but even in 8 days, we can be pretty sure that what's likely to happen is way better than not intervening at all.

And that, it seems to me, is the point.

The Island Of The Day Before

The first thing that struck me, as I woke up this morning to the news of Japan's earthquake, was that because of the International Date Line, the warnings for a tsunami in Hawaii would mean that the waves would be hitting those islands at a time on the same day as the earthquake, hours before it actually struck the Japanese coast. That is, they were being warned to expect a tsunami that had already happened a day later, somewhere else. A literal island of the day before.

That sense of watching all of these events unfold at some kind of strange time and space remove from the actual events never left me. Here in the northeast, we are dealing with the after effects of two days of sustained rain, on top of more rain only a week ago. Many of the highways between my house and New York City are actually closed, even this evening. News organziations in the US, and especially on the east coast, struggled all day with balancing major world events and the local business of dealing with closed roads and downed power lines.

In a moment of such fearsome reminders of "nature's fury" and such, it's easy to feel small and kind of humble. Our lives as we know them can, literally, come apart in moments. The earth can move, the water can flood, and lives are completely changed. That sense of sudden disarray is even harder to fathom from the comfort of one's own perfectly fine living room.

It was one of those days when the morning paper is instantly "old news" - I never held onto the newspapers from the morning of Setember 11th, 2001. They were irrelevant by 9 am that day. Today was a similar sensation, stuck as I was most of the day at a job where one can seem especially cut off from love events as they unfold. It's very disorienting. All of this doesn't matter now. The real news is happening elsewhere.

As we go to bed in the northeast, it is midday in Japan, on the day after. We live our lives in the day before, and always have. It's rare for events in the future to reach back and affect the day before. It is tomorrow, Kevin, in a world where we are clearly so all connected to one another, and so humbled by the hugeness of events beyond our control. Our humanity, in these moments, I think, is how blithely we carry on, knowing that we are so small, so ineffectual, and so transient.

Doing The Madison (Wisconsin), And Taking It To The Streets

Here's the question I keep having about the events unfolding in Madison: how does this all end?

The threat of our left-right divisions, after all, is not that one side will prevail... but that, in fact, the conflict keeps getting ratcheted up and no resolution is found. And the events in Wisconsin have to end at some point... don't they?

I've spent a lot of time - at least, as much time as I'm willing to, before I get exasperated - listening to arguments on all sides and, naturally, I come down on a decidedly left, but fiscally conservative side: there's no reason to eviscerate collective bargaining rights, but the way public service workers are compensated has to change. Lots of us can find common ground on something along these lines... but I don't think that's the point of what's unfolding in Wisconsin.

From the intransigence of the state's Governor, Scott Walker, to the "Senators on the run" sitcom of the Democrats who fled rather than see Walker's measure passed, it seems to me that real lesson in Wisconsin is each side testing the other for limits. How far will you go? How outrageous will you be? How many people can you rile up? And which side will cave?

Tht's why I ask again... how does this all end?

As a nation, we are generally conflict-averse and fairly comfortable and easily bored. Envisioning more mass labor protests, in other states, even with all that's happened and could happen on labor regulations, is hard to do. The energy to sustain this really isn't there. Around the country, looking at Wisconsin, I get the sense people - wherever theiir politics lie - wish Wisconsin officials would figure out a solution and end this.

The political and economic decisions we face do not get easier in the coming months and years; and maybe, given the passions surreounding some of these topics, there will be more taking it to the streets, more breakdowns of legislative comity, grinding our work and social lives to a halt. Maybe... but I kind of doubt it. I think no one knows how Wisconsin will end, but when it ends... there will be both a sense of relief that it's over and a resolve to figure out how to not let that unfold elsewhere. Whatever the price.

It's worth pointing out, after all, that with both side in Washington daring the other to reject a resolution to fund government operations through March and have a government shutdown, both sides managed to find a compromise they can live with. This, I thnk, is the real sense of our new normal: ugly compromises, barely manged week to week.

I'd love to say, as a good liberal, that this is all about union-bashing and we need to stand up for the workers and the unions. But the reality is that less than 10% of the country is unionized, and much of the unionized work force is public sector workers - teachers, emergency services, civil service. It's worth asking just what liberals think we are defending and where we think things go from here, when it comes to labor. I'd feel a lot better about a liberal, progressive movement that looked beyond unions, and worked harder to protect union gains for non-unionized workers, especially in service industries where unionization is unlikely to grow. And of course, I'd feel better about  conservative pushes for fiscal responsibility that didn't involve mistreating members of the poor and working classes, while protecting the rich and comfortable.

This is not the world we have. The world we have is the world that's on display in Madison. And that disagreement that's out in the streets, cannot be resolved. That's the reality. And knowing that... I still don't see how this all ends to anyone's satisfaction. But it does have to end... right?