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Articles We Never Finished Reading: And The World Screams, Kiss Me, Son Of God

"[Cornel] West and Cone did a Q&A at a Princeton bookstore last winter, and afterward, they and a handful of friends and colleagues—including the journalist Chris Hedges, who wrote the Truthdig piece; Carl Dix, a local communist organizer; Brother Ali, an albino rapper; and a few professors—went to dinner. There, West was in his element. He had no one to provoke, and it was clear to see why some might compare West to Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. DuBois, or even Mark Twain. The conversation started with an appreciation of the works of novelist James Baldwin. “At Baldwin’s funeral,” said West, “I sat next to Stokely Carmichael. He’s a hard brother, and he cried like a baby.” West regarded Baldwin in the light of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Amiri Baraka, and his friend Toni Morrison. Then the conversation took a turn, touching briefly on the works of the slavery historians ­David Brion Davis and Leon Litwack, and the civil-rights historian Howard Zinn, ­before resting for a time on Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, the definers of ­twentieth-century Christian theology—both of whom taught at Union. About the literary critic Harold Bloom, West pronounced, “He’s not always right, but he’s always got something to say,” and then he veered straight through Martin Heidegger to praise his lesser-known disciple, Hans-Georg Gadamer."

 - This week's profile of Cornel West titled - I'm not kidding - "I Want To Be Like Jesus", by Lisa Miller.

Miller does manage the neat trick of being both fawning and dismayed in profiling West, apparently going with "how could such a great mind have so many personal problems," but none of West's admirers can outdo West himself. If you can get past the Jesus part - it's an actual quote that West says he doesn't see himeself as any of Jesus' disciples, but rather as Jesus, himself - there's still West polishing his resume over a string of appointments at Ivy League schools (the hook for the story, ostensibly, is that West is leaving Princeton for Union Theological Seminary), and name dropping like mad. It's not West's celebrity that gets me, or the self satisfaction; his Jesus complex is no doubt helped by the sycophants he's trained to follow him and who shower him with accolades and praise. Miller does a nice job, really, of highlighting the fact that all this mass love is no substitute for the fact that he has few friends, three bad marriages and even a fairly checkered set of professional connections (and really, when forced to choose between Larry Summers or Professor West, who's really worse?).

No, the thing that got me to throw down the artcle was the paragraph above, which to me laid bare the intellectual pomposity that annoys me when West talks in most interviews and appearances (I can only imagine what his classes would be like), the scattershot deployment of Big Intellectual Names You Must Know, the smattering of celebrity names and inside gossip that make you feel like an intimate (why else name drop of Stokely Carmichael?) , but the considered lack of thought about the ideas that are supposed to drive these big thinkers and their works. I feel very lucky to have had college professors who challenged me not to just read the assignments, but to think about what I read, synthesize my own ideas and apply the learnings to all sorts of aspects of life in general. It's not who you know, or how fabulously well read you are, I think it's what you do with the ideas that you discover along the way, and the life you put together as a result. Otherwise, why bother learning anything along the way?

West, the article suggests, is suffering now because he's one of the few major black intellectuals to have soured on President Obama, but that, of course, is of a piece with West's general approach: his over-the-top praise for Obama initially was both too much and too intended to get attention for himself, and his new contrarianism is just as self aggrandizing and just as poorly thought through (if you can stay long enough, Melissa Harris-Perry takes it apart in the article, with her usual combination of smarts and class). Maybe it's my life spent around collegiate types, and faculty in particular; but the best teachers, and the best friends, I find, carry less pretension and look more to share ideas rather than win the contest of Obscure References, because it's a better world when we all know a little bit more. West can probably win the name game... but that doesn't make you Christ. Or even Christ-like.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Here, There... Somewhere

Deepika Bahri, a friend and an associate professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, where Mr. Rushdie is a distinguished writer in residence, said that Mr. Rushdie was game for interacting online with any person or subject, highbrow or low. “I don’t think it really matters to him,” Ms. Bahri said, when asked how such behavior might affect public perception. “He does not fear or have concern about what people think or what it will do to his literary reputation.”

                 - Laura Holson, "From Exile To Everywhere," The NYT, Sunday Styles (emphasis mine)

"Everywhere," it seems, refers to Manhattan nightclubs and restaurants, not frequent flights to Atlanta, where Salman Rushdie is apparently "in residence."

This one isn't a "don't bother" because of the actual piece - like most Sunday/SunGay Styles articles, sure, it deals in trivialities, but it's not as bad as, say, building a makeup line off of the villains in The Hunger Games, or treating Kim Kardashian impersonators as art. No, what made me throw this one down was the subject of the article, Rushdie himself, who still, somehow, manages to garner this kind of coverage as if anything he's done literarily is remotely relevant or important. Even when The Satanic Verses was published, earning Mr. Rushdie death threats from fundamentlaist Islam (mostly Iran), Rushdie was more social butterfly than literary light; and time spent in hiding didn't particularly help ground him much better. But even the Times article notes that whole escapade ended after about ten years, and we're a good twenty years past that. And still, Rushdie is most notable for catting around with attractive women, frequenting nightclubs and bars, and vaguely talking about writing a new series for Showtime. And the difference between him and some other guy you run into on the Hotel Gansevoort rooftop? Not much, save that Rushdie is paid absurd sums to serve as things like "Distinguished Writer", no seriously... wait for it... "In residence" at Emory in Atlanta.  

Of course, Emory is welcome to throw its money away in any way it sees fit, but I just feel bad for the actual students at Emory, who deserve better than some Page Six Publicity Monster who can't even be bothered to take terms like "in residence" seriously.  And to be even fairer, this is hardly even one of the ten top reasons I'd never take Emory seriously, either (number one: Atlanta). None of which can be blamed on the Times, though it's hard to tell just how firmly Holson is relaying all of this seirously, or tongue in cheek. In either case, I couldn't be bothered to find out how this one turns out... because the thing really seems to write itself.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: And I'd Rather Be On A Yacht In Greece

Cory Finley, a recent Yale graduate, applied to work at Bridgewater Associates, a large Connecticut-based hedge fund, during his senior year of college. Mr. Finley, 23, said there was “definitely something tempting” about the structure and prestige of a high-paying finance job. But he decided to follow his dream of becoming a playwright instead.

            - Kevin Roose, "Wall Street's Latest Campus Recruiting Crisis" in the New York Times.

Now, look, I'm sure that the financial crisis and the pressure on banks and investment firms to limit bonuses has changed the career plans of some college seniors... but come on. The kid who says "I thought about investment banking, but then decided to be a playwright" is hardly a serious example of what, I suspect, is a dubious trend article anyway. Aside from Finley, Roose has found about one other college grad to speak to their recruiting experience, and padded the article with obvious quotes about how this week's disgruntled resignation letter in the Op-Ed section proves no one wants to work at Goldman Sachs. Is that a trend? Probably not. But back to our poet. Nothing says "I don't need to work" like a 23 year old who can take all the time he needs to craft a play. I know I wanted to take some time off after graduating college and write a novel. Unfortunately, I also needed to do things like eat, and have a roof over my head. Still do. But if anyone wants to fund my foray into novel writing, let me know. I'm totally worth it.

Panic On The Streets Of London

In a week where the "big news" has been about America's Financial Meltdown, I said to my mother that the real story, to me anyway, that was being overlooked was London. That ended the next day, when violence in London exploded into a much larger problem of riots and looting than anyone expected.  It only took a day for worrying about the stock market to seem quaint.

To my "connect the dots" mind, the story of the London riots - which still seem somewhat wildly surreal to me - will turn out, I suspect, to be the endgame of the story about phone hacking... which in turn, as we are seeing, is less a story about the press and more a story about London's Metropolitan Police Force.

Stay with me on this for a minute: the real scandal in the phone hacking story - which, one might recall, has led to the resignations of its top leaders just as rioting broke out - is the complicity of police forces in both the hacking and the failure to stop it or investigate it fully. That story, really, is the tip of an iceberg which the rioting, and the failure to police that effectively as well, becomes just another example of how flawed London's policing really is.

It's easy to fall into a familiar left/right argument about the riots - are we worried about root causes, or lawlessness? - but our American biases are really beside the point; the British have a problem that is both about root causes (poverty, injustice, and a sense of powerlessness) and violence and law breaking on a severe scale that a developed society simply cannot tolerate. 

And all of those problems, really, have everything to do with an ineffective, poorly deployed police force.

One of the things that's rarely mentioned when discussing the English (and, in this case, really them and really not us) is just how much of British society is still a deeply entrenched system of class distinctions that are quietly accepted and at times brutally enforced. We Americans are only barely exposed to the issues of "Council Housing", the bifurcated system of education which puts the elites into those tony boarding schools we hear so much about, but shunts the poor and working classes into schools of lesser quality. The list of ills for the poor and working classes in London goes on and on... we quaintly talk of "Dickensian", but we forget that what Charles Dickens described in the interactions of British people between classes is that some of those perceptions never really changed.  The upper class is still separated and superior, and still insulated from the suffering of the masses, suffering that, when it comes to the police, is done, in no small part, to perpetuate the insulation.

London's riots, in fact, are now news - much the way the Rodney King riots in LA became national news - mostly because it's clear, at this late moment, that no one is particularly safe. Your education, wealth, class, and privilege will not protect you when lawlessness reigns. Therefore, some will conclude... we can't have lawlessness.

We can't have lawlessness. And we cannot condone violence. But while Thoughtful People wring their hands over quelling the riots, bringing some sense of order (and justice) back into play... it would be a worthwhile moment if London's elites also took a hard look at the role of the class divisions in their society as a catalyst for revolt. Improving housing, education, opportunities for work and advancement will be crucial to improving a society bacl to a place where violence isn't just condemned, but where it also seems unnecessary.  

In the midst of panic, it's easy to condemn the violence, the looters, the breakdown of civility and order. But the point is, really, that these riots are not, however it seems from a distance, events that came out of the blue. It's why we expect more of police than simply beating back protesters and throwing people in jail. Britain has a choice - are the police merely the enforcers of an established social order, or are they an instrument of helping to establish fairness and a sense of justice for all? Order and a sense of calm, however uneasy, will eventually be restored... but until when? Until the next riot? Or until people believe that, whatever class they come from, all of them have a chance for a decent, positive quality of life? 

Teachable Moments... With Molly, Gail and Rachel

The transformation of Gail Collins into a latter day, New York based Molly Ivins is somehow sad to watch. I think Gail Collins was doing such a nice job of being Gail Collins – a savvy, feminist New Yorker with just a hint of jaded cynicism – that it’s near painful to watch her try and replicate Molly Ivins, and her personally brilliant style of sugar tipped, poisonous sarcasm.  The difference may seem nuanced, but Southerners, really, have cornered the market on seeming super nice while in fact being extra super bitchy.

In all of this, I blame Rachel Maddow: the more Collins becomes part of Maddow’s rotating cast of snarky columnists who share her darkly sarcastic take on the day’s events (It’s already ruined Chris Hayes and Gene Robinson, among others), the more her writing gets infected with trendy catchphrases (Maddow may well be the triumph of the Brooklyn Hipster on cable TV news), and the less Collins actually works to tether her otherwise trenchant commentary to deeper insights about the issues of the day.

There’s a string of recent NY Times columns to illustrate this, but let’s just take yesterday’s as the most recent. In it, Collins bemoans a generalized trend of increasingly turning over public education functions to private businesses – from for-profit colleges to charter school management firms, to teach certification enterprises – to make a case that this is proof that Republicans are terrible and education should be left to… well, Democrats. And I mention Ivins, because one of Collins key examples, and not isolated, is a long anecdote about for-profit teacher certification in Texas.

(This is probably as good a time as any to note that, since the New York Times has instituted that bizarre paywall scheme where you can only see a small number of articles for free in a month, I will no longer link to the Times. First, it’s a waste of my limited free article cache to look for article links; and second, clicking through without realizing it’s the Times wastes yours. If nothing else, I stand for the notion that newspaper articles should run free on the internet.)

Ivins, of course, was renowned for being an arch Texas liberal who made mincemeat of the failures and foibles of the Texas legislature, itself a spectacular, scandalous enterprise full of big characters and legendary outrageousness. And while that’s kind of similar to the amazingly dysfunctional mess-ups of the New York state legislature in Albany, it’s also very different. Collins has a finely honed sense of how to convey the mix of hopelessness and squalid decay of Albany and how it eats nearly every good thing and person put into it… but trying to pin her own snark onto Texas comes off – as it should – as condescending, a kind of northeastern class superiority that tends to undermine her sarcasm as she deploys it.

There’s a lot of attention on education at this moment – a symptom, I suspect, of the painful choices local governments have to make as our current economic realities dictate. Charter schools, teachers unions and pensions, vouchers for private schools… all of these issues stem, primarily from the reality that local governments can’t afford business as usual approaches to education spending. And along with for-profit colleges, the choices we are having to make, as parents, students, and members of our communities, are changing the nature of American education. It’s fair, I suppose, to bemoan the changes and note their negative impacts. But, reading between the lines of Collins’ dark cynicism, the alternatives are almost nonexistent. It’s basically “let’s not change anything, because the alternative are these terrible ideas that are terrible, in many ways, because conservatives like them.” It’s just not an answer.

I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate here and say that for-profit companies represent a potential positive development in education; my opposition is a combination of my Mom’s sense that things like people’s health and education should probably not be run for a profit… but also my own sense that, in fact, education is not a profitable enterprise, no matter how you try and provide it. The for-profit technical colleges may make money, but there’s a reason that the training they produce is held to a lower standard than that of not for profit schools. There’s also a reason that such options are proliferating, having everything to do with a fetishized notion that a “college degree” somehow makes a better, more employable person… and everything to do with an economic reality that training, say, to be a nurse or even a nurse’s aide, will at least get a job that pays the bills.

This new, Ivinized and Maddow-ish version of Gail Collins can, easily, unload her sarcastic venom on the various, crazy details of education policy in various localities… but the larger problem we have is the kind of thing I think a savvy New Yorker with vast experience and a jaded eye could inject some real insight: Charter schools and vouchers and all the rest are really details in an education debate about something very basic. Either we commit to a system of public education for children – and frankly, we don’t really have any serious alternative to it – and spend the money for it, or we don’t. Either way, there will no clear cost-benefit analysis that will prove we did the right thing.  Either way… there isn’t really a joke to be told.

 

The Post I Never Wrote About Cathie Black

As someone who grew up reading Ms. magazine, I feel especially invested in the career of Cathie Black.

Among her many accompishments, Black was the first publisher of Ms., a risky move for someone interested in the fairly corporate side of magazine ad sales and management. Black helped develop a generation of ad saleswomen, and to break barriers in advertising for women - such as convincing car companies that women might be more interested in whether a car runs well than whether or not it's pretty.

Black went on to a series of jobs running women's magazines at Hearst, until eventually she ran the publishing side of Hearst's operations. She oversaw Good Housekeeping and Harper's Bazaar, among many, and was considered quite good at what she did.

So when Michael Bloomberg announced that he was making Cathie Black Chancellor of New York City schools, I too was torn. Here's someone I deeply admire in one context taking on a role in another that just seemed well, completely wrong for her. And for New York.

I folowed the travails of Black's nomination, more out of annoyance with Bloomberg and his ham-handed management style of late - it's the fashionable thing, in his third term, for New Yorkers to complain about him - than anything about Black. Even as it turned that she had no education credentials, that she'd have to get special waivers to fill the job, that her kids went to private school... still, I figured there must be some reason she was taking on this huge role.

As the story unfolded, I thought a number of times about writing about it. I haven't written about education in a while, and I thought this would be a way into the story... but as I kept reading about the issues, and watched Black flail, my ideas for writing never quite came together.

And now, 3 months into her tenure, Black's resigned and been quickly replaced, and New Yorkers are left bewildered, wondering what just hit us.

Best. Speech. Ever. As Usual.

Before he'd even finished speaking - which was as good a definition of "rush to judgment" you're likely to get - the usual suspects were already offering their familiar refrain: "The best speech he ever gave," "he hit it out of the park" and on and on. Today will surely be filled with more of those exquisitely uncomfortable expressions of hero worship and mass love that seem to follow President Obama, sometimes quietly, often loud and gushing, Don't get between the hero and his adoring crowd.

The Tucson "Memorial Service" - if it can be called that - is already taking its place in the "legendary" and "historic" pantheon of those ever great, ever best, speeches that President oBama gives at regular intervals. Almost like some doppelganger reflection of the low standards applied to the Bush Presidency - where merely reading the text without stumbling became the low bar for his supporters of his greatness - President Obama endures a standard where his most recent remarks are somehow always his best, the most wonderful, the most ideal. It is the best of all possible worlds. How could it be otherwise?

It will no doubt seem churlish to some to suggest that, from a distance, absent both the "Obama wonderful" sensibilities and the pump priming for mass grieving on cue, that the event, and especially the President's speech, tended to fall flat, and seemed not especially appropriate, or on point. From the cheering, screaming crowds better suited to a Basketball final than a moment to grieve or mourn; to the generic, banal thoughts the President offered as (fairly cold) comfort, nothing last night seemed to work quite the way it should. And the net result, in the long run, is the net result President Obama has garnered from all his "best ever" speeches: good will with a short half life, and the sure sense that after his remarks, nothing really is or will be any different.

The Shape Of Things To Come

Rather than paying attention to too much of the absurd maneuverings in Congress - yesterday was a particularly intense dance of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" votes, failure to pass several other things in the Senate, and some growing (but pointless) dissension over the tax proposal - I'd suggest looking across the pond. If you want to see what's heading our way, watching the scenes that unfolded in London yesterday would be a good place to start.

Following on a series of especially tough financial measures passed through Parliament (the result, you may recall, of this year's painful elections in the UK, where Conservatives finally managed to form a government by hooking up with the small Liberal Democrat party), there was a vote yesterday to raise college tuitions at Britain's universities. The tuition hikes - which will top out at 9,000 pounds, or asome $14,000 - are a major increase from around 3,000, where they were a couple of years ago.

Yhe story of yesterday, though, isn't really the hikes; it's the large, often violent protests which occurred in Central London while the votes were happening in Parliament.

After a day of riots and attacks on police and far more protestors than many expected, the day was capped off when the car of Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, was attacked on their way to the theater yesterday evening.  Though the Prince and his wife made it to the event, they were rushed home afterward in a police truck, rather than their limo, which was damaged by the rioters (a window was smashed, and the car was doused with white paint).

As symbolic events go, this strikes me as pretty big. The votes in Parliament yesterday were themselves painful - the hikes went thorough with a bare 21 vote majority, though the governing coalition has a comfortable 84 seat margin of control - and could indicate a breakdown within the governing coalition (3 Liberal Democratic Ministerial aides resigned in protest over the hikes) that could result in more elections, more turmoil and greater uncertainty. At the very least, protestors attacking members of the royal family are never a good sign in England, and the blowback should be pretty interesting in the coming days and weeks (I found myself wondering yesterday - before  heard about the attack on the car - if the royal family wouldn't make some gesture to relieve the pain of the tuition hikes out of their fortune).

Though the British system has its differences , these dilemmas about things like college tuition are harbingers of the kind of painful decisions Americans face in the coming months and years about government spending, cuts, and decisions about which services can go on, and which need to be cut. This is why the tax debate is so absurd and capitulating to continuing the Bush tax cuts continuance is so disastrous: lost revenues will make the decisions to cut services and raise fees that much more painful, the results that much worse. Already we've seen - especially in California, which is really in the worst shape of all the states - student protests about tuition hikes at state schools, ugly tensions in the K-12 debates for public schools, and serious discussions about ending Medicaid programs in states over the coming expansion of benefits to larger swaths of the population. These questions will not get easier, the choices less painful.

All over Europe, there's been high tension, demonstrations and acting out over painful government funding crises. And while conservatives like to send out shrill alarms about the US becoming like Greece, where a huge collapse in their government bond financing still threatens the overall stability of financial markets, the analogy is imprecise. It's not that the US overall could be Greece. It's that, for our purposes, California may already be Greece. And we as a nation are the EU, unable to find a workable solution to keep a member state from falling into financial meltdown.

It's worth keeing in mind that fear - fear of financial disaster, fear of violence, fear of making mistakes - underllies a lot of what appears to be paralysis in Washington and elsewhere in the US when it comes to making hard choices about our financial issues. The dark mutterings about what rising long term unemployment might mean, the unwillingness of Congressional Democrats or the President to actually let the Bush tax cuts expire... behind them is a fear of riots and chaos that's rarely expressed but hovers, waiting to take shape. It's why the anger and marches and "Tea Party" machinations can't, entirely, be ignored or just dismissed: if this coalesces into something, if serious protests break out... there's no telling what could happen. Watching events unfold in London yesterday, I got a slight shudder thinking that, well, yes, that's what could happen here. And more and more... I'm not sure we have any idea how to stop it.  Or the will to try.

Seventeen, Again

Apparently, I decided to take some time off after Thanksgiving.

It's a lot of things - the holiday season is upon us, and apparently, I've decided to try and make a serious go of working in the coffee biz, with the encouragement of my boss and her boss as well. The weird thing is, it's not that I have nothing to say; I'm feeling particularly energized, just now. Just too busy to write.

Also, Chanukah was early this year.

So, getting back to it has been a challenge, but here I am, for the weekend, visiting my old pal J. in B.

It's always weird, coming back to my old home town; sitting in the mall food court - which didn't exist when I was in high school - seeing the familiar expressions and atiitudes of what it was to be a teenager in this neck of the woods. I don't live this life anymore - not exactly - but the familiarity of it was both odddly reassuring and thoroughly disconcerting.

I've been thinking, a bit, about my high school experiences, particularly in these days of worries about gay teen suicides and the appeal of "it gets better" (when, honestly, I'm not sure it does; it gets different... but not necessarily better). It's easy for gay people - especially my age or a little older - to rewrite the years of teen angst as, well, angst-ier than they were. It wasn't necessarily fun being weird and gay and different... but truth be told (at least when I try to be honest with myself about it), mostly things were pretty okay and, in retrospect, nothing all that bad actually happened.

The thing about visiting J - or writing over e-mail, as we do, mostly, these days - is finding a kindred spirit. We didn't know each other during our high school experiences, but the commonalities still shine through. Towson, gay, preppy... too smart for our own good.... these things define us, join us. It's not all of who we are, especially these days; but those touchstones are what help make us who we are.

It's easy and reductive to say this is all "old friends... aren't they great?" It's more than that, for me, anyway. It feels like, well, I'm seventeen again; like I'm looking not at life as it is today, but the shadows of a life I led twenty, thirty years ago - with all these ghosts hovering around me. I can say that now, and oddly, it doesn't sting like they said it would (that said, I can't imagine turniong 50, as I will, in 5 years).

I just don't have a lot of interest for living in the past; I don't want, or need, to go back and revisit this past life, those old feelings. It's not uncomfortable, it doesn't dredge up a lot of bad memories... but I left this place and went on to do other things. In the conversation we're having (real time!), about how rambling and all over the place this piece seemed as I began to write it (i.e. a few sentences ago), J asks, "is the point of this piece that it's great to have lots of good sex in your twenties?" Yes. Yes, it is... but that's not all of it. Not exactly, anyway. I mean... if that were all, I too, would go on You Tube to tell the kids "It gets better!" And how. But that - like the mythical gay land - is not the whole of this story, not the whole of my story. I live in a different place now; not the physical place.... but the life of the mind, and the heart, I thought, for a long time, that I liked feeling, always, that I was still seventeen. And here it is, feeling like I'm actually seventeen, again... and I don't think I need to stay here that long.

(And, at this point, I must say "Thanks!" to J for his attentive edits to this post; he's offered to provide the service full-time, for a small fee.... when I can afford him.)

Morning Morsels: A Healthy Diet Of Common Sense

As bad as this Tuesday's election results were, and as many problems as the results perpetuate (and how few will be solved), there does some to be a resurgence, in some quarters, of saying some sensible things that make common sense. And though I spent some moments this morning (I wake up early, and screaming) being annoyed iwth some of the pointless bloilerplate of lefty apologists (Please stop me before I read Steve Benen or Mori Dinauer ever again!), I also was blown away by some sharp assessments of things that might actually matter. So for this morning, a few morsels of ideas that might get us to talk about the things that really need fixing:

1. Suzy Khimm, the healthcare crisis reporter at Mother Jones, has been guest posting at Ezra Klein's Washington Post blog, and she offers the most clear-eyed assessment of the painful debate about Medicaid that's coming, discussing the decision in Texas to consider dropping out of the program altogether:

To be sure, there's no question that Medicaid has been costly for state governments, and it's understandable that the lingering recession would make state officials feel panicky about the future expansion. There are deeper programs still: the cash-strapped program only pays providers 66 percent of Medicare reimbursement rates, making it hard for Medicaid patients to find doctors who accept their coverage. Such dilemmas strengthen the argument for simply federalizing the entire Medicaid program, protecting it from the ideological and fiscal battles on the state level.

But until the day comes that a better Medicaid overhaul is possible, states must also realize that simply trying to wash their hands of the problem by stripping Medicaid coverage from the poor — without providing a reasonable alternative — won't be the answer either. The uninsured poor will continue to get sick. They will continue to seek out health care. And many institutions — including state governments — will still end up paying for it.

2: Ezra's also been featuring his pal Dana Goldstein, whose focus on education issues leads to a great point about where "progressives" and conservatives find common ground on the wrong aspects of education reform:

This morning I heard a lecture by British education expert Geoff Whitty on the emerging similarities between school reform efforts in the Obama-era United States and the Cameron-era U.K., particularly around the concepts of school choice and accountability. Whitty was critical of policy makers and the media for selectively citing research findings in support of charter schools and — more interestingly and counter-intuitively — for being obsessed with finding “what works” in education and other social policy areas.

The “what works” framework, Whitty argued, tends to privilege attempts to create alternative administrative structures (like charter schools), when in fact, other types of interventions may be equally — if not more — effective.

3. Via the entirely hopeless Steve Benen, Ross Douthat makes the best case I've seen that Republicans are going to do themselves in by having no real plan for the issues they ran on:

Today’s Republicans, by contrast, know what they’re against (the health care bill, tax increases, cap and trade) but have a world of trouble saying what they might actually be for.

Instead, they tend to fall back on the reassuring story they’ve been spinning for the last two years, in which they lost to the Democrats only because they failed to hold the line on spending. It’s a narrative that flatters conservative self-regard, while absolving Republicans of the obligation to think too deeply about policy. All they need to do is say “no” to bigger government, and the rest will take care of itself.

This strategy has worked for them in opposition, thanks to the Democratic Party’s haste and hubris. But it isn’t a blueprint for governance, and it ducks the real reasons that the Republicans lost their majority. While the Bush administration overspent, it wasn’t spending and deficits that turned the country against conservative domestic policy between 2004 and 2008. It was the fact that the Republican majority seemed to have no answers to Middle America’s economic struggles, and no appetite for the structural reforms required to keep the United States competitive.

This is even more true today. The United States is facing three overlapping crises — the short-term challenge of a jobless recovery, the long-term crisis of entitlement spending and, in the medium term, an economy that wasn’t delivering for the middle class even before the financial crisis struck. The Democratic Party may have the wrong answers to these problems. But the Republican Party as an institution often seems to have no answers whatsoever.

4. Over at Open Left, Mike Lux offers some of the best breakdown of why middle/working class voters shifted to voting for Republicans. I don't share his hopeful assessment of how Democrats can fix their problems, but this seems dead on:

I wrote early in 2009 that voters were going to be in a very bad mood in November of 2010, and that this would be a blame election, where economically stressed swing voters would be wanting to take their misery out on someone. I was certainly right about that, but here's the ironic thing: I suggested that since I thought it was unlikely we could get them to blame the economy on Bush since we were in charge now, that our best hope was to get them to blame it on Wall Street. They did, that 35% who laid the blame on Wall Street's door were primarily the middle class swing voter bloc in this election, but they associated us Democrats and Obama with Wall Street more than Republicans. The TARP bailout and Obama and Geithner's vigorous defense of it, the kid glove treatment of the big banks at the hands of Geithner, the AIG and big bank bonuses that closely followed, the failure to prosecute or break up the Too Big To Fail banks: it all came together in those angry middle class voters' minds as Obama being associated with the same Wall Street actors people were blaming for their economic problems. The fact that once the financial reform bill that had some important wins for the middle class was passed, Democrats barely ever talked about it again didn't help.

5. And finally, David Sirota(!) over at Open Left takes apart the Olbermann mess and highlights the "Hollywood Minute" problem with our celebrity happy culture:

Most Americans struggling in this economic crisis probably don't even know and/or don't even care who Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or their counterparts on the Right are. That's no knock on Olbermann or Maddow at all - I have great respect for them and for the work they do. It's just a statement of reality that only seems shocking to uber-political junkies who, ensconced in the political media bubble, tend to overstate the cultural penetration of the political media class. And if members of the Silent Majority - ie. those outside that bubble - caught wind of the media back-and-forth over the Olbermann suspension (granted, a big if), it probably served as proof that the political media class really is narcissistic enough to believe the Broadcast News adage that they're the story - even during a Great Recession when media controversies shouldn't be the story.

Again, I'm happy that MSNBC only ended up suspending Olbermann for two days, and it's probably a good thing in the long run that the whole situation highlighted questions of ideology and partisanship in professional journalism. But it also highlights some really disturbing truths about the celebrity-prioritizing nature of our political activist culture - truths that, if left unaddressed, will likely continue to make it difficult to organize around the most important non-celebrity causes like, ya know, fixing the economy.