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I'll Wait...

The news, these days, seems stuck on two storylines: covering the wave of uinrest across the Middle East and breathlessly reporting every minor step in Washington's painful budget process (chances are, that's followed locally by news in your state about the state level budget crises).

If I'm not writing much these days, and especially not much about politics, it's because I think a lot of this budget maneuvering is meaningless. Republicans in the House couldn't get their most extreme cuts past the Senate or signed by the President, and the President's new budget can't pass the House, and most of the speeches and news interviews are posturing with few real suggestions of a workable compromise. If nothing changes, then there's little likelihood of anything getting done. And for now... I'll wait and see what develops, but I don't expect much.

Everybody's got - well every political junkie like me, anyway, all nine of ya - their pet budget issues, and mine, as I've said is healthcare; or in the current language of budget talks 2 of the big 3 "entitlements" of Medicare and Medicaid. Like many on all sides of the budget discussion, I tend to agree that without some attempt to tackle health care costs through these two programs, it's impossible to significantly redue the deficit (you could cut defense spending, another unpopular topic, but you'd stil be stuck). So my test for any seriousness in these discussions of deficit reduction is: how seriously are they planning to reform Medicare or Medicaid?

By that measure, I'd say we're miles, and years, away from any serious or deep change. President Obama's budget did essentially nothing to tackleeither of these problems, and he admitted, basically, that he's not doing anything until Republicans offer a proposal. Republicans haven't offered much, either. John Boehner says he wants to remove President Obama's Medicare cuts from the Affordable Care Act and replace them with other "market based" reforms, and Paul Ryan now says he wants to turn Medicare into a "defined contribution" program, where the government subsidizes private health insurnce for seniors (yes, off in the distance there, you can see "mandate" in the offing), and then a system of "defined payments" for Medicaid, which means block grants to states.

Both are pretty much useless. Boehner's new version of "repeal and replace" is about as unserious as the "cuts" that Democrats have claimed to have enacted, but haven't and likely won't come to pass. Though Dems have cut funding for Medicare Advantage, which allowed some seniors to obtain HMO coverage rather than use traditional Medicare (which matters especially to seniors in rural areas where services may be scarce), Congress already put off, again, reforms to the reimbursement fees to doctors and has no plans to follow through on other cuts. Boehner's "market based" reforms is basically code for restoring the Medicare Advantage money, and some lip service about "waste fraud and abuse" but they have even less stomach for reducing reimbursements, which would be the crux of reforming the healthcare market. So much for "market based."

Ryan's proposal is interesting, but unlikely to amount to much; like much of his "Roadmap", it's a proposal Republicans support until actual hard choices have to be made (remember how they were cutting $100 million from this year's government spending, only to get to about $68?). Ryan's proposal would theoretically take the government out of the "price setting" role it has in healthcare through Medicare's reimbursement rates... but that's illusory because the "defined contribution" role, by its definition, would do the same thing. Also, there's a reason Medicare was started in the first place, and it's because private insurers don't particularly want to insure the oldest and sickest members of our population who require the most and costliest care. Ryan's Medicaid idea is even more fanciful: states alreeady can barley cover Medicaid costs, and that's under a formula that offers some flexibility to get additional federal money. Take even that small cushion away, and you're just making healthcare for poor people that much worse

The main point, though,  is that Ryan's proposals - or Boehner's - don't exist as legislation. Indeed, there's no indication that Ryan can write a bill with either proposal that can pass the House - even the Medicaid plan, which might be attractive to the House majority, will elicit howls from state Governors, mainly Republicans - never mind, again, the Senate or the President's desk. Better still, I don't think Ryan can even muster the relatively painful exercise of following through on soke sort of reimbursement reform in Medicare fees (which, by formula, would also affect Medicaid), and that's just basic - a House majority that can't cut costs by, well, cutting them... can't claim seirousness on deficit reduction.

In some sense all this roiling in Washington - and the implicit threat to voters of "don't keep yelling at us to cut something... or we will" - is pretending to make something not hard look very hard and complicated. It would be eay to cut the budget: just stop spending as much. The problem is, a government that actually spends less would be a government doing less, and that, in turn, would make people's lives harder. The math is not the problem... it's the potential results that are where the real pain lies.

Ryan and others are already trying to calim that "political demagoguery" is the problem, as a way to protect themselves from the negative fallout of proposals to cut Medicare or Social Security (remember, no one speaks for the poor, so Medicaid protests won't be heard). The harsher reality is that historically voters have punished Congresses that have cut those programs, and my bet - as many others do - is that voters wouldn't hesitate, in 2012, to do much the same thing. And for now, fear of being punished is really the beginning and end of why nothing has really happened on the budget. I'll wait... but I think we're going to find, in the coming months, that all of the notions of breathess drama and pitched budget battles will end in a muddle of both sides doing very little to reduce spending, or deficits, especially when it comes to the big, painful decisions needed on healthcare. And that's not necessarily good fiscal policy... but given this crop of politicians, I think failure and stasis may be the best result.

What I'm Watching

Among a number of things I've been meaning to write about - which would fill something like, say, a five day gap in posting - is something about the current television season. One hard part is that "current" is such a cloudy term when discussing TV these days; the old paradigm of a TV season starting in fall and ending in May is definitely out the window... yet structurally, the various runs of series don't necessarily stray from that all that far (I suspect that the best examples of shows that pay no attention to old notions of a "season" are really the Reality and contest shows, anyway).

A couple of caveats: I don't have HBO, so don't ask me about Boardwalk Empire. And I don't have Showtime, though probably only Californication still captures my interest (I frankly admit to being baffled by the fascination with Dexter, what I know of it). And I'm not sure, just now, that pay cable is essential viewing anyway. I've foud plenty to watch without it.

And so, herewith the shows that have captured my interest, and probably explain, on any given evening, why I'm not writing. It's roughly by the days they originally air... though really, a lot of my viewing happens by DVR. That, I thiunk is the most brilliant invention ever. :)

Friday Evening Flotsam

 

jinb

The Revolutionary Road That Cuts Through Jerusalem

I don't generally write much about Israel; it's a personal choice, driven by the feeling that discussions can get very contentious, and because I have a lot of friends and family very invested in the discussion. On all sides.

I also think that it's generally less productive to talk about the current unrest, in Egypt and elsewhere, in terms of Israel-specific conclusions. It's a very American thing to see the Middle East as primarily a story about Israel first, a bad habit that has, in its way, contributed the events that are now unfolding.

Still, we're in a moment where the situation in Egypt is both very fluid and very static; until Mubarak can be firmly transitioned out, it's hard to know how the protests will play out. This could all unravel tomorrow, or it could slowly devolve fom now until September's elections (or beyond).

In the meantime, it might be worth considering, at least for now, why these events, especially in Egypt, probably signal a tectonic shift for Israel, and for an American foreign policy driven in no small measure by the Israeli peace process.

A lot of people have talked about the fact that Egypians are not as supportive of the historic peace treaty with Israel as Hosni Mubarak has been officially. There's considerable concern about what could happen if Egypt held the kind of open elections - with a real chance for a different kind of oppositional government - in terms of maintaining a peaceful, settled arrangement with Israel. That alone may explain a great deal of the heavy dithering by the Obama Administration on trying to manage change in the region.

Whatever happens, though, it's likely that sometime this year we'll be looking at an Egyptian without Hosni Mubarak and less certainty about a major piece of the Israeli/Arab peace puzzle. And I think one interesting shift, one that might finally shake some of the recent complacency that has stalled movement between Israel and the Palestinians, will follow as a result. And that shift is that Israel's hard right will no longer be able to pretend, based on one 30 year old treaty, that they actually know how to coexist peacefully with the Arab world on their own terms.

Ever since Camp David, it's been kind of a given in discussions of Mideast peace that based on that treaty, Israel has known "how to do peace." This has given their foreign policy team a seriousness in public perception and in negotiations that is rarely questioned. When talks failed during the last year of the Clinton Presidency, or when the process became a mess under George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice, in both cases it was generally suggested that the failures rested squarely with the palestinians. This despite an increasingly hardline Israeli leadership that was less interested in negotiated compromises and more interested in getting something for giving up very little. Settlements have only grown in the West Bank. Gaza has been increasingly isolated and cut off.

But we know Israel can "do peace"... because they made a deal with Egypt. Once. Thirty plus years ago.

It would, in some ways, be a welcome change to a certain kind of complacency to begin to suggest that Israel, as well as the Arab world, has some work to do to get a serious peace process going in the right direction. An Israeli population that cannot take even their western neighbor as a settled question is a population that might ask more questions of the hard right political parties... and give the more compromise minded Labor Party another chance to lead on the forign policy questions with more sensitivity to things that might need to be given up. Or maybe the Kadima/Likud hardliners will get to make the case that peace, itself, like a "two country solution" is a kind of Western fantasy that can never happen. At best, there will be a tense staredown and grudging acceptance.

American foreign policy would, in many ways, be a better, more sensible policy if we treated Israel less like a sacred mission and more like a nation, among many nations, that needs to be treated respectfully and fairly... and part of worldview that balances Israel's needs against neighboring countries, which are also important to US interests.

...Of course, that brings up a mucbh longer discussion that I care about passionately - figuring out how to define Israel less as a religious state and more as a nation, like other nations, that is defined by territory and political structures. But for the moment, I think it would help to just contemplate the Revolutionary Road that Egypt is on... and what it does when it reaches their border with Israel.

Molting And Revolting

My general silence may suggest, reasonably, that I've been feeling a little stuck. Which is kind of true, and kind of not - there's a number of things I want to take up - work has been a little stressful and busy, and I'm a little tired and achy. But as I thought about it this morning driving to work, I realized that part of feeling uninspired, just now, is another round of internal changes that I am still trying to process.

Writing is many things for me - a way to express opinions, a way to connect with people and debate ideas... and a way to chronicle, at times, some of what I find along my journey. I'm not a big fan of the latter, partly because I try very hard to steer clear of the overly self indulgent navel gazing one finds there, and partly because, as you may have noticed, I try to stay kind of anonymous out here (the pressures to Facebook, I have to say, are growing immense). But every so often... there's a moment to try and get some of that into the story.

In recent weeks I find that a number of personal events have gotten me thinking about who I am and where I am and just where it is I want to go. There's no immediate need to make big life changing decisions, but my thinking, especially this morning, lately is that we rarely notice how all the small, seemingly minor decisions add up, in the end, to major change. In the past couple of months, for me... not much has happened. Yet today, thinking about the life I have... I realized it was strkingly different from my life just a short while ago. I work in a different store. I drive a different car. I have lost old friends and made new ones. I do different things in my spare time. I write less... and yet, in many ways, the writing is even more central to who I am, and how I think about what I do.

It's taken me a long (long) time to come around to the idea that life is a journey, and the point is not a destination - here is not a place - but what happens along the way. As I wrap my mind around that, it's made me think differently about change, and the idea that we are all constantly evolving. Lately, I think of the metaphor of molting - a caterpillar into a butterfly, that sort of thing. I always wonder, does the caterpillar - or the butterfly - see the change in the way we see it, from outside? Does one thing so obviously transform into the other? Or does the thing that walked suddenly discover it can fly?

And if the people and things who knew you as a caterpillar now meet the butterfly, will they like what they see? Will they understand that some things have changed... but perhaps others have not?

I feel, lately, more of a sense of doing things that piss people off - mostly unconsciously, certainly not deliberately - and not quite knowing whether or not I want forgiveness. I don't like pissing people off - I never have - but I also feel, lately, as if being this me, this slightly different me, comes with that result. I am now a person who may, at times, piss you off. Does that still work for you? If not... I'm not sure there's something that can be done about it.

To extrapolate a bit, I think this notion of change - of molting, of a gradual process where big changes are only noticed after the fact, and there is no real conclusion - may be a more useful way to think about social change, like, say, in Egypt. Molting... revolting... pissing people off, change creates a kind of tension. The trouble, I think, comes in trying to stop it, control it... or even try to impose a storyline on it. Over my life, I've found I like the tension, the uncertainty, the ever changing picture of the world... and who I am within it. And I'm finally trying less to impose a storyline upon it, or me. I'm beginning, just beginning to find out who I am. And tomorrow, really, it could be something quite different. And the story goes on.

Apparently "Neiman Marcus Neo-Marxist" Wasn't That Far Off

My dear friend Red and I have a longstanding joke about how to reconcile our upscale personal tastes with our overarching concerns for making sure government helps those most in need. "Limousine Liberal" is, of course, the old term for this, but we felt the concept needed a more descriptive, updated, sobriquet. And so... we eventuallt settled on "Neiman Marcus Neo-Marxist" (I think we originally called it "Neiman Marcus Neo-Liberal," but that wasn't sufficiently radicalized).

In any case, apparently we're not alone. At least not to Neiman Marcus. This morning, scrolling down through Daily Kos, I stopped dead at their paid ad:

 

 

I suppose there's a point here - a Versailles related one, even - about how the Great Orange Evil shows its true colors with advertising aimed, obviously, at an upper middle class consumer; clearly Neiman's thinks there's enough commonality between its products and Daily Kos readers to at least test an ad placement. And yes, in a number of ways, just thinking about that can be disconcerting. On the other hand... why do we (on the left) sort of retroactively assume that being liberal and liking nice things is somehow mutually exclusive? Can't we be pro-Choice and pro-Prada?

Ponder those class issues, my comrades. And later we can discuss them over lunch at Saks. :)

Friday Evening Floralude

 

jinb

 

For 2012, It's Not Who's In, It's Who's Out

If it weren't for Egypt, most likely these snowy days would be filled with Washington political hacks attempting to start their next favorite guessing game: predicting the shape and outcome of the 2012 elections.

Already, 2012 is shaping up to be not much of a story: it seems likely that President Obama will be a 2 term President, with little coherent opposition  to provide an alternative that can attract a majority of voters.

For a lot of pro-Obama Democrats, this is good news; already, there's a certain amount of crowing about the weakness of the potential Republican field, the lack of dissension within the Democratic Party, and the ill fated attempts to build any kind of third party alternative.

I tend to agree with all those points... but find them depressing.

Instead of a robust, lively election debate, it does seem clear that we're probably stuck with - Oy, Versailles metaphors! - a likely coronation scenario, where the President's worst enemy will be himself (and, given his past performance, I wouldn't dismiss his ability to shoot himself in the foot, given the opportunity). That's not great for our democracy, or our political debate, which could use some fresh discussions about more than the usual left/right divides.

But rather than grouse about the (Oy! Versailles!) status quo, let's discuss the GOP problems. If nothing else, it's more fun, and it's one place where even the least Obama loving liberals can agree: We Don't Want That.

A Few More Words From The Terrible TV Criticism Of Alessandra Stanley

It's false equivalency time!

On Monday’s episode of  MTV could show minors in the kind of flagrante delicto that is usually reserved for mature audiences. Yet most adult Americans still can’t watch Al Jazeera English on television — even now, when the world is transfixed by images of Egypt in revolt.

It seems like a perverse application of free speech. But sex is sexier than foreign affairs and it certainly sells better. Freedom of expression is guaranteed to all Americans, but mostly it follows the money.

Yes, that's right, Alessandra Stanley has decided to link Skins and the Egyptian Revolution, as presented by Al Jazeera!

Can you figure out how to veer from discussing the slanted coverage of a news network to the sleazy business of selling teen sexuality on a scripted British import? Neither can Stanley, though she lurches all over the place, and eventually settles on "ratings" as her basis for cable systems not carrying Al Jazeera but still carrying MTV. That's not "analysis", that's desperation.

And, as if that's not enough, Stanley isn't done throwing in the kitchen sink:

To be fair, Al Jazeera English may be providing the most up-close and personal coverage round-the-clock, but it isn’t necessarily the best. And “Skins” isn’t the worst series for young people on cable, not by far. That would be “Jersey Shore.”

"To be fair"? How about "to try and throw in yet another complete non sequitour"?

And "Jersey Shore"? Seriously?

None of this is necessarily surprising - Stanley's long been the best example of worst criticism the Times has to offer... which is saying something in a pool that includes, still, the blatherings of Ben Brantley. Still, even for Stanley's usual lousy standards, this column was especially, awesomely, bad.

It's a shame, because the Times has actually been putting some effort into recasting its Arts pages, improving the quality of coverage, smoothing out its terrible instincts for flashy trash and simultaneous Upper East Side superiority (Which explains the Music department's apparent schizophrenic love of gangsta rap and opera). The Sunday section is almost readable again, Brantley is balanced with the perceptive analysis of Charles Isherwood, Manohla Dargis seems to be less and less of a presence on the film side. But for all the good... there's still Stanley and her astonishingly lame TV reviews. Does this nightmare ever end?

By the way, just to wrap up how lousy this column is: the problem with Skins is that it's not very good, which is the kind of situation where pushing the envelope on salaciousness is meant to cover weak writing and fairly bad acting (it's hard to find great acting talent under 18, and the market is seriously tapped out). Skins is mostly further proof that British shows rarely transfer well to America (The Office is an exception that actually helps prove the rule). Al Jazeera's inability to increase its presence on American cable systems deserves a full, separate article. And Jersey Shore's popularity, while mind blowing, is not inexplicable, and mostly a reminder that America's television habits are not generally, a reflection of good taste. Which, really, should help Alessandra Stanley, and still, somehow, doesn't.

Egypt, When We Haven't Finished Yet

So President Mubarak won't run for reelection. Glad that one got solved.

A lot of people were struck by President Obama's suggestion that the transition from Mubarak ought to start now; I was struck by the fact that he referred to the protests and the protesters in the past tense. It was his way of saying - to me anyway - "nice work, now let's move on to the next phase. You can all go home."

More than anything, I think the American interest in Egypt - as in most countries - is to see stability and orderly transitions. Revolutions, war, chaos... these do not help American interests. They are situations beyond our control. Order is something we like to see restored. And historically, we've accepted as a nation some of the worst political arrangements and lousiest authoritarians to see stability succeed over anything else.

Still, I think President's Obama attempts at a capstone were premature; a sort of "nice try. but you won't get off that easy." For one thing, it was obvious that Mubarak's plan to step down after elections were held - sometime in the fall of this year - was both stupidly obvious stalling and equally obvious agreement to a non-issue. Mubarak is 83. His time on the national stage was bound to come to an end soon. And there's just too much opportunity for mischief over months and months of waiting for elections, results, and a transition. And the Egyptian protesters, both last night and this morning, seem to have clearly rejected the appeasing gesture as any kind of final answer.

I don't think it would be entirely fair to criticize President Obama for not handling Egypt as a situation all that well; there are not a lot of good answers there, and American interests are both easy to see and kind of hard to define. At some point, though, I think it will be reasonable to wonder why the Administration seemed so lost as events spun out of control, and why so little thought was put towards Egypt's transition after Mubarak. For a minute, it looked as though Mohammed ElBaradei was a workable alternative; that seems to have petered out to some extent. The Muslim Brotherhood doesn't seem like an answer, especially for US interests. And Mubarak has worked hard for a long time to stifle opposition, enough to leave few options at this late date.

But the main thing, just now, seems to me that the events Egypt are far from over, that an answer is far from settled and what happens next is entirely uncertain. For days, as I mentioned in my last post, what we've been watching amounts to rising tension with no real release. There are a lot of people out in the streets, milling about. Business has stopped. The simmering rage that could easily boil over is readily apparent. This is not a good place for things to be, and it's hard to see how any event - even Mubarak fleeing the country - will lower the heat enough to just send everyone home, resuming normal life.

It's remarkable, and heartening, how the Egyptians have held off, even this long, from really starting to attack one another. It says something, I'd like to think, about such a long lived civilization that eventually a society can learn not to hurt one another, that an Army can refuse to attack its own citizens. But really... this isn't over. In some ways it's only just beginning, and it's way too soon to know how things play out. But the good news perhaps is that Americans are, already starting to get a little creeped out following another nation's miseries as entertainment. For us, at least, that may be some measure of progress.