Year: 2010

AVNR

If you still have any, I should let you know I have now sold all mine. Guru thinks bad news could be imminent.

YOW – WILDCATS!

As you almost surely know, this summer marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of Camp Wigwam. So where would I possibly have been last weekend but South Watuhfud – population six in the wintuh, hundred fawtee in the summah – for the celebration?

I’m not going to take you through every last lobster roll, but let me start with this observation: Mainers are such nice people.

The trip began in frugal comfort on JetBlue to Portland, continuing with Hertz NeverLost (or I would be always lost) to the Vinalhaven Ferry, about 77 miles up the coast, then 15 miles across Prescott Sound on a boat with six or eight other pedestrians and a dozen vehicles. To say that the character of the Vinalhaven Haven ferry experience is a bit different from the Fire Island Pines ferry experience would be to strain understatement. But both are great.

Vinalhaven (population 1,250 or so) and its sister island North Haven (350) have nothing to do with Camp Wigwam; but a friend had been inviting me for years, so I decided to take the detour. ‘Vinalhaven,’ he said as he met me at the ferry, ‘produces more lobster meat than anywhere else in the world.’

‘Oh! Can we get a lobster roll?’

We walked off in the direction of the Gawker, which places both a menu and rules on each table (this is an establishment that serves an amazing lobster roll but doesn’t suffer fools gladly). On the way, my friend pointed out the home of the island’s most famous, if most reclusive, resident, artist Robert Indiana, whose ‘LOVE’ sculpture you have surely seen. I stopped to snap a photo of the house for Charles – and as I was turning to rejoin my host up ahead, observed an elderly gentleman hurrying across the street from the Post Office and opening the door.

‘Joey!’ I stage whispered, ‘could that be Mr. Indiana?’

Joey turned, spotted, and – just before the man had vanished – shouted, ‘Bob! Bob!’

Robert Indiana turned to see who was invading his privacy, and – when he recognized Joey – invited us inside for what wound up being an astonishing private tour . . . not entirely unlike this one a New York Times reporter was treated to in 2003 (absent the cigar, thankfully, and the ponytail).

If we had been 30 seconds earlier or a minute later, we’d have missed him entirely. How cool was that?

My trip to Maine was ‘made’ and had hardly even started.

The Gawker’s lobster role was perfect . . .

The three 400-foot Vinalhaven windmills mentioned here Friday rocked . . .

Dinner at Joey’s with half the Maine Congressional delegation* and her beau made me prouder than ever to be a Democrat . . .

* Maine has two Congressional districts.

And then, in the morning, it was into the dinghy for the stone’s throw over to the North Haven ferry dock and a store where, in the owner’s absence, you take what you want and toss the cash into a large jar on the honor system – I purchased a $35 sweatshirt and a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup this way.

A brilliantly gorgeous 70-minute ferry ride back . . .

Two lobster rolls from the shack by the parking lot on the Rockland side (the proprietors wanted to knock $1 off each for my having helped them take down their awning in preparation for the hurricane, but against all my frugal instincts I wouldn’t let them) . . .

Then NeverLost to (just hum along if you don’t know the words) . . .

. . . Wig-wam, your braves will love you
While the moon shines o’er Bear Lake.
We’ll keep your campfires burn-ing,
For each fleet-ing’s mem-ry’s sake . . .

Oh, sure, you laugh. But do you know who wrote those words? Richard Rodgers, that’s who (as in Oklahoma? and South Pacific? and The King and I? – that Richard Rodgers). A Wigwammer.

Another? J.D. Salinger (voted the camp’s ‘most popular actor” 1930).

A third? My dad – best camper, 1933.

Einstein came and visited for a week.

So I’ll have no chortling, please. There’s no time for chortling anyway, because the camp owner/director – a preternaturally upbeat and energetic man whose first year as a camper was 1965, and whose first counselor was . . . well, me – had a full schedule of activities for the nearly 200 Wigwammers, aged 21 to 84, who had returned.

For the occasion, the old nature shack had been turned into the camp museum. I went up and found a photo of my Dad as a counselor, and, from a few years earlier, his 1933 activity report.

He played baseball six days in July – perhaps even July 6, 1933, coinciding with the first ever All-Star Game (the American League defeated the National League 4-2 in Chicago’s Comiskey Park) and nine days in August; was out on the lake in boats and canoes 29 days, swam 48 days, played tennis 40 days, football, 16, was down on the riflery range five times – perhaps including July 14, 1933, the day Germany banned all but the Nazi party – went on 3 golf outings and a canoe trip – perhaps even as Will Rogers’ pal Wiley Post was completing the first ever solo flight around the world. Not to mention basketball, handball, and horseback riding (or that this was also the summer Congress passed the nation’s first minimum wage – 33 cents an hour). He arrived at camp weighing 131 pounds, left at 132.5, ‘did all his work without having to be asked, and what is more did it well . . . an excellent sportsman in every sense of the word.’

I’m not sure a single eye had perused that loose leaf page from the day it was typed, but it sure meant a lot to me.

And perhaps a good stopping point for an already overlong report. (I may or may not inflict the tale of Saturday’s mini-color war on you. Gray won but Red was robbed on the cheer. Which is where the ‘Yow – Wildcats’ comes in.)

I hope your summer was equally wonderful.

SNAKE OIL

You may have heard radio ads for a $248 ‘platinum gas saver’ guaranteed to make your car engine at least 22% more fuel efficient – all but government certified. Rightwing radio talk show host Michael Savage (Michael Weiner) endorses it, saying that ‘it increases the percentage of fuel that burns inside your engine from the standard 68% of each gallon’ to 90%.* Go to their website or call their 800-number and you’ll be sold.

The only problem (and, in context, a considerable one): it doesn’t work. Or so says Consumer Reports. (If it did work, wouldn’t most manufacturers build it into their cars to get the higher fuel rating?)

The FTC has issued a warning about such claims, followed by a listing of the things, mostly free, that do work.

*Never mind that this would be a 32% improvement, not 22% – to increase something from 68 to 90 is to increase it by 32%. Perhaps either he or the sponsor is purposely underselling the benefits?

ST. LOUIS

Last week I suggested that we either continue move forward November 2 or slide back. I had just come back from the DNC summer meeting in St. Louis, where the Vice President made the same case, and with a lot more charm. ‘Don’t compare me with the Almighty,’ he quoted former Boston Mayor Kevin White – ‘compare me with the alternative.’ Watch the whole speech, if you can (and Secretary Sebelius’s as well), here.

Tomorrow: Maine and Indiana

DCTH

This bullish analysis came out Tuesday calling DCTH “a great buy at these prices.” If you own the stock, you’ll enjoy it. The bearish case, from a month ago, is here. (The bearish analyst see the stock as worth about what it’s selling for now – around the same $5.37 we initially paid for it – so at least he’s not saying he thinks it’s greatly overpriced here.)

Guru summarizes: “At the moment, Wall Street believes in the bear case. I think over the long run the consensus will move closer to the bull side, but will probably take more time than I thought.”

And there’s always the chance it will not work out at all – so, as always: only with money you can truly afford to lose.

DRYING TOWELS

Linda Tam: “Re the horror of your dryer’s electricity consumption (‘Turn it ff! Turn it off!’) – I’ve been trying to cut back on dryer use for a few years now. We don’t like how the clothes/towels feel if they 100% line dry, so I hang things up until they’re about 80% dry (I just use a couple little racks indoors near the laundry room, no trouble at all), then finish ’em off in the dryer. We still get that soft fluffy feeling and the dryer-sheet benefits, but we definitely saw a difference in the electric bill when we started this habit. So, as you say, you don’t have to go all the way to get some good results. (Doing this, I noticed that our nice, heavy, all-cotton t-shirts stay wet on the rack even longer than the towels do. I would never have guessed this, but those puppies must suck up a lot of dryer power. You’d think 100% cotton is a good thing, but the blends dry a lot faster. So, maybe polyester is good for the planet?)”

☞ But polyester is petroleum-based and blends are an abomination. Nothing is easy. Which leads me to . . .

NATURAL GAS

Coal is dangerous for the miners and bad for their lungs, causes acid rain and contributes massively to climate change. Nuclear entails potential catastrophic threats, however remote, along with the waste-disposal problem. Corn-based ethanol (the bi-product of corn kernels and Iowa’s lead-off position in the Presidential primary schedule) is inefficient and leads to Third World starvation. Offshore drilling has its much-noted downside. Imported oil impoverishes us. Wind is terrific, but I was just up listening to the three 400-foot-tall General Electric windmills on Vinalhaven that 12 residents are complaining about. “Let’s wait until the plane passes,” I said to my guide as we approached (you could hear a distant plane in the background), “so we can hear them on their own.” Ah, but there was no plane. And solar panels, my Vinalhaven guide told me, are made with Chinese slave labor (not sure of his source on that one) – but my point is, there seems to be only one source of energy that doesn’t have some potential downside . . .

. . . and it’s not natural gas. Indeed, extracting natural gas may contaminate your drinking water. No, the one source of energy with no downside is using less of it. Like hypermiling or Linda Tam’s laundry drying technique.

Meanwhile, speaking of noise pollution and energy generation:

MICRO-PIEZO – “E”-GAD

Judy Lawrence: “After years of sitting in a cube listening to the constant keyboard clicking going on all around me, my idea was to install a tiny friction device on every keyboard key to capture that energy. It would add to the cost of the keyboard, so maybe we only put it on the most frequently struck keys [maybe just the “e” key]. While it certainly would be a tiny amount of energy captured, just think how many gazillions of times it would occur every day! It’s no crazier than the people who want to harvest the energy of our body movements, right?”

☞ Egad.

Yesterday, I aired our clean laundry. Or at least our towels.

Today, this page that calculates the impact of running a single 100-watt light bulb for a year (for starters: it requires the mining of 714 pounds of coal). And, this interactive one that lets you estimate out what your various appliances are costing you, based on your own utility rates and estimated usage. Charles Revson (whose biography you can read here free) had a 252-foot yacht that got 1 mile to the 5-gallon fuel efficiency and ran the air conditioning so strong on his February Caribbean cruises that they slept with electric blankets. (Well, if you subtract the yacht, the Caribbean, and the a/c, the February electric blankets were a good idea.)

THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH

Slow but steady, in a deeply thoughtful way that is too slow for some and too fast for others, we are winding down the war the President never would have started in the first place and making the effort to fix the war we could have pursued so much more effectively if we had not focused on Iraq instead.

Predictably, the President’s speech Tuesday was spot on.

You can say – fairly – “Oh, sure – you thought all Clinton’s speeches were spot on, too.” Indeed I did. I would suggest there was a direct correlation between the thoughtful leadership we got from President Clinton and the prosperity we enjoyed. His war (in the religiously and ethnically diverse powder keg that was Yugoslavia) went so well that we barely remember it. Not, of course, that there weren’t mistakes (to name just two: not interceding in Rwanda; not putting even more resources into killing Bin Laden before handing off the operation to his successors, who shut it down).

So, yes, just as I believed then that we had a terrifically smart, wise, well-motivated President (personal demons aside) who was, for the most part, making the prudent decisions (e.g., don’t blow the surplus with tax cuts, shore up our national balance sheet and “Save Social Security First”) . . . so I believe now we have a terrifically smart, wise, well-motivated President (who seems wonderfully devoid of demons) facing the toughest challenges in generations.

To the extent progressives like me are hugely frustrated by the compromises . . . the wars are on a trajectory for phase down, but have not ended; the health care reform will prove to have been an amazing step in the right direction; the Wall Street reform and credit card reform and education reform and alternative-energy and Supreme Court appointments are constructive in a major way (as are, sorry, point of personal privilege, the list of things, both symbolic and concrete, the Administration has done to advance equality) – SO much has been accomplished in 19 months! . . . but to the extent progressives like me are hugely frustrated by the compromises and delays, I have just two simple things to say. But I think they are really important things:

1. You think YOU’RE frustrated? Imagine how frustrated the President and his team must be.

2. The way to get more done is NOT to give up and allow the Republicans to take back Congress.

If you really care about this stuff, as so many of us do, you have to recognize that – just as Nader’s well-intentioned idealism wound up sending our country off the rails on every issue he and his voters cared about – we now have to decide whether, once again, to play into the hands of the well-meaning Republicans (this time: John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, and the rest, who honestly believe they have a better direction for the country) . . . basically, to “punish” the Democrats, which is to say ourselves, for not being able to do overcome Senate Republican opposition to important things we wanted . . . or whether the thing to do is work like mad to effect a surprisingly good outcome nine weeks from now.

I vote for the latter. And I think that as people really begin to focus on the choice – forward or backward – they will prove the dire pre-Labor Day polls wrong.

Thrillingly, the outcome is actually up to us. Volunteer, contribute – and raise your vote.

FEEL LUCKY – IN A MALIBU

John Scully: “The last scene (the bank robbery) of the video you linked to yesterday – The Luckiest People in the World – is from a Chevy Malibu commercial. Who knows how many of the clips are real.”

☞ Where would we be without Snopes?

WATCHING OUR ELECTRIC METER

So while you’ve been out playing softball or kadima and grilling hotdogs, I’ve been sitting by the side of our house watching the electric meter spin. There’s a remote control hooked into our wifi that shows me how much power our rooftop photovoltaic array is generating – we topped 2500 watts for several very sunny hours most days last week – and I can even go on-line and see it from here (I’m in Maine tonight). But there’s nothing like actually watching the big wheel of the meter spin backwards – oops! it’s slowed, stopped, moves slowly forward (a cloud is passing by), now starts going backwards again – to bring home what’s actually happening. All this with the pool pump on, the refrigerator and computers on, and all the little trickle things on like the electric clocks and cell phone chargers.

When possible, I flag down passersby to show them. “Come look at our electric meter.”

I explain that at night, of course, we generate no power. And that wattage is low on a rainy day. And that when we turn on the dryer, it spins forward no matter how sunny it is.

“Really?” said one friend.

“Let’s try it,” said Charles, who went inside to flip the switch.

Needless to say, I was of two minds about running the dryer for no reason, but figured a few seconds couldn’t hurt.

Well, suddenly the slow backward rotation of the meter went into a frenzied forward spin.

“Turn it off! Turn it off!” I cried in what I’m a little surprised to admit was genuine alarm. (Well, you should have seen it! It was flying!)

And a second later, with the dryer off, the wheel reverted to its lazy backward rotation.

This event made such an impression, we have begun drying our towels on the roof. (No, Silly, not on top of the solar panels; on the part of the roof deck we normally reserve for humans.) Not slavishly, and not on a cloudy, humid day, obviously. But I can’t tell you what fun this all is, or how toasty dry the towels get.

There’s nothing like being able to measure your usage of something to get you to use less of it.

So far, we’re been generating about 17 kwh a day. Not a lot – maybe $3.40 worth, so maybe we’ll come close to $1,000 a year. The economics are iffy, and would be far more so if it weren’t for the big rebate check the utility will shortly write us for having, in effect, built a small power plant for them. (When the meter runs backward, we’re actually sending electricity TO the grid, selling it to the utility.) The 30% federal tax credit, and the state tax credit, don’t hurt either. But to the extent those credits help encourage a fledgling industry, and help reflect “externalities” like pollution that are not currently priced into coal, they make some sense and I’m happy to accept them.

Of course, you can skip the very expensive solar panels, at least for now, until their cost come down, and still dry your towels in the sun. That’s a nice saving with no capital expenditure at all.

(For the record: Charles is somewhat horrified. But relationships are all about compromise.)

KOREA, NOT CHINA

Daniel (and Jonathan): “Those are actually photos of Haeundae Beach in Busan, Korea you posted yesterday. Check out google maps street view to get a view on a day when the beach is fairly empty.”

☞ Oops. Corrected for late risers.

IS IT ELITIST TO BE CONCERNED THAT PEOPLE DON’T KNOW THE FACTS?

On-line commentary from the New York Times:

Building a Nation of Know-Nothings
By Timothy Egan
August 25, 2010, 8:30 pm

Having shed much of his dignity, core convictions and reputation for straight talk, Senator John McCain won his primary on Tuesday against the flat-earth wing of his party. Now McCain can go search for his lost character, which was last on display late in his 2008 campaign for president.

Remember the moment: a woman with matted hair and a shaky voice rose to express her doubts about Barack Obama. “I have read about him,” she said, “and he’s not — he’s an Arab.”

McCain was quick to knock down the lie. “No, ma’am,” he said, “he’s a decent family man, a citizen.”

That ill-informed woman — her head stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler — now makes up a representative third or more of the Republican party. It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are unpopular or ill-conceived — not because millions of people believe a lie.

In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.

So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:

“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”

Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate.

On the Muslim deception, Limbaugh has sprinkled lie dust all over the place. “Obama says he’s a Christian, but where’s the evidence?” he said on Aug. 19. He has repeatedly called the president “imam Obama,” and said, “I’m just throwing things out there, folks, because people are questioning his Christianity.”

You see how he works. He drops in suggestions, hints, notes that “people are questioning” things. The design is to make Obama un-American. Then he says it’s a tweak, a provocation. He says this as a preemptive way to keep the press from calling him out. And it works; long profiles of Limbaugh have largely gone easy on him.

Once Limbaugh has planted a lie, a prominent politician can pick it up, with little nuance. So, over the weekend, Kim Lehman, one of Iowa’s two Republican National Committee members, went public with doubts on Obama’s Christianity. Of course, she was not condemned by party leaders.

It’s curious, also, that any felon, drug addict, or recovering hedonist can loudly proclaim a sudden embrace of Jesus and be welcomed without doubt by leaders of the religious right. But a thoughtful Christian like Obama is still distrusted.

“I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That’s not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was “born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his father.”

Actually, he was born from two non-practicing parents, and his Kenyan father was absent for all of his upbringing. Obama came to his Christianity like millions of people, through searching and questioning.

Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.

Beck tosses off enough half-truths in a month to keep Politifact working overtime. Of late, he has gone after Michelle Obama, whose vacation in Spain was “just for her and approximately 40 of her friends.” Limbaugh had a similar line, saying the First Lady “is taking 40 of her best friends and leasing 60 rooms at a five-star hotel — paid for by you.”

The White House said Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha were accompanied by just a few friends — and they paid their own costs. But, wink, wink, the damage is done. He’s Muslim and foreign. She’s living the luxe life on your dime. They don’t even have to mention race. The code words do it for them.

Climate-change denial is a special category all its own. Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox.

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?

FEELING LUCKY?

Two and a half minutes – here. Don’t miss the last one. (Thanks, George.)

A DAY AT THE BEACH IN CHINA

These photos from a couple of years ago suggest a whole bunch of things, beginning with population density.

THE TIDE IS TURNING

“A growing number of Republicans are breaking with the party’s traditional stance [on gay marriage],” the Washington Post reported Saturday, “a shift strategists say stems as much from demographics as from the renewed focus on economics and the ‘tea party’ movement. . . .” Won’t it be nice when we have this behind us?

MARRIAGE EQUALITY PROTEST SIGNS

And while we’re at it, here’s a short video of marriage equality protest signs. A movement with a sense of humor.

GLENN BECK’S RALLY

If you missed it, here is an account. (“You can’t profit from fear and division [on TV] all week and then denounce them one Saturday on the National Mall in Washington and hope nobody notices. But Beck sure tried…”)

MOCK-U

Nick Lerman: “I wanted to give you a heads up about the plastic bag mockumentary you linked to yesterday. It’s a ripoff of this real short film. I’ve been interning with its maker, Ramin Bahrani, for almost a year and he isn’t happy about it. Perhaps you could link to his film, too, to show where the mockumentary came from (and to show how much better the narrative film is)?”

☞ I like them both!

MEHLMAN

So former RNC chair and Bush reelection committee chief Ken Mehlman is now open about being gay, and squarely in favor of marriage equality (along with Laura Bush, Dick Cheney, and Cindy McCain).

There are those who find it hard to forgive Mehlman for his active role in his party’s beating up on gay people – on this very issue – to get cash and votes from the religious right. Some say his actions directly led to teenage suicides and to the increase in gay bashings observed in the 21 states that put “marriage initiatives” on the ballot.

Blogger Mike Rogers writes that “Ken Mehlman’s new-found support is welcome” but suggests that, to make amends, he:

1. Record a 60-second YouTube apology for what he has done, including using marriage as a wedge issue and the use of veto threats on ENDA and Hate Crimes bills.

2. Spend time with the family of a young person who was murdered or committed suicide after the 2004 election. Spend time with the partner of someone who died while they were denied hospital access because of the lack of recognition of their relationship.

3. Sell the $3.77 million condo he bought because of his horrible work and give it to gay organizations fighting the fight against the war he waged on his own people.

Texan Eugene Sepulveda goes a bit easier on him. “Once you have a convert,” he writes, “you don’t make him beg to join you.” Going on to say:

Not only do I remember what it was like being young and struggling, I remember having a suicide plan for when I was outed. I was a banker. By 29, I’d risen to the position of head of lending for a regional set of banks. I always assumed someone would try to blackmail me for a bank loan. I’d planned to gather enough evidence, forward it to the FBI, then commit suicide before facing the loss of love and respect from my family, friends and colleagues. In fact, someone did try blackmailing me. But, instead of asking for a $1,000,000+ loan, they asked for $500. The ridiculousness of it, allowed me to laugh in their face and deal with the perception of demons. Moral of the story, sometimes we create our own stories about the closet, about the enemies we face. I blame society for much of our closeted behavior – less today than yesterday, but still a bunch. I’m not saying that Ken doesn’t owe apologies. But since he’s now come out and is trying to help, I’m welcoming him. I’ll leave it to divine beings to judge him and set the standards of his penance.

Whatever your view, it’s pretty stunning to have George W. Bush’s campaign manager, George W. Bush’s Vice President, and George W. Bush’s wife – not to mention Ted Olsen, the attorney in Bush v. Gore without whom George W. Bush would not have been President in the first place, and Cindy and Meghan McCain, the wife and daughter of the Republican nominated to succeed George W. Bush – now all advocating for marriage equality.

How the world has changed. Let alone since Dr. Bertram Schaffner’s day. To wit:

HE GOT INTO HARVARD AT 15, BUT LEFT FOR SWARTHMORE IN HOPE OF BECOMING HETEROSEXUAL

It didn’t work. But what an interesting perspective on the way life used to be – an interview with a psychiatrist who passed away at 97 earlier this year.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?

It is the wondrous adventure of the plastic bag. A highly polished four-minute mockumentary. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.

THERE – I FIXED IT

That’s the name of a website – thereifixedit.com – that testifies to the sometimes scary ingenuity of the American public. I couldn’t find a way to highlight favorites, but here’s one (imported to a different site) to give you an idea. And here’s someone’s top ten.

RACHEL MADDOW . . .

. . . had hit after hit Monday. First this piece on “scaring white people”; then this one on a Tea Party guide for avoiding black neighborhoods if you attend Glenn Beck’s odd civil rights march this weekend; this one on the alleged year of the anti-incumbent (except the incumbent seems to keep winning); and this one on the credit card reforms that have just kicked in (you can no longer be charged $29 for exceeding your credit limit by $5 or have the interest jacked up on stuff you’ve already purchased).

Enjoy!

Tony Spina: “From my perspective neither Party gets it. The national debt of the United States has gone up every year since 1957. No exceptions. No ‘surpluses as far as the eye can see’ – in fact not one single surplus from any President since 1956! Republicans and Democrats are of course both well represented in those 50+ years. My conclusion: the two major Parties are not ‘good Party or bad Party’ for this Country, lately both are bad. Each spending Bill that passed since 1957 had to have been judged as essential at the time, or (I would like to think, anyway) would not have passed. Crises do occur, but can it be that in over 50 years there was not a single year without a critical need for spending more than the government took in? Prior to 1957 the national debt got paid down occasionally. A great many people will listen to an old or new political party that convincingly addresses this, I believe.”

☞ I share your frustration and know it comes from a good place, but it may be a bit offbase. In the first place, all that matters is the size of the debt relative to the economy as a whole. If the debt is relatively small – like a $175,000 mortgage on a $2 million home owned by a billionaire – it’s not a big concern. If it’s large – like the same $175,000 mortgage on a $160,000 home owned by short-order cook – it can be devastating.

So imagine we ran a $200 billion deficit each of the next 100 years, while our economy grew at 5% a year – half from real growth, half from inflation. Terrible, no? A century of $200 billion deficits!

Actually, that scenario would be wonderful. A century from now, the debt would have grown by another $20 trillion and be closing in on $35 trillion. But the GDP would have grown to $1.9 quadrillion. So the debt would have shrunk from today’s ratio of nearly 100% of GDP to less than 2% of GDP.

All this is fanciful, to be sure, but illustrates the point. Deficits are okay, so long as the overall debt is – at least in most years – growing slower than the economy.

Another piece of this is the way the accounting is done. The government does its accounting on a cash basis. All would agree that when we borrow to issue unemployment checks that’s money we are spending; but most would agree that when we borrow to build the Interstate Highway System, that’s investing. It’s not terrible to borrow money to make a productive investment. Well-managed business do it all the time.

Sometimes, a crisis comes along that requires not just relatively minor deficits, but enormous ones – like winning World War II. What choice did we have? We had to do whatever it took to win. And in so doing, we took the National Debt – which had been roughly 30% of GDP at the start of the Depression and had risen to roughly 40% by the time we entered the war – all the way up to 121% by 1946. And then, over 35 years that ended with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, we gradually shrank it back down to 30%. Not, as you correctly note, by paying it down; just by having it grow a lot more slowly than the economy.

Reagan/Bush shot the debt ratio skyward.

Clinton inherited a stalled economy but put the brakes on spending. (At least one prominent liberal resigned in protest that bond-holder interests had been put ahead of poverty programs.*) And he worked with a Democratic Congress that in 1990 had established a system called “PAYGO” that required new budget items be paid for with commensurate cuts elsewhere or new tax revenue.

When the Republicans took back control of Congress, they ditched PAYGO.

This year, the Democrats reinstated it, over unanimous opposition from Senate Republicans (who also filibustered to kill legislation that would have created the Bipartisan Deficit Reduction Commission that President Obama went on to establish anyway, by executive order).

When Democrats are in power, Republicans call loudly for passage of the “Balanced Budget Amendment” to the Constitution. (A bad idea.) Then they take power, go silent on the issue, and run up trillions in debt. Once they lose power, they start calling for it again, as they have begun to now.

There is a pattern here.

I would never argue that Democrats are uniformly and always perfect on this issue (or any other), or that Republicans are uniformly and always wrong. But to suggest there are not huge differences between the parties – to tar them both with the same brush – is to miss some very deeply ingrained themes.

As to the “surpluses as far as the eye can see,” a couple more points. First, even though I have myself railed against doing it this way, the budget is generally expressed by both parties as if the Social Security surplus is “revenue.” Miscounting it this way did indeed give us surpluses in each of Clinton’s last two years. (But because it was not really revenue – rather, money borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund – the debt did go up even when there was reportedly a significant surplus.)

Indeed, recognizing this, Clinton left office urging his successor (and anyone else who would listen) to “save Social Security first.” It was his way of saying, “don’t blow this reported surplus on tax cuts – we need it to shore up the national balance sheet.”

Bush, by contrast, told anyone who would listen that the surpluses were large and real. Indeed, there were prominent Republicans who publicly worried that the surpluses Clinton was handing them were so large that they threatened to pay off the entire National Debt, which would kill the important global market for U.S. Treasury securities – a worrisome prospect.

Bush said, the surplus is your money, not the government’s. Elect me, and I’ll give it back to you.

But what he really did was borrow the Social Security surplus – paid in by average working stiffs – and pay it out in the form of tax cuts that most benefited millionaires and billionaires.

There is a lot to be angry about in our current economic straits. Only a small share of that anger should be directed at Democrats.

Where Reagan slashed taxes for the wealthy and raised them for Joe the Plumber, Obama has done the reverse. He has cut taxes for 95% of working families, including Joe, but plans to raise them for the best off.

Even though I’m in the fortunate 5% or so who will pay more, I think it’s the right approach for our current circumstance. That it’s made Joe so angry is a testament to the skills and resources of the folks who hope to misinform and manipulate him into supporting Republicans who will put corporate interests and the interests of the wealthy ahead of his own.

It worked in 2000 and 2004. We’ll know in 70 days whether it worked again in 2010.

* A budget that got not a single Republican vote, and became the subject of Bob Woodward’s book, The Agenda.