"State Trooper" - Steve Earle
A tremendous cover of a great Springsteen song. I also love the youthful Earle's intro where he explains to those who aren't familiar with his work that "he made all of these songs up" other than State Trooper -- it is a description of creation that is at once evocative and self-effacing.
We are having a spectacularly crappy weather day here -- it's about 35 degrees and has alternately rained and snowed all day. No accumulation to speak of, but seriously cold and wet in a way that it really never is here in October. Ugh. (Our average high here in October is 68 and average low is 51 -- snow is not usually an option.)
- Speaking of public intellectuals, I saw Paul Starr today at Politics & Prose, my neighborhood bookstore discussing his latest work, Remedy and Reaction, a book about health care reform and its history in the United States. Starr, a professor of sociology at Princeton and one of the co-founders, along with Robert Kutner and Robert Reich, of The American Prospect, first came to widespread attention with his 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Remedy and Reaction atempts to explain American "exceptionalism" in the area of health care, i.e., why the United States is such an outlier in the industrial world with respect to providing health care to its citizenry. I asked Starr if he thought that there would have been any merit to attempting either a "Medicare for Everyone" approach to health care reform or a substantial public option. Starr, who worked for the Clinton Administration during its health care battles, gave me an unequivocal no. He indicated that whatever its flaws -- and he understands that there are flaws -- the Affordable Care Act was as good as we were going to be able to get in the political environment of 2009-10 and that he believes that should it survive this election cycle, can form the basis of a fairly meaningful move toward universal and more affordable coverage. He was pretty complimentary about Obama's efforts on this score. He also expressed bewilderment at the Republican lunacy on this issue, noting that they are completely out of step with other conservative parties throughout the world. He's a very good and genial speaker, so if you get the chance to see him on his book tour by all means do so.
- There are few organizations in DC that I despise more than "Third Way" -- the Thomas Friedman of think tanks here. I was amused to read this report -- linked to yesterday by Jay Ackroyd at Eschaton -- prepared by them in 2007 called The New Rules Economy, a Friedmanesque encomium to the global economy. Essentially the message was don't worry about the middle class -- it's doing great in the global economy. I'd love to see how those statistics they relied upon look in the harsh light of the post-2008 crash.
- Speaking of Friedman, the degree to which Paul Krugman openly takes the piss out of him and Brooks these days is a constant source of amusement to me. His most recent slap, in which he crosses out the words "find a wise taxi driver to explain everything" made me almost spit out my morning coffee. One gets the sense that the Nobel Prize winner really has contempt for his page mates at the Times. And rightfully so.
- Charles Blow, on the other hand, has continually improved as a columnist for the Times. Today's column -- and more importantly, its accompanying graph -- gives the lie to the gaseous optimism contained in that Third Way monograph.
- Oh, and Joe Nocera makes up a bit for his odious "Borking" column of a few days ago with this stomach turning story of a Buffalo law firm whose main practice is mortgage foreclsoures, where the employees have a Halloween party in which dressing up as foreclosure victims is thought the height of good fun. the mind boggles at this kind of institutional sadism.
Well it sounds like the precipitation may have stopped. Time to grab Stanley and try to take advantage of the break before grabbing a little warm mulled wine with which to unwind.
What's up with you my friends?
