It's Fathers' Day, and the little rascal is, amazingly, still asleep at 10:10am. We were over at his cousins' last night, and they and their friends wore him out, apparently.
I'm wearing this t-shirt. How can a self-respecting geek dad wear anything else on Fathers' Day?
The best take on Watergate is, unsurprisingly, given by Charles Pierce:
Instead, the true "lessons" of Watergate were how we could abandon our responsibilities as citizens, and twist the obligations of self-government, so that "the country" would never have to "go through" anything like that again. What was a triumph of self-government in 1974 was reckoned to be such a national trauma by 1986 that our elite institutions formed an iron circle to keep it from happening to Ronald Reagan and his people because the country "couldn't take another failed presidency."
And that's how we've arrived at a place where Obama was warned in advance by the Villagers to barely mention Bush's failures, let alone his likely crimes, and where it seems to have become impossible to prosecute anyone in a position of wealth or power for crimes involving the abuse of their power.
Read the whole thing. As always with Pierce, it's worth it.
Pierce's chronology is excellent, but his piece falls apart when he starts discussing the 'lessons of Watergate' because he makes the same mistake most people do in writing about it, to assume that the impeachment, the charges, the whole situation had to do with Nixon's political crimes.
It was not.
It was NOT. It had nothing to do with his politics, his abuse of political power. It was about nothing but his offenses against the ordinary criminal code. (There WAS, I keep pointing out, an article of impeachment dealing with his war crimes -- and the 'secret war' in Cambodia and Laos was far worse than anything Bush did. But it was brought up by the few liberals involved, partcularly Fr. Drinan, (and Charles Goodell had called for Nixon's impeachment on political matters even before Watergate), and was overwhelmingly defeated.)
In fact, Pierce has it reversed. Iran-Contra, the Florida battles and the Iraq were not reversals of the 'lessons of Watergate' but sequels to it. (They should, perhaps, have been impeachable offenses, but had they been so used, it would have been a first -- even the Johnson impeachment wasn't quite similar.) And the Clinton Impeachment, with all its absurdity, was at least theoretically based on a criminal offense of perjury and obstruction of justice.
Pierce's piece is great on chronology, and is -- afaik -- the only place to mention the names of the policemen who 'did their jobs extemely well' but its conclusions are, again, those of someone attempting to piece together what he experienced at age 14-16, someone who is seeing it only after the final scene was written, and someone who is, wrongly, tryng to use it to defend some points it does not speak to. I am sure he was as glued to the tv as I was, as concerned as I was, but he had to 'develop the context later' and fell for the 'overarching hypothesis' fail that is so common on both sides of the political debate.
And while I shed a tear, deservedly, for Frank Wills, the first and 'purest' Watergate Hero, I couldn't help of thinking of the Democratic multi-millionaires, the Kennedys and Jay Rockefellers and many others though the time, and wonder why not one of them could have arranged a job, a sinecure or real work, for someone who deserves a statue somewhere, and not a sad, lonely grave. His name was known. Even if no one thought it necessary to 'keep an eye on him' at least once the arrest happened, was there no staff member who could ahve brought it to anyone's attention?
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | June 17, 2012 at 12:00 PM
In fact, Wills is the first, and strongest, but only one of many examples of the 'forgotten' lesson of Watergate, the importance of the individual human being. I'm sorry, but if Wills had had the flu, there is no guarantee his replacement would have been so conscientious, and the whole history of the last 40 years would have been different.
There are so many others. If someone less stupid and gullible than Alexander Butterfield had been in charge of the tapes, if "Tough Tony" Ulascewicz and Charlie Sandman had been less clownish, if there had been a different Minority Leader, or if Ervin had retired, and most of all, if John Dean had been less honest.
And how many of the players in "All the President's Men" could have been replaced, from W&B to Grahame, to Mark Felt?
So the next time someone tells you that 'history is made by impersonal forces that use interchangeable people as their personification' -- or the equivalent, that there are these groups of comic book villains manipulating all of us and that they, and not the figures in the news -- involved with them, of course in secret and sinister ways -- are the ones to watch, it doesn't matter if he's whispering in your left ear or your right -- reach for the salt cellar. There's a small germ of truth there, yes, but not much of one.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | June 17, 2012 at 01:43 PM
It had nothing to do with his politics, his abuse of political power. It was about nothing but his offenses against the ordinary criminal code.
Prup: this is true of Article 1 - Obstruction of Justice. But it is not true of Article 2, Abuse of Power, which was the article of impeachment that actually got the most votes in the House Judiciary Committee, passing by a 28-10 margin. This was about siccing the IRS, FBI, etc. on his political enemies. Nor was it true of Article 3, which was about his refusal to honor Congressional subpoenas. (This one passed only along straight party lines, 21-17.)
Posted by: low-tech cyclist | June 17, 2012 at 05:55 PM
So the next time someone tells you that 'history is made by impersonal forces that use interchangeable people as their personification'
That isn't true or false; it's sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some events can turn on a knife-edge and are very much dependent on random events or individuals' actions going a certain way. Others are sufficiently robust that it's hard to imagine their going any other way, no matter how the dice were rolled.
Say you were to jump back in time to Jan. 1, 1959. Nixon might well beat Kennedy the following year this time, or Kennedy might not even win the nomination. But either way, fast food chains would rapidly expand over the American landscape in the 1960s and 1970s, and at some point in the 1970s, whether or not there was a Yom Kippur War, the Arab nations would have flexed their muscles and raised the price of oil substantially.
More recently, of course, the butterfly (ballot) effect was felt in the outcome of the 2000 election. And recent history would have been very different if Gore had won. But it's hard to see that he would have had much more luck persuading Congress to do anything about global warming than Obama has had.
So sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Posted by: low-tech cyclist | June 17, 2012 at 06:14 PM
Jane Mayer wrote a lengthy piece for the New Yorker about Tupelo-based, Stanford-educated, extremist homophobic radio-host Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association -- in this week's issue. [Heads up from Prup about this guy, a while back]. What's a Romney to do but cave to such a person.
Hope that link doesn't break for non-subscribers.
Also, Happy Dad's Day, this time on the correct date, for those of you holding the honor. Have dessert!
Posted by: nancy | June 17, 2012 at 09:18 PM
L-tc, and if Gene Buchinsky had not been on the night desk at the Post on June 17, the report on the break in might have been buried forever on the police blotter. The attempted burglary didn't sound like much at the time but, as I recall reading in All the President's Men, Gene pulled it out for further scrutiny. He was a young editor who had worked his way up from covering Anacostia in 1963 to working the overnight and by 1972, was eager to make his mark at the paper. You have to remember that the Post of 1972 was nothing like the Post of today. It had decent competition in the Star and Daily News. They were looking for something like Watergate to break out from the pack. Like you said, Prup, sometimes individuals involved in events drive the narrative.
Again, I point out that by this week in 1972, Nixon had already screwed up a lot of lives and changed attitudes toward the Executive in a multitude of individuals in and around DC and maybe elsewhere, including this one. We knew -- in our hearts -- we lived in a despotcracy, but had no real proof. It was not the same DC, not the same America we had grown up in. Think of the films, songs, novels about finding America: Easy Rider, The Band, Simon and Garfunkel, Somehow, that folksy but honest place we knew and didn't love very much had vanished, almost overnight, and the only variable we could point to was the Nixon White House. The revelation of the White House connection to an honest-to-god low-level crime was actually a great relief to those of us who despised the man, much more than the legislation he proposed. That was part of what was so maddening about the man. He could hide his misdeeds behind a very beneficent legislative agenda. The stuff W&B gathered for this retrospective give credence to conjecture made by young people over coffee and wine late into a five years of tense nights. And, I believe public attitude toward Watergate -- thanks to high-ranking apologists and a far less than unified condemnation of the crimes among the general population -- opened the window to an Iran-Contra Reagan, a W Bush and even an Obama. Compared to his predecessors, Obama is Caspar Milquetoast, but compared to an ideal, I guess you could say he's not.
Let the darts fly...
Posted by: Paula B | June 17, 2012 at 09:23 PM
l-t c,
Happy Father's Day guy! Love the T-shirt.
I just got back from driving from Philly to NYC and then NYC back to DC today. Set the lad up in an NYU dorm for the summer, bought him groceries, made his bed, bought him lunch, and said goodbye.
I realize that these goodbyes are now going to be normal and that it is the times that he is at home that will be the exception. It remains a strange feeling -- it's good, it's what is supposed to happen, it's a sign you've done your job and all that. But you'd still like a little more time.
Posted by: Sir Charles | June 17, 2012 at 09:30 PM
Rites of passage. NYU is a good school. I hope the lad can get a grip on it.
That's the trouble with such things as watergate... that's the trouble with mythology and propaganda, and all the other theater that goes on, it doesn't at all represent what is really happening.
A platoon level perspective is not adequate for managing a theater wide scenario.
I'd like to take a census of the commenters here. Just about your location. I know I'm an outlier but it would be interesting to be able to see just how much of one. I know prup is in Brooklyn, but where are the rest of you?
Does anyone here ever read the Bradblog?
If you do, don't you wonder just a bit whether any election is an honest poll of public will or just a bit of theater?
Does anyone here wonder if wall street games the system in their own favor?
Does anyone here think that big banks buying hundreds of millions of barrels of oil futures is a part of free market economics and reflects the true dynamics of supply and demand?
Does anyone here wonder why the liability for extravagent speculation in the mortgage market has fallen solely upon the individuals who have mortgages, or why something like 30% of all 'home owners' are underwater with negative equity, essentially paying banks huge sums of money, for nothing at all? The firgure I have seen is $1.2 trillion in negative equity.
Father's day. No reason to disclaim my cynical perspective here. I have no doubt that fatherhood is a hard row to hoe. You could say that it is equally, and perhaps even more difficult to avoid it altogether. We are after all programmed by our genetics to indulge in reproductive behavior. Whatever... I have no progeny. In good conscience, I could not inflict upon anyone the fate that awaits future generations.
sleep well....
Posted by: KN | June 18, 2012 at 03:55 AM
I work in Boston and live ten miles north of there.
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 09:06 AM
Over time the powerful always game the system in their favor. A fundamental flaw of libertarianism is its refusal to rely upon anything but market forces to correct that.
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 09:08 AM
I can't say that I find these comments encouraging with regards to the outcome for Obamacare.
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 09:17 AM
Maine appears poised to make history by becoming at least one of the first states to vote for marriage equality by popular vote (& hopefully Angus King will caucus with the Senate Democrats, with whom he's a more natural fit).
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 09:26 AM
From The Seminole Democrat:
Read the whole thing. It includes a profile of Marion Hammer, the chief Florida lobbyist for the NRA, a "4-foot-11, 73-year-old grandmother... [who] is as close to evil as you might ever see. She has also done more to enable the killing of innocent Florida citizens, and put many more lives in danger, than any other person in this state."
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | June 18, 2012 at 10:07 AM
KN's questions:
Location: a Maryland exurb of DC.
Bradblog: No.
If you do: I don't, but American elections are somewhere in between those two alternatives.
Wall Street: Wonder? Hell, no. Of course they game the system in their favor.
Banks buying oil futures: I think of it in a totally different way. You know how the gold bugs think currency should be pegged to represent a certain quantity of gold? If they substituted oil for gold, they might have an argument. Oil is the closest thing the world has to a natural base of currency. If I were a big bank, I'd want to be hedged against changes in the price of oil, especially upward changes.
Liability for mortgage speculation: what's to wonder about? The banksters run our world, and the French Revolution makes more sense to me with every passing day.
Posted by: low-tech cyclist | June 18, 2012 at 10:18 AM
I realize that these goodbyes are now going to be normal and that it is the times that he is at home that will be the exception. It remains a strange feeling -- it's good, it's what is supposed to happen, it's a sign you've done your job and all that. But you'd still like a little more time.
How can you not? Thank goodness I have 13 years before my son heads off to college.
Posted by: low-tech cyclist | June 18, 2012 at 10:31 AM
KN: right smack on the MA/VT/NH nexus.
Ssir C: Best wishes to both of you in this bittersweet transition. I don't think you ever stop wishing for more time. I still do, even though my son will turn 40 in a few weeks. (Don't tell him, please.)
Posted by: Paula B | June 18, 2012 at 10:53 AM
This looks like a day for 'hopscotching the (blog) world.' Not -- so far -- interested in writing that much, more passing stuff on. (subject to change at any time, of course)
If you click on the Seminole Democrat piece above, check the whole "My Stupid State" series, one of the best compendiums of Rick Scott's horrors. My favorite is probably the law imprisoning and fining doctors -- pediatricians, mostly -- for merely asking if there are guns in the house. But Scott stopping Florida -- the 'pill mill' capital of the East Coast -- from instituting a registry of prescriptions (even though even the makers of Oxycontin supported the idea and offered $1 million to help get it set up. I won't link the stories, just click on the secion.
Then there's a new poll from Pew detailing which programs Americans want cut, expanded, or to remain the same. (And the poll is from early 2011, after the TeaPartiers were elected but before the effects really hit.)
RI has decriminalized marijuana. And with that, and New Yrk's policy of punishing only 'public display' not possession -- that's what part of the 'stop and frisk' hassle was, cops telling a suspect to 'turn out your pockets' and then busting a guy for 'public display' -- an exact analogy of the way DADT was twisted (not that it was good in the first place, but it was better as written than as applied).
Anyway, I think legalization is finally a likely possibility sometime soon -- or (and I actually prefer this) a 'state option' system like we had after prohibition.
(And I still insist that Romney's refusal to pick that particular 'low-hanging fruit' and supporting legalization at least of medical was the final proof he wasn't going to be able to 'pivot to the center.' It would have given him a 'cheap pickup' of about half -- at least -- of the Paul supporters, and for a lot of liberals who have other issues with Obama, it would have been a last push, and the funny thing is that I can never remember much of a fuss in Religious Right circles over marijuana. Maybe it isn't mentioned because it 'doesn't have to be' that everyone assumes it is evil -- but there's a hell of an overlap between RR areas and pot growing and smoking areas. Texas and Alaska are prime examples. But he came down hard against even considering the idea.)
And after I read this I knew I'd have to break here. It's a Father's Day message from Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father:
'Nuff said.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | June 18, 2012 at 11:53 AM
Easing of pot laws poses challenge for parents [by forcing them to have "the talk" earlier and to be more frank about the use of pot].
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 12:47 PM
Voyager I, launched in 1977, is now on the verge of leaving behind the astronomical space dominated by the sun's influence (& thus metaphorically the solar system).
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 01:08 PM
Actually, I'd say the easing of pot laws makes my job as a parent easier.
Because I've always been ready to be honest about my experiences with the evil weed. I didn't experiment with pot; I smoked dope. I got high. It felt good. That's why I smoked. And I'm ready and willing to be honest about that with my kid when the time comes.
And I'm ready to remind him that any escape only lasts so long, and the real world is always waiting when you come down from your high - or even before you do. So you can't get high all the time; you've got to pick your spots, or you won't be ready for the world when it's coming at you.
The thing I was always afraid I'd have to say to him even before that was that, if the law caught him with a joint, I'd do everything I could to keep his ass out of jail, but I might well not be able to save him.
I'll be glad to see the time come when that's no longer a concern.
Posted by: low-tech cyclist | June 18, 2012 at 01:28 PM
Here's an example of a news story WaPo was supposed to run that's so blatant an example of the need for universal healthcare that WaPo ultimately decided not to run the story because it supported Obamacare too much.
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 03:28 PM
Scalia flip-flops on SCOTUS precedent underlying modern commerce clause rulings (including Scalia's own) and UCLA law professor explains why it's revealing.
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 03:50 PM
perhaps i am too optimistic, but i think justice ginsberg's comments in the article oddjob linked to augur well. i just don't think she'd be making those jokes if she were on the losing side. just speculation.
not so impressed by that little part of the ucla prof's email. what law and order case is he talking about? not lopez (gun free school zone) or morrison (vawa crime). maybe the CA marijuana case, raich? that's not to say that scalia doesn't pick and choose and even flip-flop, just to say little things like that bit of email are not actually informative and don't become so by citation to the position and authority of professor.
Posted by: big bad wolf | June 18, 2012 at 03:57 PM
"...Scalia himself cited Wickard in his 2005 opinion in Gonzales v. Raich, concurring with a 6-3 majority that said Congress may, under the Commerce Clause, prohibit a licensed medical marijuana patient from growing pot for personal consumption even if it’s legal in the state. A central foundation for that sweeping federal power, the winning side argued, was Wickard.
At the time, Scalia emphatically agreed, writing in his concurring opinion that “where Congress has authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.” The Reagan-appointed justice’s decision upset libertarians who saw Raich as a squandered opportunity to limit the 70-year trend of reading the Commerce Clause expansively and giving the federal government broad authority when it comes to national economic regulation...."
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 04:16 PM
(bbw, I'm not necessarily trying to safely cite for purposes of peer review, but rather to share something that as an interested layman I thought was interesting and so might possibly be interesting here. I freely admit I'm not an attorney.)
Posted by: oddjob | June 18, 2012 at 04:18 PM
i wasn't criticizing you oddjob, and i am sorry if it came across that way. i was puzzled why tpm would print just that flip-flop/law-and-order part. it's hard for me to see raich as a mere law and order case. beyond that, i think it is fair to say that raich did not present the regulation-by-required-purchase question and that is different. i think that in an obviously commercial context like our health care system that the mandate is among the available regulatory tools. but it is a different sort of question and perhaps a power permitted becasue of the pervasiveness of the health care market. wickard would clear allow a farmer not to sell broccoli. whether wickard would allow congress to require us to buy broccoli is a different question by nature, i think. the broccoli market is not nearly as pervasive as the health care market.
fwiw, ronald dworkin thinks we can be required to buy broccoli. i can't get there with him
Posted by: big bad wolf | June 18, 2012 at 04:51 PM
I strongly suggest you click through -- here or from oddjob's cite -- to the original article on TPM. Even in the book discussed Scalia states that he has, and may in the future, join decisions thay contradict what he has written. And an ex-clerk of his says "we should be careful about drawing conclusions about what he said in a book we haven’t read yet, but I’m not sure there is any inconsistency between citing a decision in an opinion and thinking the decision was wrong; Justice Scalia does believe in stare decisis.”
(I also remind people that in a recent decision -- forgot to write the details down -- Scalia spent his whole time heckling the government during oral argument -- then sided with them, without comment, in the decision.)
I still think it is likely that he will vote against the ACA, but I don't think the book necessarily changes the odds.
Two further questions -- and I'll discuss my thoughts later, after a short shopping trip. First, how would this case compare in impact to the Schechter ("Sick chicken") case that invalidated the NRA -- also a key program of the President's?
Second, if the ACA is invalidated entirely, what happens to the 'medical loss' rebates. A lot of people have already gotten money from the companies -- I can quote a couple of state totals later. If the act is invalidated, will they have to return the money -- and how will that get people feeling? (Arguably the best thing that could happen would be for the act to be invalidated early enough that people will be feeling the pain well before the election. Might even result in a better bill being passed, no? Better than a delayed decision or a half-hearted one, but it would probably be easier if we didn't have to start from scratch.)
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | June 18, 2012 at 05:26 PM
Oh, bother. I wrote a long comment and it got lost somehow.
It said my reading of the captcha was right, dernit.
Posted by: Crissa | June 18, 2012 at 05:37 PM
Crissa. Dernit. :)
KN, I'm in Spokane WA USA situated where the Mountain West turns into the Pacific Northwest and 'Cascadia'. I believe I have a general idea where most of the folks who comment here regularly are living, which is one reason I value your exchanges. There's a good deal of commonality, but then not, coming from different places, ages and experiences. Keeps me more optimistic than I might otherwise be in a political climate unlike any I've seen or thought I'd see in my lifetime.
Bradblog? Occasionally. It might be interesting to compare our blogread lists sometime. Rearranging the one on this site around my reading tastes however wouldn't make sense to me. I like unplanned cross-pollination.
Btw, if you look at the blog sitemeter now and then, you can track its audience. It's all over the map(s) and I wish more of that audience would chime in. No membership dues required. ;-)
Also, is it me or has the comment box 'time expired' time shortened? I'm having to copy and past into a new tab more often it seems. Just happened again.
Posted by: nancy | June 18, 2012 at 08:20 PM
Jim,
I am guessing that the rebates are not recoverable.
However, I think we need to be clear that if ACA goes down that's it. There will not be another bill worth a damn for at least a decade. It would be a shattering loss -- and unlike the ones sustained in the early days of the New Deal, there will be no second act.
Crissa,
Sorry about that. All I can say is that it has happened to a bunch of us.
Posted by: Sir Charles | June 18, 2012 at 08:22 PM
For the lawyers and legal junkies, SCOTUS seems to be coming up with some unexpected alignments these days -- for whatever it means for the ACA. Today's judgment in Williams v Illinois is a good example -- and while it seems to be too complicated to go into here is also an interesting case. (Is a defendant robbed of his right to confront witnesses if an expert testifies about the results turned in by an outside lab when she had no direct knowledge of their actions, or of their protection of the 'chain of evidence' etc.?)
The line up is not what you'd expect:
The decision supports the prosecution, btw.
And that's not the only weird line-up (I don't count a solo dissent which may have personal reasons). Salazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter comes down:
Only a labor decision came down with the expected line-up, the foul 4 plus Kennedy excluding pharmecutical salesmen from minimum wage protection. But the others at least are surprising and break the picture of two inevitable sides.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | June 18, 2012 at 08:24 PM
Sir C: Then you don't see any liklihood for an NRA type-situation? I could -- just barely -- imagine a situation where the decision came down against the ACA -- and I'm not so sure that the checks won't be recoverable, at least it will cause a few suits and a freeze and the argument that some states shouldn't benefit because their checks went out earlier than the others -- and the response was so negative once people saw how they were directly impacted that it could swing more than a few House seats our way, enough for the shot at a better bill. Still, I'd rather not risk it.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | June 18, 2012 at 08:29 PM
Jim,
It comes back to that one nasty word -- filibuster. Nothing can happen on anything major, especially something as big as health care.
And unless we take back the House -- which seems a pretty heavy lift -- nothing at all will happen.
Posted by: Sir Charles | June 18, 2012 at 09:47 PM
Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone who responded to my little survey. I'll respond in order.
Oddjob, as I think I have mentioned elsewhere, I know the area, I have lived in and around Boston but not for long, only a year and half or so. It was an inflection point though, so I have a certain soft spot for it that I didn't appreciate as much then as I do now.
Ltc - I never would have guessed. I have never lived in the DC area but I have some fond memories of stopovers there, not the least of which is a few trips to Goddard in Greenbelt, and that fantastic Bay seafood. I have to disagree on the oil question. It is a vital commodity unlike gold which, frankly, is only vital to a slight extent in it's application to some narrow markets. Before deregulation banks and others were not allowed to enter into large commodity markets for purely purposes of speculation which is what is happening now. The banks have so much excess cash they can park it in oil and literally move the market in their favor and we have seen this behavior repeat itself several times since the late 90s. I am not sure of the exact year but in the late 90s a barrel of light sweet crude (high end) was going for about $10. So my take is that the finance industry is also gaming the commodities markets in their favor and to the detriment of everyone else.
To the rest, yep, but it is surprising how many people think that the mortgage game and the other wall st. shenanigans are actually the fault of 'lazy people who want to live off the government dole'.
Paula B - I lived for quite a while in western Mass. Spent part of a summer at a little place called Colrain right on the Vt. border and regularly climbed ice in NH during that whole period, I also lived for about a year in Montpelier, Vt. I like the overall character of the region quite a lot. I like the geology too. Complex but not really all that obscure if you look closely.
Nancy - nicely put about the transitional nature of Spokane's location. I have never spent any time there but have passed through more than a few times. I actually did a lot of work on that general area, called the Columbia River Plateau Basalt Province back in the day. You could in fact say that it was the turning point for me in my career, nightmarish mathematical conjuring with some 32,000 whole rock analyses, trying to sort and sift them into some meaningful process of fractionation. All that analytical work, however, was harvested from the published literature, I did hardly any actual field work. Spokane has a fair bit in common with Pendleton, Or., another place I have passed through many times.
My curiosity is largely satisfied. The Cogitamus community is more geographically dispersed than I had imagined but not by a whole lot.
In return I'll give up some details of my own situation. I own a nice home in Portland, Or. That is where my SO resides. Because my business is a feast or famine kind of thing, I bought the place outright back in '93 for cash. If I had been 'smart' and leveraged my capital I would probably have lost it sometime in the last couple of years since my income has dwindled to nearly nothing and my fees due that are in arrears will never be collected. I don't know what it is 'worth' not but it doesn't matter, I plan to hold onto it. I can at least afford the insurance and taxes. But it is getting close now to ten years since I spent more than a couple of weeks there. I have adapted of course, but I still miss it in a way that is hard to describe. However, it has been so long since I was truly immersed in the community I am not sure I would recognize it now if I went back on a fulltime basis.
I am also getting old, and despite all the mythology, experience really does not count for much in today's commercial world. That is not to say that it shouldn't, it is just a statement of fact. This project is a perfect example. All the neophytes are myopically focused just on the one thing that they can readily quantify, they are totally ignorant of all the tell-tale signs of something much different at work behind the scene. It would have been nice to be vindicated in my analysis of things by getting a huge payday and being able to lavish my good fortune on my small family and few friends. Instead all I can leave to them is my disputable share in the largess that will ultimately come, if they live long enough.
I have to comment on the marijuana issue raised in earlier comments. In my opinion by far more damage has been inflicted on society by the prosecution of the draconian pot laws than anything the weed itself could have produced. Since economic issues seem to be popular now with the seriously uninformed and low information population, they might pay attention to the billions of dollars expended prosecuting and incarcerating people for growing, or smoking a plant.
By far the most dangerous aspect of experimenting with such innocuous drugs as THC is the horrendous prospect of being targeted by the 'justice' system for breaking the law. Utter insanity.
KBO -
Posted by: KN | June 19, 2012 at 12:06 AM
Sir Charles: After my over-optimism in 2010, I've been cautious in predicting the Senate races this year -- unlike the Presidency, which is still going to win me five books. But my optimism is returning on the Senate this year, and at least the Democrats -- and the blogosphere -- aren't making the same mistakes they did last time. I think there is a fairly good chance we will pick up a few seats -- unlike a few months ago when it looked like breaking even was the best we could do. The question is whether the majority will be enough to get the filibuster rule changed.
Or eliminated, but I think that would be harder to get votes for, and I am still not sure is a good idea. The current situation is insupportable -- and four more years of the standoff might be more than our current system of democracy could stand. But too often the mistakes we've made have been from responding too fast to a situation that needed some time to settle down -- see almost any foreign policy or military blunder we've made. I would far rather have a situation where an opponent or opposition party can delay but not kill a given bill. The "Lieberman plan" which calls for a series of votes scheduled two days apart with a descending number of votes needed to stop debate -- usually 60-57-54-51 -- strikes me as an intelligent compromise.
But we need to hold our majority -- and somebody needs to find out where Angus King stands on this one. But other than him, there seem to be few Democrats likely to revolt against a change. (Joe Manchin will, of course, but the only vote we can count on him giving us is the organizational one -- not even that if he is the 50th or 51st vote. But the type of traditionalist or independent eccentric (Russ Feingold, anyone) who will support the filibuster -- as it stands now -- seems to be mostly gone from the Democratic ranks. The currently serving Senators have watched the last three and a half years and the newcomers seem unlikely to make their second vote one that makes their own offices less relevant.)
So this may not be as much of an obstacle as you think. As for taking back the House, I am simply not sure how we stand there, but I think it is at least a likelihood as the Republicans sink into disarray. I'm doing those pieces on the various Senate races, but I've asked for info on House races out there and will be doing my own looking.
Oh, and This story should help Tester - who is far from shy at swinging back.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | June 19, 2012 at 09:50 AM