Across the Great Divide

The 10 pm Hysteria Report.

When did "supposed" — accepted by some as real, but on slender evidence — become "supposed to" — inevitable?

I guess when supposed is pronounced spos-ta. As in, it's spos-ta snow like hell today.

That's what we've been hearing for mosta the week, and although the dire forecast has lately been slipping into Thursday and Friday, it has already done some mischief. My in-laws cancelled their trip here, and by extension, the theater tickets we purchased. I decided it wasn't prudent to ride my bike to a crosstown meeting and get caught in the return traffic snarl. My domestic partner came home early because of cancelled clinic appointments.

As of 10 pm, however, though there's a dusting of snow, the blizzard has not hit my front walk.

Though I bailed on a perfectly good biking day and our family income will take a small dip because of a shorter work day, there are consolations.

For example: I've had a precancerous lesion on my forehead for most of year, or maybe two. What can I say? I'm a guy. It's not like the skin was sloughing off. But there comes a time in a domestic relationship when you understand your act is wearing thin and it's time to make the appointment.

So I called a dematologist, and they were taking appointments starting June 21st. (I guess it's good I wasn't depressed or something.) But I called again today, to another office, and voila — they had two openings for tomorrow, thanks to cancellations.

'Cause it's sposta snow, you know.

It might. Tomorrow's drive might totally suck. My life might be ruined by the experience. Or I can cancel. Or they will call me to cancel because their staff couldn't make it to the office. I expect it to be apparent tomorrow, and I'll deal with whatever comes.

But meanwhile, I have an appointment with a hard-to-book dermatologist, because I didn't worry about what "it" was supposed to do. I just did, finally, what I was supposed to do.

Experts Say, Fix the Forecasts.

Not long ago, I wrote about the implications of leaving inflation out of the state budget forecast and quoted several past state finance commissioners who thought it made sense to forecast revenues and expenses through the same economic lens.

Today, the current finance commissioner released the latest forecast, and once again inflation was counted on the revenue side and ignored on the expense side, thanks to a 2002 law requiring that we delude ourselves about rising expenses.

Fortunately some ex-commissioners and other economic advisors are still allowed to operate based on good sense. Here's a paraphrase of what they said in a statement issued today:

1. The current financial forecast does not provide an accurate understanding of our state’s finances. In the real world, inflation affects both revenues and expenditures.
2. The forecast gives us a picture of our state's fiscal health; it does not determine our budget. Making the forecast more accurate  would simply show how much current commitments would cost in the coming years.
3. Leaving inflation out of the forecast helped create expectations of a budget surplus for the next biennium that does not exist. Putting it back in will help the media give an honest picture of the state’s finances and help the public understand what's realistic — whether they want to spend more or cut taxes.
4. Policymakers need to ask — can our current level of revenues sustain future commitments and investments? They can set a goal to hold the line on expenses, but without a realistic assessment of future costs, they can't know what that line really means.

"[u]ntil the forecast is fixed, policymakers and the public should act on the assumption that the real story is in the fine print of the forecast...where the Department of Finance has been forced to leave the inflation figures since 2002."

[A full text of their statement is posted at The Test Tank.]

Wounded Newsman Takes Up Arms for Vets.

I rarely watch television any more, and network TV even less. But I'm going back online to catch the portion of the ABC News Bob Woodruff report I missed last night. It's the story of his comeback from the serious brain injury he received from a roadside bomb attack in Iraq.

More important, it's the story of our wounded vets who have come back to face recovery without all the resources available to a network newsman.

Congratulations to ABC for taking this on. This is not just about moldy walls at Walter Reed Hospital. If Congress and the Bush Administration aren't shamed by this, god help us all.

There's more to come.

Money Might Buy Happiness — If You Watch the Exchange Rate.

Two weeks ago, I briefly commented  on a Wall Street Journal article and David Strom post theorizing that European economies lag ours because Europeans are less satisfied in their jobs. I simply lobbed a playful shot at David pointing out there was more to enjoying life than work, and a lively discussion ensued.

Could we both be right? A reader sent me this Reuters story today:

European Union citizens are overwhelmingly happy with life -- and that's official.

A pan-European opinion poll conducted for the European Commission and published on Monday showed that 87 percent of EU citizens considered themselves happy, with a record 97 percent in Denmark.

Only in Bulgaria, which joined the bloc in January, did a majority of people (55 percent) say they were unhappy.

But the Eurobarometer survey on "European social reality," conducted between mid-November and mid-December, found far lower satisfaction levels with retirement and employment prospects.

And two-thirds of the 26,755 Europeans questioned think life will be more difficult for the next generation because of unemployment, the cost of living and uncertain pensions.

Let's see. Bulgaria... Denmark... Bulgaria... Denmark. Sounds about right to me.

But we were comparing Europeans to Americans, and for that I found no equivalent U.S. study of happiness. However, U of Michigan researchers have studied the topic and tell us "much of the variation in happiness is not about how well off you are, but about news in your life—whether you are doing better or worse than expected."

Although the effect of news on happiness is powerful and revealing it does not offer an easy way to be happier. "It doesn't do any good to tell people to go out and get good news," Kimball says. "They are already doing what they can to get good news." It also doesn't help people's happiness overall to know that high social rank adds to happiness, since the only way to gain social rank is at the expense of someone else, he adds. The things people can do to be happier in the long run are often simple—getting a good night's sleep or spending more time with friends, he notes. "People think they want to be happy, but for some people that only means they want good news, which no one can control. Given other concerns and worries, not everyone is willing to devote time to being happy."

One of the great mysteries about happiness is that economic growth has not raised U.S. or Japanese happiness much if any in the last 50 years, according to Kimball. "That doesn't mean that money can't buy happiness—only that people don't know how to convert time and money into happiness or that they have chosen other things instead," Kimball says. "Our complex, modern lives offer greater potential than ever for us to be happy, as long as we sacrifice money for the sake of time and put enough time into the things that will make us happy."

U of Minnesota David Lykken's studies of twins suggested that a capacity for happiness may be largely innate, after all, in evolutionary terms, money showed up rather late and vacation homes in Aspen, even later.

So I blame my genes for this post. According to the baby book my mother kept for me, my most common words at age two were: "I'm s-o-o-o happy!"

 

   

A Bouquet for Bluestem.

Those of us who veer all over the road, down through the ditches and occasionally into the corn field to find material aren't lazy, but we do have it easy compared to bloggers who pick a beat, cover it diligently and don't let themselves be distracted by the grass on the other side of the fence.

In fact, the good ones would have the self-discipline to avoid writing a sentence like the last one.

If there were such a thing as a Blog of Record in the First Congressional District, it would be A Bluestem Prairie. BSP covers goings-on in the First so well that it's a required stop for anyone, including metro reporters and state party animals, who wants a clear picture of what's going on there.

Readers of BSP knew Tim Walz was going to beat Guttnecht and charm Washington long before anyone else did. Not because Ollie Ox told us, but because she reported what was going on. What a concept.

The DM&E railroad loan was another story she stuck with, starting early on, and now we hear from her that the loan did not go through. BSP can't take credit for that, but who knows where the story would've been on the state and national radar over the last few months without that patient, focused local attention.

Hacks like Michael Brodkorb get the attention and the newspaper ink. Real writers like Ollie get to make a difference once in awhile.

The NRA Takes Down One of Its Own.

For a chilling look at how the NRA treats its own when they question assault weapon orthodoxy, read this story from the Washington Post. Then imagine what those eliminationalist boys think about the rest of us.

Modern hunters rarely become more famous than Jim Zumbo. A mustachioed, barrel-chested outdoors entrepreneur who lives in a log cabin near Yellowstone National Park, he has spent much of his life writing for prominent outdoors magazines, delivering lectures across the country and starring in cable TV shows about big-game hunting in the West.

Zumbo's fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America's gun culture -- and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs.

"Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity," Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. "As hunters, we don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them. . . . I'll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles."

The reaction -- from tens of thousands of owners of assault rifles across the country, from media and manufacturers rooted in the gun business, and from the National Rifle Association -- has been swift, severe and unforgiving. Despite a profuse public apology and a vow to go hunting soon with an assault weapon, Zumbo's career appears to be over.

They took down Jim Zumbo faster than a corn-baited deer.

There's a segment of rabid gun owners who believe in the slippery slope  — if you allow limitations of any sort on gun ownership, why the next thing you know, you won't be able to shoot ni  intruders or keep wolves from eating your livestock. I don't happen to think this slope is nearly as slippery as the one related to abortion rights, but I'm a shooter, not a killer.

Either boys with guns really know how to organize or the companies that sell to them are especially chickenshit. Or both.

If Only Saddam Had Been Working on Global Warming!

Jeffrey Feldman points out Dick Cheney's curious flexibility on the matter of how much evidence is needed before we act to prevent catastrophe:

In his 2006 Book The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind summed up Dick Cheney's approach to national security after 9/11:

if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction -- and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time -- the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.
(quote courtesy NYT)

What Suskind saw in Cheney, in other words, was a man who proclaimed himself a man of action, not analysis.  What matters to Cheney is the act of preventing disaster.  The analysis to show that act was necessary can come later, if at all. 

How strange it is--or maybe not so strange--that Cheney's one percent doctrine as it applies to invading a foreign country, quickly inflates to a new, at-least-90-percent doctrine when it comes to fighting one of the greatest threats to national security of our time: the global climate crisis .

According to a recent ABC interview (hat tip to Think Progress), Dick Cheney does not see the global climate crisis as enough of a threat to our nation for him to act decisively--despite the fact that 90 percent of all scientists working the question agree that it is.

In his 2006 Book The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind summed up Dick Cheney's approach to national security after 9/11:

if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction -- and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time -- the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.
(quote courtesy NYT)

What Suskind saw in Cheney, in other words, was a man who proclaimed himself a man of action, not analysis.  What matters to Cheney is the act of preventing disaster.  The analysis to show that act was necessary can come later, if at all. 

How strange it is--or maybe not so strange--that Cheney's one percent doctrine as it applies to invading a foreign country, quickly inflates to a new, at-least-90-percent doctrine when it comes to fighting one of the greatest threats to national security of our time: the global climate crisis .

According to a recent ABC interview (hat tip to Think Progress), Dick Cheney does not see the global climate crisis as enough of a threat to our nation for him to act decisively--despite the fact that 90 percent of all scientists working the question agree that it is.

Michele Bachmann Doesn't Know the Half of It.

In the March 5 New Yorker, Seymour Hersh writes about the larger sectarian and political issues at play in the Middle East. It's a long piece that dissects and speculates about possible consequences of a new Bush-Cheney strategy, starting with Iran, god help us.

One outcome — not necessarily intended — could be a partitioning not just of Iraq, but of the whole region, along religious and ethnic lines. This scenario is suggested by the Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, whom former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage called the smartest man in the Middle East:

“I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, ‘I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.’ ”

Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.” Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was “the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq,” which is dominated by Shiites. “I am not sure, but I smell this,” he told me.

Partition would leave Israel surrounded by “small tranquil states,” he said. “I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,” he said. “In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.”

In fact, the Bush Administration has adamantly resisted talk of partitioning Iraq, and its public stances suggest that the White House sees a future Lebanon that is intact, with a weak, disarmed Hezbollah playing, at most, a minor political role. There is also no evidence to support Nasrallah’s belief that the Israelis were seeking to drive the Shiites into southern Iraq. Nevertheless, Nasrallah’s vision of a larger sectarian conflict in which the United States is implicated suggests a possible consequence of the White House’s new strategy.
– via Information Clearinghouse

Just So I Don't Ruin the Oscar Broadcast...

I'm setting this post from Frank Rich's Sunday column to go out Monday.

Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it's revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. It was on Dec. 9, 2001, that Dick Cheney first floated the idea on "Meet the Press" that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. It was "pretty well confirmed," he said (though it was not), that bin Laden's operative Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before Atta flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.

In the Scooter Libby trial, Mr. Cheney's former communications aide, Catherine Martin, said that delivering a message on "Meet the Press" was "a tactic we often used." No kidding. That mention of the nonexistent Prague meeting was the first of five times that the vice president would imply an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration on that NBC show before the war began in March 2003. This bogus innuendo was an essential tool for selling the war precisely because we had lost bin Laden in Afghanistan. If we could fight Al Qaeda by going to war in Iraq instead, the administration could claim it didn't matter where bin Laden was. (Mr. Bush pointedly stopped mentioning him altogether in public.)

Al, Y'all Turned Out All Right.

In case you haven't yet plugged into Liberal Media Elite, they're commenting on the news about Al Sharpton's lineal connection to Strom Thurmond's family, which did seem to get around. This quote from the story in particular set Bill off:

Some of Thurmond’s relatives said the connection also came as a surprise to them. A niece, Ellen Senter, said she would speak with Sharpton if he were interested.

“I doubt you can find many native South Carolinians today whose family, if you traced them back far enough, didn’t own slaves,” said Senter, 61, of Columbia, S.C. She added: “And it is wonderful that (Sharpton) was able to become what he is in spite of what his forefather was.”

As I commented over there, I'm not sure Senter's statement is racist. It may be wonderfully arch. After all, Sharpton's "forefather" was a white slave owner.

[In one day, I've linked to two posts that contain c*ss words. No wonder Michael Brodkorb is considered by the media to be a reliable source of political and cultural insight instead of me...]