The Episconixonian

You Think?

2012-01-27T22:50:00.001-08:00

The cautious people at our Marriott hotel in Manhattan warn that weather is "subject to change without notice."

Tragic, Tough Tibet

2012-01-27T20:50:00.000-08:00

During the last year, to protest Chinese rule at least 16 people, including monks and nuns, have immolated themselves in Tibet and ethnically Tibetan regions of neighboring Sichuan province. Fifty demonstrators across the street from the UN late this afternoon waved victims' photos and Tibetan flags and shouted angry denunciations of the Chinese communist government.

While Beijing insists that Tibet has always been part of China, Tibetans say the region was autonomous for much of its history. China reasserted control after the 1949 revolution and says it won't ever let go. Beijing regularly squeezes until it hurts. Along with hundreds of millions of Chinese, Tibet's people experienced the worst of communism's privations. Hundreds of thousands died during Mao Zedong's failed Great Leap Forward. Communist forces destroyed thousands of monasteries. The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual and political leader, was driven into exile in 1959. Beijing suppresses all manifestations of separatism and insists that it will name the Dalai Lama's successor to ensure that he'll toe the line on Tibet's permanent status as part of China.

Although China's treatment of Tibet is tragic and sometimes scandalous, there's little if anything the U.S. can or will do. It does regularly express its concerns to China. Barack Obama even invited Beijing's ire last July by meeting with the Dalai Lama. But it's hard to imagine this or any administration risking a significant worsening of relations with Beijing for little Tibet's sake. China denounces all alleged inferences in its internal affairs. Besides, being a dominant player in global and American markets buys a lot of deference. In Times Square, the bright red panel crowning this video tower, a potent symbol of capitalism, has been purchased by China's propaganda arm, the Xinhua News Agency, an ironic counterpoint to the demonstrators a few long blocks away, the types Xinhua calls bandits.

When two great peoples have interests in common, a numerically small people like the Tibetans will lose out. But China should understand that they'll probably never lose heart.

Vacancy At The Center Of The World

2012-01-27T20:28:00.001-08:00

Would you believe the storefront on the northeast corner of Broadway and 42nd St. (at right, above) is available? Great spot for a church, actually.

Midtown Sky

2012-01-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

From the UN to the Chrysler building, the best view you are likely to get from a Courtyard by Marriott

A One-Source Donniebrook

2012-01-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

According to Mark Feldstein, who says Richard Nixon was "crafty, criminal, self-pitying, vengeful, paranoid," but not gay (not that it would matter if he were), sensational claims about 37's sexuality and a possible affair with Bebe Rebozo published in Don Fulsom's new book (out Tuesday) come down to this:

Just a recollection from retired journalist Bonnie Angelo, who, in an interview with me, confirmed the story she told Fulsom: In 1972, she saw a tipsy Nixon pull Rebozo into a group photo at a Florida restaurant and hold his hand for “upwards of a minute.”

That's all you've got, Don? Nixon was a profound introvert whose anxiety spiked when anyone pointed a camera or microphone at him. Bet he grabbed Rebozo's hand and forgot to let go after his brain went into hyper-observing, -calculating overdrive. This two-fisted pre-presidential handshake with Jackie Robinson looks like a semi-permanent arrangement as well. Mrs. Robinson would gladly set you straight, as it were, if you have any suspicions.

Newt VIII

2012-01-27T10:40:00.000-08:00

Former House Republican Joe Scarborough on the bullet one hopes we're in the process of dodging:

Gingrich’s precipitous fall from power was the result of arrogance, self-satisfaction, and a fatal tendency to flit from issue to issue—and even from core conviction to core conviction—in the seeming belief that if he spoke well enough (and used as many adverbs as possible) no one would notice that he was doing something he had equally eloquently (and equally adverbially) opposed before.

Let’s be clear: Gingrich is an important figure. Regardless of what happens in Florida and beyond, he will be remembered as the man who brought the Reagan Revolution to Congress. Yet it will also be recorded that Newt compared the Great Reagan to Neville Chamberlain, dismissed Reaganomics as flawed and called Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union an utter failure a few years before the U.S.S.R. was relegated to the dustbin of history.

These unpleasant facts do not stop Newt from trying to embrace the same policies he once denounced (one wonders if he even remembers the contradictions at this point), but that’s what makes my former colleague so fascinating. And so troubling.

Hat tip to fitnews.com for photo

Cry Baby Watch

2012-01-27T08:08:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich, after crowds in old South Carolina roared their approval of his attacks on Juan Williams and the elite media and after NBC's Brian Williams, in the next debate, cautioned the crowd to be less raucous:

We're going to serve notice on future debates. We're just not going to allow that to happen. That’s wrong. The media doesn’t control free speech. People ought to be allowed to applaud if they want to.

The Gingrich campaign, after crowds in Jacksonville roared their approval of Mitt Romney's attacks on Gingrich:

Members of Newt Gingrich's campaign accused Mitt Romney's campaign of packing the audience for the Republican presidential candidate debate on Thursday night in Jacksonville, Fla., with its own supporters to ensure that the dynamics would be favorable to Romney.

All thanks to HuffPo.

"Helplessness Blues," Fleet Foxes

2012-01-27T05:09:00.000-08:00

Fleet Foxes "Helplessness Blues" from Austin City Limits on Vimeo.

Romney Isn't The New Reagan

2012-01-26T21:45:00.000-08:00

Weak. Incompetent. Failing. Impotent.

2012-01-26T21:19:00.001-08:00

Newt on Obama? Nope. Reagan.

Bully!

2012-01-26T20:49:00.000-08:00

Rod Dreher after tonight's GOP debate in Jacksonville:

Romney won this debate, and probably Florida, and so the nomination. Newt collapsed, as bullies and blowhards often do when somebody fights back. Santorum auditioned for Romney’s VP, and greatly enhanced his chances. Ron Paul shines on, that crazy diamond.

David's List

2012-01-26T20:19:00.000-08:00

Wanted: Presidential library director

Unborn Hero

2012-01-26T19:22:00.000-08:00

During a January visit to the 9/11 Memorial, my St. John's friend Andy Guilford took this photo juxtaposing the name of hero Todd Beamer with an unborn, unnamed child who also died aboard flight 93 in Pennsylvania

We Fall Back In June And October

2012-01-26T18:35:00.000-08:00

Discover explains why:

We have two systems to measure time: our everyday one which is based on the rotation of the Earth, and a fancy-schmancy scientific and precise one based on vibrations of atoms. The two systems aren’t quite in synch, though, since the Earth counts a day as a tiny bit longer than the atomic clocks say it is. So every now and again, to get them back together, we add a leap second on to the atomic clocks. That holds them back for one second, and then things are lined up once again.

The Continuing War Against John Dean

2012-01-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

Nixon White House staffer Geoff Shepard (left) says his ex-colleagues "did some horrible things. The colleague the Nixon-Bob Haldeman operatives now controlling Nixon's foundation consider maximus horribilis is John Dean (below), who helped send their friends to jail for their Watergate crimes. In 2009, they went to war against former Nixon library director Tim Naftali after he invited Dean to give a talk. Among the schemes disclosed so far was getting another former Nixon aide, Sen. Lamar Alexander, to pressure Naftali or worse by putting a secret hold on President Obama's nomination of a new archivist of the U.S. Shepard also tried to keep the public from seeing Nixon's 1975 grand jury testimony.

Beginning tomorrow, the Chapman University law school in Orange, California is convening a 40th anniversary Watergate symposium that features Dean. We learn today that Shepard's been trying to get onto the bill so he can call the former White House counsel a nutcase and fool to his own bad face. But the professor convening the confab said no thanks:

"Look, I don't want to hurt people's feelings," [he] says of Shepard's draft, but there wasn't much intellectual content and it was marked with innuendoes.

The politics still swirling around Nixon in the county of his birth is, to borrow the columnist's word, complicated. Who can say what will happen next as the struggle over his legacy continues? The irony is that while there's a good case to be made in defense of some of Nixon's actions during Watergate, attacking Dean doesn't help him anymore. It just helps his men.

Even More Of Us Are Keynesians Now

2012-01-26T13:12:00.000-08:00

Tory Andrew Sullivan looks at the numbers and tilts against austerity:

For me, the true test of conservatism is empiricism. It doesn't look as if the Ron Paul medicine is currently working very well (although some of that blame must surely lie with the massive debt that Blair and Brown, like Bush, piled up in the last decade). Nonetheless: this is the data. Britain has flatlined or declined in the last six months. The US has grown.
So here's an obvious retort to Romney and his Obama-Is-A-European schtick. Obama should simply say that it is Romney who now wants to impose European-style austerity, and it isn't working. Obama, meanwhile, has chosen an American exceptionalism strategy, which is leading to growth. By relying on that renowned British homosexual, JM Keynes.

An Afternoon In America

2012-01-25T17:24:00.001-08:00

The 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan is in the middle of a construction site. You need reservations to visit; details here. Beyond the fences and security, it's spacious and quiet. Hallowed ground. People walk slowly and speak quietly. "It doesn't feel like New York," said my stepdaughter, Meaghan, who lives here. Friendly, otherwise inconspicuous volunteers step forward to offer tissues to those who are moved to tears or to assist with photography.

Sunken fountains ringed with the names of the fallen mark the footprints of the World Trade Center towers. The spaces will be encircled by the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower and several other skyscrapers, each designed differently and spaced at odd intervals, like American irregulars standing guard. Their grandeur and diversity (and, one hopes, low occupancy rates) will affront the murderers.

One of their victims, Lisa Frost, an alumna of St. John's Episcopal School, had been graduated from Boston University in the spring of 2001. She was aboard United flight 175, which the terrorists flew into the south tower. Her name is on panel S-3. My wife Kathy found the name of William Wik, who married her high school friend Kathy Norton. William escaped from the south tower but died after reentering to help others get out. His name is on S-60.

I don't know if this little girl and her family were visiting the name of a family member or friend. The carved names invite touch. Sometimes, depending on how the wind blows around the plaza, the marble is dampened by mist from the thundering fountains.

The small temporary visitor center (a Sept. 11 museum will open later, in a building that looks like one of the towers knocked on its side) displays only two relatively small photos of the towers on fire. The first has the U.S. flag in the foreground. The spare text says the attacks were the work of the "radical Islamist terrorist network al-Qaeda."

Wednesday was a cold, breezy day, and the flag over the memorial snapped smartly. The largest single contributor to the 9/11 Memorial is the Starr Foundation, controlled by Hank Greenberg, the former chairman and CEO of American International Group and the largest beneficiary of the former Nixon Center.

The spire of St. Paul's Chapel, where volunteers and clergy assisted rescue and recovery workers after the attacks, and the Freedom Tower, which looks like it's about two-thirds finished. St. Paul's is an institution of Trinity Episcopal Church, nearby at Wall St. and Broadway.

Near the memorial a passerby was having a spirited and friendly conversation with an Occupy Wall St. protestor. Someone had sent pizza for the demonstrators. Vigorous debate, openness of heart and mind, generosity of spirit. How American.

In Those Days, Editors Paid Peanuts

2012-01-25T14:31:00.000-08:00

Bill Thompson (shown with Kathy and me this afternoon at lunch on the Upper East Side) was an editor at Doubleday in 1973 when he decided to offer a $2500 advance to a struggling young writer named Stephen King for a book called Carrie. In the late 1980s, he was running a short-lived imprint, Wynwood Press, when another unknown novelist sent him a manuscript that several publishers had already turned down. "Even the coffee stains had coffee stains," he said. But Bill thought A Time To Kill was a great yarn, so he gave John Grisham his first contract.

If you're keeping score, that means Bill Thompson discovered two of the top-selling U.S. fiction writers of all time. The same day he released Grisham's first novel, he also published mine, which was read by dozens. Two out of three ain't bad.

Kathy and I got to know Bill in the mid-1980s when we assisted Richard Nixon, along with his chief foreign policy adviser Marin Strmecki, on his sixth book, No More Vietnams. Bill was then working at Arbor House, where he helped the great Elmore Leonard (whose Rum Punch became Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown") achieve his first bestseller, Glitz, by getting cartoonist and Leonard fan Charles M. Schultz to draw a panel showing Snoopy engrossed in Glitz. On the basis of that success, he persuaded Nixon to give Arbor House a try and did very well by 37's defense of the Vietnam war and his own policies.

This afternoon's conversation was a leisurely one about, among other things, the radical changes in the book business and Bill's continued cutting-edge work in helping promising new writers. He doesn't have a Kindle yet, and he said he got a headache when I tried to show him how to read the Economist on my phone. But we decided that as long as people keep reading, it doesn't much matter how.

Newt McCarthy II

2012-01-25T08:06:00.001-08:00

Not even Spiro Agnew, in criticizing the elite media, said they were un-American.

Another Elite Media Lie About Gingrich

2012-01-25T07:42:00.000-08:00

Ramesh Ponnuru examines Newt Gringrich's bold new ideas and finds them illogical, impractical, and expensive. His wacky no-risk privatization of Social Security, for instance, could break the Treasury:

His plan guarantees that if people’s investments fail, they will still get all the benefits that current law promises them. How can the government save money while giving everyone their promised benefits and making up unlucky or incompetent investors’ shortfalls? It can’t. And won’t those shortfalls be larger if people know they can’t lose? Plenty of Social Security plans involve the government saving money in the long term by taking a hit in the present. Gingrich has managed to devise a plan that actually increases the program’s long-term cost. The price tag for Gingrich’s originality, based on estimates of similar proposals in years past, would be several trillion dollars.

In The Natural Disorder Of Things

2012-01-25T07:23:00.000-08:00

Is grief a "disorder"? Experts disagree:

Jerome C. Wakefield of New York University and Dr. Michael First of Columbia concluded that the evidence was not strong enough to support the change. “An estimated 8 to 10 million people lose a loved one every year, and something like a third to a half of them suffer depressive symptoms for up to month afterward,” said Dr. Wakefield, author of “The Loss of Sadness.” “This would pathologize them for behavior previously thought to be normal.”
But Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the chairman of the task force making revisions, disagreed, saying, “If someone is suffering from severe depression symptoms one or two months after a loss or a death, and I can’t make a diagnosis of depression — well, that is not being clinically proactive. That person may then not get the treatment they need.”

Gingrich's Failed European Policies

2012-01-25T05:52:00.001-08:00

In 2010, Newt Gingrich compared Muslims to Nazis -- political hate speech, according to his former House colleague Joe Scarborourgh -- and argued that U.S. citizens who are Muslim should be banned from mosque worship in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. More recently, he said he'd insist on a religious test for Muslim citizens who wanted to work in government. If elected, would he try to make his anti-First Amendment beliefs the law of the land? Then he'd be leading the U.S. down the road he claims Barack Obama is taking, toward a militantly secular Europe. Besides being unconstitutional, it would be stupid. As Jonathan Laurence writes, Gingrichism has slowed rather than accelerated Muslims' integration into European society:

Europeans should not be afraid to allow Muslim students to take classes on Islam in state-financed schools and universities. The recognition and accommodation of Islamic religious practices, from clothing to language to education, does not mean capitulation to fundamentalism. On the contrary, only by strengthening the democratic rights of Muslim citizens to form associations, join political parties and engage in other aspects of civic life can Europe integrate immigrants and give full meaning to the abstract promise of religious liberty.
The rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties has led several European countries to impose restrictions on Islamic dress, mosque-building and reunification of families through immigration law. These policies are counterproductive. Paradoxically, people for whom religion is otherwise not all that important become more attached to their faith’s clothing, symbols and traditions when they feel they are being singled out and denied basic rights.

Start Spreading The News

2012-01-25T04:22:00.000-08:00

The view at dawn Wednesday morning from our hotel in midtown, looking south along 3rd Ave. We arrived on the redeye from LAX -- a homecoming for Bronx-born Kathy and for me, too, since we both worked in New York for former President Nixon for many years. Both my daughters were born in Manhattan.

Kathy's superior instincts told her that we'd find a diner on 2nd Ave. We bought the papers -- actual printed newspapers, the Times, the Daily News -- and had eggs and coffee and juice. Then Kathy went to St. Patrick's Cathedral and I went looking for a Village Voice, which, I was distressed to find, is now just a flimsy giveaway like its sister paper OC Weekly and no longer the two-section authoritative cultural and political source book that I left behind in 1990. It still carries Michael Musto's column, though. This week he interviewed Joan and Melissa Rivers. He asked Joan about Golden Globe fashions. She said, "Meryl Streep is the best actress alive, but she looked like was wearing the Temple Grandin collection. Meryl, call me."

Full Of Passionate Intensity

2012-01-24T16:13:00.000-08:00

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- W. B. YEATS, 1920

Nixon: "For Me, [Being Gay] Is a Choice"

2012-01-24T11:00:00.001-08:00

Not this Nixon. That Nixon.

Egypt Is Not The New Iran

2012-01-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

Alon Ben-Meir give three reasons Egypt won't be the new Iran: The military's power, the Muslim Brotherhood's comparative moderation, and the Egyptian people's gumption. He then advises:

The United States and its allies, especially Israel, must accept the fact that in the wake of the Arab Spring, Islamic governments are likely to dominate the Arab political landscape. This does not suggest that these governments will follow Iran's model and naturally commit themselves to hostility toward the West or seek Israel's destruction. Without throwing their caution to the wind, the U.S. and its allies will be wise to adopt a pro-active policy toward Egypt. They must demonstrate that they stand for democracy, in words and in deeds, and welcome any genuine democratic development in Egypt that leads to sustainable reforms and progress, however treacherous the road may be.

"Worse Than Anyone Imagines"

2012-01-24T07:38:00.000-08:00

Veteran Middle East watcher Robin Wright on the dire economic news from Egypt. Remember that unemployed young men were fodder for Iran's Islamist revolution in the late 1970s:

[A] year of turmoil has...reversed tentative economic progress in the Arab world's largest country, which accounts for 25 percent of the 300 million Arabs spread across 22 countries. Egypt's economy, which is the fourth largest in the Middle East, has been tanking. Tourism is drying up. Investors have been scared off. And foreign currency reserves have plummeted.
Prime Minister Kamal el Ganzouri broke into tears last month as he told journalists that Egypt's economy was "worse than anyone imagines." The situation is sufficiently dire that the government has opened talks about a $3.2 billion from the International Monetary Fund, an idea it originally rejected as a threat to its sovereignty.
But to jumpstart the economy with an IMF loan, Cairo would also have to undertake reforms and reduce subsidies that could seriously increase public pain. By last October, 40 percent of Egyptians surveyed by Gallup already said they found it "very difficult" to get by, with nearly half of Egyptians saying they had faced times when they did not have enough money to buy food.
In an ominous sign for the future, youth unemployment -- in a country where 60 percent of the population is under 30 -- is currently estimated at 25 percent, with few of the young having any imminent prospects. Sayed and Abdel Nabi are among them. Many of the hardcore who returned to Tahrir last fall are the marginalized and unemployed, not the idealistic activists who launched the uprising.

The Party Of Palin And Gingrich

2012-01-23T22:30:00.001-08:00

Andrew Sullivan believes that Newt Gingrich is slouching toward Bethlehem, an unstoppable creature of the GOP of Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, and Karl Rove. He writes:

This now is the party of Palin and Gingrich, animated primarily by hatred of elites, angry at the new shape and color of America, befuddled by a suddenly more complicated world, and dedicated primarily to emotion rather than reason. That party is simply not one that can rally behind a Mitt Romney. He too knows what he has to say - hence his ludicrous invocation of Obama as some kind of alien being. But it doesn't work. He believes it - since he seems capable of genuinely believing in anything that will win him votes and power. But he doesn't have the rage to make it work.

Newt Is The New Nixon III

2012-01-23T22:13:00.000-08:00

Carter Eskew, quoting Rick Perlstein's Nixonland:

”Politicians. . .make their life’s work convincing 50 percent plus one of their constituency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams.. . .” In the 1960’s, “America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which. . .” In 1964, the voter “pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else. . .seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.”
Sounds at least plausible today, doesn’t it?

Newt Is The New Nixon II

2012-01-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

Jon Meacham:

Like Nixon, Gingrich is smart, with a wide-ranging and entrepreneurial mind. Like Nixon, Gingrich is a striver who seems insecure around traditional establishment figures even though he has achieved much more than nearly all the politicians, editors and reporters he seems to at once loathe and fear. Like Nixon, Gingrich is fluent in the vernacular of cultural populism, brilliantly casting contemporary American life in terms of an overarching conflict between “real” people and distant “elites” bent on the destruction of all that is good and noble about the U.S.

Mitt Fit

2012-01-23T21:59:00.000-08:00

Newt moot.

Ann's Song

2012-01-23T13:48:00.000-08:00

Coulter: Thumbs down on Newt Gingrich.

Laura's Song

2012-01-23T13:35:00.000-08:00

Those few who may remain in the Pollyanna column when it comes to what the so-called Arab Spring portends for women's rights in the Arab world ought to be reminded of the brave journalist who returned from glorious Tahrir Square with latent PTSD. The hope probably should have died that day, but the collective conscious was still hoping for the best.

Gabby In 2016

2012-01-23T09:27:00.000-08:00

God bless her on her Arizona highway.

On The Knife's Edge

2012-01-23T09:07:00.001-08:00

Jonathan Cohn, who favors the president's reelection, counsels against those who celebrate Newt Gingrich's surge because they think he'd be easy to beat:

Yes, an unstable demagogue should be a lot easier for Obama to beat than a candidate who'd make a plausible president -- e.g., judging by past work product, Romney. But in a two-party system, either party nominating an unstable demagogue is a danger to democracy, both because any incumbent can be beat if economic conditions are bad enough or if catastrophe strikes, and because the takeover of one major party by extremists, reactionaries and hatemongers means we are always on the knife's edge. The counter-argument, often expressed by [Andrew] Sullivan, is that only by electing an extremist and getting its clock cleaned can a party submerged in its own ideology be dragged back to the center. That may have worked in the case of Goldwater. But Goldwater was a sober statesman compared to Gingrich, Perry, Palin.

Don't Just Blame Bibi

2012-01-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

Who's really dragging their feet on Middle East peace -- the Israelis and their conservative prime minister or the Palestinians, who are more focused on the dramatic changes in neighboring Arab countries and their alliance with Hamas? Jonathan Tobin:

The Arab Spring that many hoped would bring democracy to the Muslim world has morphed into an Islamist Winter that promises nothing but sorrow and future conflict. If the Palestinians, like the voters of Egypt, ultimately choose to embrace radical Islamists, there is not much the West can do to stop them. But they can draw the proper conclusions from this turn of events and forebear from policies that are based on the assumption that the Palestinians still desire peace with Israel. This is especially true for an Obama administration that is still beguiled by the chimera of a peace accord that the Palestinians clearly have no intention of signing no matter where it might place Israel’s borders.

Gingrich's "Anti-Semitic Diatribe"

2012-01-22T21:18:00.001-08:00

Richard Silverstein didn't like the sound of Newt Gingrich's South Carolina victory speech:

We are going to argue American exceptionalism, the American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American federalist papers; the founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. [Obama] draws his from Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers and people who don’t like the classical America.

Silverstein:

Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is replete with multiple references to the Founding Fathers and American constitution as the embodiments of liberty and democracy. But note how he sets up Alinsky as a radical who is alien to America. The final nail in the coffin is his reference to “classical America.” Who or what is classical America? It is of course white Christian America, everything that Saul Alinsky and many of you out there reading this are not. This is a classic anti-Semitic diatribe gussied up in Tea Party rhetoric.

First Sighting Of This Theme

2012-01-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

A vote for Newt Gingrich is a vote to re-elect Richard Nixon.

War Cry

2012-01-22T12:28:00.001-08:00

Gleeful Democratic operative Paul Begala on the heart-clutching panic being experienced today by those Republicans who once had the idea that they might actually contend in November -- and on how Newt Gingrich confounded them all in the birthplace of the Confederacy:

Gingrich won the South Carolina primary not because of advertising, but rather because of his debate performances. Eighty-eight percent of South Carolina Republicans said the debates were important to making up their minds, and in the two key debates, Gingrich hit every GOP erogenous zone. He scolded Fox News's Juan Williams when Williams asked him about the dog-whistle language Gingrich uses to stir up racial stereotypes. Williams, the author of Eyes on the Prize, a respected history of the civil-rights movement, knows of what he speaks. But Gingrich knows his party's base, and the base loves both the coded language and attacking anyone who calls them on it.

Bush Was The Food Stamp President

2012-01-21T22:40:00.000-08:00

Attacking Juan Williams, Newt Gingrich's statements were false.

Elite Media Kegger In Newt's Honor

2012-01-21T22:29:00.000-08:00

Newt, Newt, Why Are You Persecuting Saul?

2012-01-21T20:26:00.000-08:00

Ira Stoll on Professor Gingrich's seeming ignorance:

Mr. Gingrich mentioned Alinsky's name at least twice, again echoing a theme raised here in an October 18, 2011 post on Obama and Alinsky. But the way Mr. Gingrich set it up, as a juxtaposition between American exceptionalism as represented by the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers and the "radicalism of Saul Alinsky," makes me wonder if Mr. Gingrich has actually read Alinsky. In fact Alinsky, like Mr. Gingrich, wrapped his own cause in the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers. In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky writes:"To us the Declaration of Independence is a glorious document and an affirmation of human rights." In the same book, Alinsky calls Samuel Adams an "organizational genius." Alinsky's Reveille for Radicals begins with a quote from Thomas Paine and contains this passage: "Where are America's radicals? They were with Patrick Henry in the Virginia Hall of Burgesses; they were with Sam Adams in Boston; they were with that peer of all American radicals, Tom Paine, from the distribution of Common Sense through those dark days of the American Revolution...The American radicals were in the colonies grimly forcing the addition of the Bill of Rights to our Constitution. They stood at the side of Tom Jefferson..."

The Power Of Hate

2012-01-21T20:20:00.000-08:00

How Newt won.

Chris Christie For President

2012-01-21T19:28:00.001-08:00

My Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt, who says the GOP nomination will be decided by the Florida primary, puts the best face on the South Carolina debacle:

Newt’s greatest contribution to the race has been to demonstrate that the style of political argument that Chris Christie and Paul Ryan debuted in the last couple of years actually is not a luxury but a necessity to win hearts and minds in the GOP. The 2012 election will not be won because of Mitt Romney’s tax returns or his years at Bain, or because of Newt’s past marriages or the payments from Freddie.

Fair enough, Hugh, when it comes to Gingrich's ADD policy motor mouth. But never have I heard Gov. Christie or Rep. Ryan say that the president of the United States takes his inspiration from socialist Saul Alinsky instead of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Our country could be wounded by Gingrich's demagoguery. Is it too late for a Christie candidacy?

Newt McCarthy

2012-01-21T19:03:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan perfectly captures the ruthless demagoguery of Newt Gingrich's speech tonight. He said the president believes in the organizing principles of socialist Saul Alinsky (how foreign that name sounds, doesn't it? Gingrich keeps using it) instead of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Is he saying the president is unpatriotic? Mr. Gingrich, do you believe Barack Obama is a loyal American or not? A sad day for South Carolina and a desperate moment for the Republican Party. What's your plan, Mitt? If you can't stop him, then the abyss.

They're Laughing. But He's Preaching.

2012-01-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

Louis CK. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan

Having A Very Good Time At The GOP's Expense

2012-01-21T14:25:00.000-08:00

Democratic operative James Carville addresses the Republican establishment, whatever it is:

[Romney] was your guy -- he was methodical, meticulous, married once. He has completely blown himself up over an issue that everyone knew was coming. Have you had a chance to look at John McCain's research operation on Mitt? Wow. And let me assure you, that thing has been supplemented, expanded, and annotated. God only knows about the Obama people -- they've got a billion dollars! And how about my friends over at American Bridge (the Democrat-leaning political action committee)? Clearly Mitt is merely in the beginning of this tax-return, financial-disclosure, Cayman Island (and God only knows what else) fiasco.
Your new front-runner is one of your old front runners, Newt Gingrich. I would like to take a moment to revel: I cannot personally tell you how pleased I am to see old Newt rise to the top after listening to all of your nauseating, sickening lectures on the evils of government and the importance of family values.

Now, you guys have to deal with a $1.6 million Freddie Mac consultant (who says he wasn't a lobbyist) who has been married three times. Hope you, at least, enjoy the Super Bowl. It could be your last hurrah for a while.

7 Out Of 498

2012-01-21T13:55:00.000-08:00

According to the LA Times, the condition of political liberalism (in its classical meaning) is poor in Egypt in the wake of elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists won 75% of the seats in parliament:

The elections were a sobering lesson for young activists whose nascent parties were no match for the grassroots networks and entwined religious and political message of the Islamists. The liberal activists helped ignite the revolution that brought down Mubarak but, winning only seven seats, they have been surpassed by more formidable political powers.

Although Stranger Things Have Happened

2012-01-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

A welcome reassurance from the right:

It is hard to make clear-cut statements about the mercurial and often contradictory Gingrich, but one thing we can say with absolute certainty: he will never be President of the United States.

Obama Goes Green

2012-01-21T00:42:00.000-08:00

It's heating up in South Carolina. On Thursday evening, the president was keeping it cool.

Jay Wack

2012-01-21T00:33:00.000-08:00

On Friday night Jay Leno agreed with Newt Gingrich that the media were driving decent people out of politics:

That's why we have people like Newt Gingrich in politics.

Does Newtonian Chaos Really Loom?

2012-01-20T22:22:00.000-08:00

His surging polls notwithstanding, I'm stunned by the idea that Newt Gingrich might win the South Carolina primary. Until just recently, electability has been the GOP watchword. Tilting to Gingrich would be sheer masochism. His ethical lapses are legion. His own people drove him from the House speakership. In national polls, his negatives are astonishingly high. If he really cared about his party, the decent thing would've been not to run at all. Gingrich's mentor Richard Nixon stayed away from every GOP convention after his 1974 resignation until his death 20 years later. He didn't want to make his unpopularity the story. He didn't want it to be all about him.

Gingrich has no such scruples. He's been acting out since Mitt Romney thrashed him in the Iowa caucuses, though impotently at first as his rage got the better of him. His super-PAC erred by producing an inaccurate hard-left critique of Romney's business practices. While history teacher Gingrich knows all about the power of the big lie, this first outing backfired. He had been in much better form preparing to run in 2010, when he cunningly appealed to some Americans' worst instincts by comparing Muslims to Nazis. His former colleague Joe Scarborough called it hate speech. He never apologized for that rhetorical atrocity and issued a tepid disavowal of the Romney attack only after party elites and even rival Rick Santorum made him look silly for having a PAC that was feeding ammunition to President Obama.

Gingrich got his mojo back once his self-righteousness cooled and hardened. He stood on a stage in South Carolina and attacked a black journalist for asking him in all reasonableness to defend calling a black commander-in-chief the food stamp president. This week he attacked another journalist to deflect a legitimate question about his poor behavior toward one of the two women he'd pledged to love in health but abandoned in sickness. What makes Gingrich's personal life relevant in a presidential debate is that it helps illuminate the kind of man he is -- egotistical, undifferentiated, vengeful, and selfish, all poor indicators of an effective executive and especially presidential temperament. You only have to listen to what he says to appreciate the dangerous extent of his self-adoration.

He has spent the last two and a half weeks doing to his party exactly what he does to his women. Party leaders are now trying desparately to forestall the catastrophe of his coming within reach of being nominated. But these nutty elections of ours are decided by voters, not elites. If South Carolina Republicans are seduced into codependency by his dulcet tones and corrosive narcissism, if Florida follows where they lead, and if their nomination process is plunged into Newtonian chaos as a result, then their party deserves to lose. If he's nominated, it had better.

A $140 Billion Question For The Next GOP Debate

2012-01-20T16:41:00.000-08:00

Anthony H. Cordesman says no one, neither President Obama nor the GOP candidates, is talking about what it will cost to keep Afghanistan from descending into chaos after control of military operations is transferred to the Afghans in 2014, as Obama has promised they will be:

It may be fair to argue that the last thing the nation needs at the start of an election year is yet another budget crisis and another decade of war. Yet this is the path the United States appears to be taking in Afghanistan. U.S. officials are talking about removing all American troops from Afghanistan and about massive cuts in military spending as part of the “transition” to Afghan control of combat and civil governance operations in 2014. Given the lead times involved in funding and implementing such massive changes within two to three years, Washington really has only a few months in which to decide whether we will take on the burden of funding the Afghan government through 2014 and beyond, and whether we will provide most of the funds, advisers and partners that Afghan forces will need until 2020 and beyond.

He Wants To Shift The Entire Planet

2012-01-20T08:15:00.000-08:00

Hugh Hewitt reproduces Mitt Romney's list of Newt Gingrich's pronouncements about himself:

Gingrich on Gingrich:

“I Think I Am A Transformational Figure.” (PBS.org, 12/2/11)

“I Am Essentially A Revolutionary.” (Adam Clymer, “House Revolutionary,” The New York Times, 8/23/92)

“Philosophically, I Am Very Different From Normal Politicians … We Have Big Ideas.” (Andrew Ferguson, “What Does Newt Gingrich Know?” The New York Times, 6/29/11)

“I Have An Enormous Personal Ambition. I Want To Shift The Entire Planet. And I’m Doing It. … I Represent Real Power.” (Lois Romano, “Newt Gingrich, Maverick On The Hill,” The Washington Post, 1/3/85)

“I First Talked About [Saving Civilization] In August Of 1958.” (Robert Draper, “He's Baaack!” GQ, 8/05)

“Over My Years In Public Life, I Have Become Known As An ‘Ideas Man.’” (Andrew Ferguson, “What Does Newt Gingrich Know?” The New York Times, 6/29/11)

“I Am The Longest Serving Teacher In The Senior Military, 23 Years Teaching One And Two-Star Generals And Admirals The Art Of War.” (GOP Presidential Candidates Debate, 12/15/11)

"We Take Care Of Our Own"

2012-01-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

The first single from Bruce Springsteen's new album, "Wrecking Ball." Details here. Hat tip to Lisa Golden.

"Sensitive Man," Nick Lowe

2012-01-19T22:35:00.000-08:00

What's so funny 'bout sensitivity? Hat tip to No Depression.

From Nuts Into The Soup

2012-01-19T22:14:00.000-08:00

During his Montreal bed-in with Yoko Ono in May 1969, John Lennon disclosed that he wanted to get some acorns to Richard Nixon. PASTE publishes the first transcript of the interview:

[Journalist Howard] Smith: Somebody told me about these acorns you’re sending around. What is that all about?
Lennon: Well the acorns started off as a piece of sculpture at a sculptor exhibition with all the Henry Moore’s and the Barbra Hepworth and all showing their big pieces of stone and brick and all that and we came up with the idea to put acorns in as a living sculpture you know. And from then on it sort of developed and we thought we’d send a living sculpture to everyone. Every head of state and then we came up with the idea instead of sending we thought we could take them and offer them as a token of peace and that’s all it is.

Smith: Have you done that yet?
Lennon: Well, we wanted to start with American you know so, that’s all we’re hoping to do you know.

Smith: Do you think you’ll be able to get to Nixon? What do you think?
Lennon: I don’t know you know, I really don’t know. We just hope we can and if not we’ll just post them to him or do something you know. We’re finding out the more we sort of say, “we’re coming to do this,” more fear or reaction happens before we even, you know some sort of strange vibe sort of sets in. So I’m shutting up a bit about acorns and Mr. Nixon and all that bit. You know, I just want to get in.

Lennon and Ono got their visas, but I don't think Nixon ever got his acorns. Soon the couple were hanging out with antiwar activists, the FBI was trailing them, and the INS was trying to deport them.

Not That Newt Ever Actually Mentions Him

2012-01-19T21:51:00.000-08:00

Zack C. Smith writes that Newt Gingrich's mentor was not Ronald Reagan but Richard Nixon, who inspired him to create the Conservative Opportunity Society. It's true: Whenever Nixon visited Washington in the late 1980s, he'd make time to huddle with Gingrich at 37's D.C. headquarters, One Washington Circle Hotel.

Rage As Performance Art

2012-01-19T19:51:00.000-08:00

Will Newt Gingrich's slashing populist attack on the allegedly anti-conservative U.S. news media deflect criticism of his checkered personal life and allay concerns about his obvious temperamental unsuitability for the White House? It would probably help if other conservatives joined in, but they didn't.

Ron Fournier on tonight's GOP debate:

The first question from CNN moderator John King was posed to Gingrich: Would he like to respond to his ex-wife?
"No," Gingrich replied. "But I will." While the partisan audience applauded in support, Gingrich glared at King and blamed the messenger. "I'm appalled that you would begin a presidential debate with a topic like that," he said.
In hindsight, perhaps Gingrich had been preparing for the moment for months by leading the attack against the media at nearly every debate. Partisan audiences, especially Republican crowds, generally believe the media are slanted against them. Journalists are easy targets.
"Every person in here knows pain. Every person in here has someone close to them going through painful things," Gingrich said. It was a brash bit of political theater: A thrice-married man who has admitted to cheating on two wives ducked his ex-wife's charges and dismissed his infidelity as merely "painful things."
Despicable? Trash? Those are not words he used to describe his actions. Rather, Gingrich called ABC's decision to broadcast the ex-wife's story two days before the South Carolina primary as "as close to despicable as anything I can imagine."
He denounced CNN for taking "trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate."

Gingrich described King's question as an example of an elite media attack against Republicans designed to help Barack Obama. But when King asked the other candidates if they thought Gingrich's personal life was a legitimate issue, the GOP voted 2-1 in favor of CNN's editorial judgement. Rick Santorum said he was thankful for God's forgiveness but added, "Issues of character are for people to consider...for everyone in this audience to look at." (Later in the debate, he accused Gingrich of grandiosity, "worrisome" behavior, and political cowardice and reminded the audience of Gingrich's policy ADD and the GOP coup that ousted him from the House speakership.) Ron Paul said, "Setting standards is very important" and mentioned his wife of 52 years. Only frontrunner Romney urged King to get to the real issues, though he'd already pointedly introduced himself as an implicitly faithful husband and the father and grandfather of multitudes.

My Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt, no booster of the MSM, hasn't blogged about tonight's debate yet, but he wrote this morning that the Marianne Gingrich interview was "devastating." At NRO, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Newt’s opening answer was very strong and will be replayed a lot. But I thought it was overstated and, as he kept going, it became clear he was trying to squelch the issue rather than express his true rage. When he was all lovey-dovey with John King after the debate, it underscored that it was as much performance as anything else.

Republicans are lucky to have such an entertaining performer to enliven their debates. But they won't nominate him to run for president.

Don't Mind The Gap

2012-01-19T09:04:00.001-08:00

Eighteen-and-a-half has a powerful resonance for Americans who are at least two score and 18, since it's the length, in minutes, of a mysterious deletion in a Nixon White House tape that became part of the Watergate story. The volunteer sound technician at St. John's Episcopal Church, Dale Griffith, tells me my sermons average about that length -- a bit long for a highly liturgical service such as ours. While their political affiliations are naturally varied, the people of God at St. John's are gracious about my Nixon antecedents. But they probably sometimes wish that I would perform a deliberate erasure of a portion of these long, one-sided conversations, and do it beforehand.

The magic number came up again this week when historian and former Nixon archivist Maarja Krusten, a member of the National Archives foundation, attended an event at NARA in Washington featuring historical novelist Max Byrd and Cokie Roberts, the ABC News commentator who gave a talk about First Of Hearts: Selected Letters Of Mrs. Henry Adams, for which she wrote the introduction. As Krusten wrote at her blog NixoNARA:

As Bruce Guthrie’s photo shows, I was thrilled at the chance to tell Ms. Roberts that I was a member of the Foundation and how much I enjoyed and appreciated the wonderful work it does in partnership with the National Archives. Max Byrd and I exchanged some joking comments. When I told him I was a former NARA archivist who once worked with the Nixon tapes, he asked if he should tear out 18-1/2 pages from the book. I laughed and said, “No, no, we at the National Archives are all about preservation and disclosure. Gotta have the whole book!”

The Hardly Believing Two Billion

2012-01-19T00:11:00.000-08:00

The Economist blithely equates the claims of Mormonism (14 million adherents) with those of orthodox Christianity (two billion):

Like most religions, Mormonism has other issues that invite derision, such as its history of polygamy and institutional racism. But its greatest vulnerability may simply be that it is relatively young, so has not yet become established in America's religious pantheon, and that it came of being at a time when good records were kept, which means we are better able to scrutinize its origins. Nevertheless, the divinely-inspired events of two centuries ago are hardly less believable (or unbelievable) than those that preceded them by some two millennia.

Putting Juan Williams In His Place

2012-01-18T23:46:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich should be so proud. The New York Times reports:

Mr. Gingrich was feted by the crowd [in Mount Pleasant, S.C.] for his Monday debate performance, particularly his face-off with the Fox News moderator Juan Williams, who is black and who asked Mr. Gingrich whether his calling Mr. Obama a “food stamp president” was not insulting to African-Americans. Referring to Mr. Gingrich’s resounding “no,” a woman in the crowd said, “I want to thank you, Mr. Speaker, for putting Mr. Juan Williams in his place.”

Middle Eastern Medievalism

2012-01-18T23:05:00.001-08:00

Surveying the struggle over women's rights between Israel's ultra-orthodox Jews and secularists, Benny Morris writes that on this issue, Israel has more in common with its Arab neighbors than you might think:

Israeli Jewish society continues to advance, paradoxically, in two contrary directions: The majority is moving toward a more open, secular, Western lifestyle and polity; and the (growing) minority is moving backward, toward a medieval, obscurantist life, attentive to what are perceived as God's wishes and commands. This ambivalence mirrors the development of the region's Arab societies—except, of course, that in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and the rest—in which it is the backward-looking fundamentalists who are in the majority and increasingly in the saddle.

The photo shows a woman standing the area reserved for men at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in January 2011.

More Than A Shaggy Dog Story?

2012-01-18T22:18:00.000-08:00

Democratic operatives Lanny Davis and Susan Estrich on the peculiar story of 36-year-old Mitt Romney's Irish Setter.

I Drudged This Up, Too

2012-01-17T22:08:00.000-08:00

Another Episconixonian link.

John Dean Was Not A Football Fan

2012-01-17T21:43:00.000-08:00

Okay, I admit it. I Googled my name and Mr. Nixon's. And I found this letter that the New York Times published on April 23, 1995:

That the famous White House "enemies list" was kept not by football fan Richard Nixon, as Robert Lipsyte suggested, but by his accuser, John Dean, ought to have been abundantly clear from Joe Namath's being listed incorrectly as a Giant. If the President had laid eyes on the list even once, can anyone imagine that error surviving?

JOHN H. TAYLOR
Director, the Richard Nixon Library
Yorba Linda, Calif.

Jerusalem, Israel. Period.

2012-01-17T21:04:00.000-08:00

Nathan Diament writes that it would be practically impossible to divide Jerusalem between an Israeli west and Palestinian east. His argument isn't easily summarized. Its nub is that the Muslim claim on the Old City (which would also be divided between east and west) is actually weak -- though one may quibble over his use of the phrase "national capital" instead of spiritual capital, since Jews lost all sovereignty over Jerusalem between A.D. 70 and 1948:

The search for a "split the difference" compromise...ignores the fact that the Old City of Jerusalem has been the national capital of the Jewish people for the past 3000 years and is Judaism's holiest site, while it is Mecca that plays that role for Muslims. The international community would never expect the Islamic world to cede sovereignty over Mecca; the Jewish people ought to be accorded no less respect with regard to the Old City of Jerusalem.

Milhous And Son

2012-01-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

In his first outing as a regular Rolling Stone columnist, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein writes about lessons he thinks Mitt Romney learned from his father, George, and from the way Richard Nixon defeated him in the 1968 GOP primaries. Father and son are shown above in 1964. Perlstein describes the elder Romney as a paragon of progressive Republican rectitude whose critique of the Vietnam war was misunderstood and unfairly devalued. In 1968,

[Nixon ran] what you might call a robotic campaign, just [BSing] about Vietnam, hinting he had a secret plan to end it. The truth was a dull weapon to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon – who kicked [George] Romney's ass with 79 percent of the vote. When people call his son the "Rombot," think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician. In 1994 he ran for senate to Ted Kennedy's left on gay rights; as governor, of course, he installed the dreaded individual mandate into Massachusetts' healthcare system. Then he raced to the right to run for president.

Nixon's famous for promoting the truism that Republicans should run to the right in primaries and the center in the general. Perlstein makes some intriguing points. But if the main one is that Mitt Romney's following Nixon's advice, he's hardly the first, and he won't be the last as long as the nomination process is so heavily influenced by social conservatives. I'm not arguing in favor of inauthenticity as a leading political virtue. But the fact is that no one admitting to the mortal sin of being a moderate can be nominated in today's GOP, leaving the candidate who may still believe in the broad-gauge, non-ideological party of Lincoln, Rockefeller, and Nixon the choices of not running, changing parties, or playing hide the pragmatist.

Perlstein believes that Romney, if he's nominated, will stay right during the general election. "[T]he party won't have it any other way," he writes. But Romney's outfoxed the party so far, evading one conservative challenger after another in the GOP fire swamp (though he was singed last night in South Carolina). What activists will expect from him in return for their eventual grudging support is something he'll have to take into account. Nixon's advice the day after the convention would be: "You owe them nothing." By the same token, some on the right may decide that a Romney loss would be better in the long run. If a few conservatives end up staying home, so be it, because with or without them, only the Massachusetts moderate has a chance against Barack Obama.

It Took Two Steves To Make An Apple

2012-01-17T07:38:00.000-08:00

"Lone geniuses are out," Susan Cain writes. "Collaboration is in." Companies, schools, and even churches are relentlessly trying to get people to work together even when they'd rather work, play, and pray alone. Many of us, and especially introverts, do our most creative thinking by ourselves, and with the warrant of Picasso himself, who said, "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible." Cain, who has a book coming out called Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking, suggests we acknowledge and harness both aspects of our social temperament:

[M]ost humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.
To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

"Thunder Road"

2012-01-16T22:42:00.000-08:00

Bruce Springsteen and Melissa Etheridge. I post this every year or so because it's one of the best things in the world. Watch for the line he lets her sing.

On Tax Returns, Romney Isn't The New Nixon

2012-01-16T19:49:00.000-08:00

New York Times editorial:

Barack Obama released his tax records when he ran for president in 2008. So did Richard Nixon in 1968. In fact, so did George Romney in that same campaign.

But, in 2012, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and onetime chief executive of a private equity firm is still hedging about whether he will do so.

Every Life About This Time

2012-01-16T18:05:00.000-08:00

Dave Alvin, co-founder of the Blasters, briefly guitarist for X, and all-American, all-Los Angeleno troubadour, raised the roof and a few ghosts during his set Sunday night at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. During "Run Conejo Run," a tribute to fallen bandmate Chris Gaffney, he glanced over his shoulder at the stairs leading up to the dressing room as though his friend were about to step in with his accordion. "Black Rose Of Texas," from his new album Eleven Eleven, was for another lost musician friend, Amy Farris. Introducing his first encore, his classic "Fourth Of July," he bonded with audience members over Foxy's Restaurant on Paramount Blvd. in his native Downey and Pup 'N' Taco, a born- and died-in-LA chain. And he opened with "Ash Grove," a boogie about the legendary LA folk club that he used to sneak into as a boy to hear blues legends who have died long since. The closing verses deserve to be quoted at length:

Well I can’t say I been all sinner
Can’t say I been all saint
I’ve done some good deeds and I’ve made big mistakes
I been in and out of love
Said words I regret
I been drunk, been sober
Smoked too many cigarettes
And I’m out on this highway travelin’ town to town
And the news on the radio just brings me down
Intolerance and fear
Ignorance and lies
It’s the same old same old I heard a million times
And I’m thinkin’ of friends and lovers
And how they come and go
Like look-alike houses on the side of the road
Full of everyday people tryin’ to get ahead
Tryin’ to find a reason just to get out of bed
‘Cause we all need somethin’ just to get us through
Well I’m gonna play the blues tonight man
‘Cause that’s what I do

If you've been 56 (like Alvin) or 57 (like me) and the vast ocean of loss is shimmering on the horizon, you feel that way sometimes. Kathy, while no blues hound, enjoyed the show and said it was a blessed thing when someone can make a living doing what he loves. As for me, I rely on the canon of my aging songwriters almost as much as my prayer book and NRSV -- Springsteen, Tom Russell (with whom Alvin wrote "California Snow," which he performed Sunday), John Hiatt, Robert Earl Keen. Alvin's the only one in the pantheon who sings anywhere near as low as I do. I was following the capo up and down the fretboard of his pretty cutaway Martin and staring at his fingers, trying to learn the chord shapes.

With such a prolific and eloquent songwriter and poet, one is also curious about the shape of his life. While Alvin interacts graciously with his audience, he's reticent about personal matters beyond mentioning menthol cigarettes a couple of times and sipping self-consciously from the half-finished Bud Light he carried on stage. His voice is so mellow and supple that you want to tell him to keep on medicating it however he wants. He's written songs that ache with desire, regret, and tormenting jealousy, probably bits of narrative peeking between what Mark Knopfler called the bars of a rhyme. If you want to hear social commentary, check out the powerful medley of his song "Jubilee Train" with Woody Guthrie's "Do Re Mi" and Chuck Berry's "Promised Land," all the peril and promise of living in America packed into a seven hard-rocking minutes.

Alvin performed 15 songs Sunday night and could've done a hundred. I'll be back again hoping to hear "Every Night About This Time," "Out In California," and the achingly beautiful new song, "Manzanita," which I mean to essay with the St. John's folk circle. He played acoustic guitar the whole time, with longtime collaborator Chris Miller filling in on electric. And what a treat when his elder brother, Dr. Phil Alvin (mathematics, UCLA, shown at left above at an earlier gig), joined him for three, including "Marie Marie," which Dave wrote for Phil to sing in their band the Blasters, and "What's Up With Your Brother?", in which they work out some sibling rivalry. On the album version, Dave acknowledges that he likes to have his privacy respected. "Loose lips sink ships, mi hermano," he says. Fair enough. But we do get the picture from the songs, and it does help.

Ants In His Pants For The Motherland

2012-01-16T15:35:00.000-08:00

Martin Horat is a genuine weather prophet, according to the Swiss tourism office. And this is a genuine ad promoting tourism. Hat tip to copyranter.

Reeding South Carolina Evangelicals' Minds

2012-01-16T15:17:00.001-08:00

Ralph Reed, the evangelical Christian Republican consultant, minimizes anti-Mormonism when it comes to Mitt Romney. LA Times:

His campaign has mailed brochures to South Carolina voters that feature a color photo of a prayerful Romney in coat and tie, his head bowed and eyes closed, along with a signed pledge to be true to "my faith" as president. The brochure notes that he has belonged to the same church "his entire life." But it does not mention his Mormon faith, a barrier for some Protestant evangelicals who don't consider Mormons to be Christians.

Reed...said that Mormonism was less of a factor this year.

In Iowa, exit polls showed 61% of caucus-going Protestant evangelicals voted for either a Mormon (Romney) or a Catholic (Santorum or Gingrich). Reed said Christian fundamentalists were voting on "electability, likability, who shares their values" and the economy, especially in this hard-hit state.

"The sort of lazy narrative is that they're driven by identity politics, and all you have to do is come in here and say, 'Praise the Lord' and quote scripture, and they're going to vote for you. It's not true," Reed said.

A Tory For Obama, Again

2012-01-16T12:22:00.001-08:00

Andrew Sullivan makes the case for Barack Obama's re-election. Since the election's likely to be (or had better be) decided on the basis of which candidate has the better chance of boosting GNP growth and getting Americans back to work, here's Sullivan's argument on the economy:

When Obama took office, the United States was losing around 750,000 jobs a month. The last quarter of 2008 saw an annualized drop in growth approaching 9 percent. This was the most serious downturn since the 1930s, there was a real chance of a systemic collapse of the entire global financial system, and unemployment and debt—lagging indicators—were about to soar even further. No fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the next 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment. Economies take time to shift course.
But Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.

All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.
The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.

Romney, Reform, Or Re-Reagan?

2012-01-16T09:26:00.000-08:00

Was Jon Huntsman, who ended his campaign today and endorsed Mitt Romney, not ready for the Republican Party, or the other way around? "BuzzFeed":

The party Huntsman imagined -- modernizing, reforming, and youthful -- could still be born. That might be the reaction to a second smashing defeat at Obama's hands, or that might be where President Romney takes his re-election campaign. But it's now hard to see Huntsman leading that change. He bet, too early, on a fantasy, and ran for the nomination of a party that doesn't exist, at least not yet. His decision tonight to drop out just marks his recognition of that fact.

The second hypothetical, in which a President Romney maneuvers the party toward the center, is the worst nightmare of tea party and social conservatives. As president, Romney would likely marginalize the right with business-friendly, relatively moderate policies appealing to a congressional coalition of center-right Republicans and centrist Democrats. If you add anti-Mormon evangelicals to the mix, some predict that Romney's nomination would portend one of those fabled general elections when conservatives stay home.

"BuzzFeed" thinks an Obama win might trigger a Republican Reformation. But conservative bigwigs who may choose to give Romney faint support in 2012 would be aiming not to reform but re-Reagan. If Romney lost, they would continue to militate for someone more worthy to wear the pompadour in 2016. Four years ago, prominent strategist Ed Rollins hinted that a John McCain loss would at least give the GOP the advantage of returning to its Goldwater-Reagan roots. I have no doubt that this magical thinking will persist indefinitely among conservatives even though Americans elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 strictly because he wasn't Jimmy Carter. A far-right Republican won't ever win an election because she's far right, only because the country's in a ditch and she happens to be on the scene with a tow truck.

Calculating politicos are one thing. Would substantial numbers of actual right-wing voters spurn Romney in hopes of making sure that a Manchurian moderate doesn't become the de facto king of conservatism? Like most second terms, Obama's would be uneventful on the domestic policy front while he grappled with the coming storm over Iran and pushed for progress on Palestine. The tactical voter might construe this as the perfect opportunity to repair to the lab to work some more on Reaganstein. I just don't know very many people who actually think that way when they vote. Do you? Part of being an American is letting the parties do their best or worst and then pulling the lever in November, holding your nose if necessary.

That would make Romney's nomination an historic event in itself. From the tea party to Fox News, conservatives have never been as vocal or well organized, and yet they're on the verge of a massive failure. We may debate about who the real Romney is. I believe he's a diligent and relatively enlightened guy who fudged what he believes about abortion, gay rights, and the role of government in order to survive the Republican fire swamp. His alternatives were not running and switching parties. In any event, neither he nor Obama will be able to evade his record in the general election. Dare we hope for a substantive national conservation between serious people?

The GOP, Nixon, And "The Whole People"

2012-01-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

Writing in the Jan. 23 New Yorker about the state of the GOP, Jeffrey Frank raises the ghost of the last winning Republican to endorse moderation for moderation's sake:

In 1959, Vice President Nixon, speaking to members of California’s Commonwealth Club, was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment—the sort that has since taken place—and he replied, “I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.” He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.” Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.” Ten months before the general election, the increasingly angry, suspicious, and divided party of Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Perry seems ever more immersed in its current orthodoxies. None of the candidates, though, seem the least bit interested in even addressing how they, or their party, might actually govern the “whole people” of a fractious nation.

The Second To The Last Unanswered Question

2012-01-15T16:32:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about the fetal position this morning, because I realized I was in it while stealing an extra five minutes in bed. My knees were pressed together and tucked up and my wrists crossed against my chest. I wondered if my 57-year-old body actually remembered being in my mother's womb. I briefly considered working this into my sermon and then thought better of it. But I remained curious.

On-line, I learned this:

A whopping 41% of participants [in a survey] sleep in this curled-up manner. Women are twice as likely to rest like this and it is listed as the most common position. These sleepers are said to have a tough exterior but are still sensitive and may appear to be shy but warm up quickly.

And this (at a great website, 1000 Awesome Things):

The fetal position is the best way to keep warm if you find yourself tentless in Nunavut or crashing on a pal’s basement floor without copious blanketing. It literally warms the heart (liver, lungs, and kidneys). And hey, isn’t the fetal position just one more way to turn back the clock? After all, your body knows the fetal position, [and] your body lived the fetal position...

Plus this:

The fetal position has been observed in drug addicts, who enter the position when experiencing withdrawal. Sufferers of anxiety are also known to assume the fetal position during panic attacks.

But type this question into Google, with quotation marks, and you get no hits: "Do our bodies remember being in the fetal position?"*

*This statement is now inoperative, because if you enter the sentence, you will now be referred to The Episconixonian. We also star in this search: "Aunt Edna's Prayer".

A California Moderate

2012-01-15T15:18:00.001-08:00

David Stockman, President Reagan's first budget director, said the so-called Reagan revolution never happened. He increased taxes and the size of the federal government. Experts quoted in this NPR piece wonder if today's GOP would nominate him. Imagine what conservatives vying to be top non-Ron would say about a California moderate (by today's measure) with a skeleton like this waiting to be let out of the closet:

In 1978, Reagan campaigned against a referendum in California called Proposition 6 that would have banned gays and lesbians, and possibly anyone who supported gay rights, from working in the state's public schools.

The bill was supported by the Christian right and sponsored by state legislator John Briggs. The measure failed, and Briggs later said it was solely because of Reagan.

You Think?

2012-01-15T14:27:00.001-08:00

"Sinking Cruise Ship Raises Safety Questions" -- headline at ABCnews.com. Five are reported dead and 17 missing.

"Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory"

2012-01-15T13:42:00.000-08:00

The peroration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech, on April 3, 1968 in Memphis

NOAA? Right.

2012-01-15T13:13:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for linking to my post about Obama dissing Nixon.

Iran: Be Serious. Republicans: Be Quiet

2012-01-14T21:20:00.001-08:00

Joe Klein argues that the Obama administration is finally making the Iranians scream and that Republicans look ridiculous claiming otherwise.

Another Newtonian Principle Disproved

2012-01-14T20:51:00.000-08:00

Campaigning in South Carolina, angry Newt Gingrich, hoping to end up as the conservative alternative to his enemy Mitt Romney, unleashed a barrage of criticism of Romney's business practices that has made Romney look more...conservative.

Go Ahead. Click. He's Watching.

2012-01-14T20:24:00.000-08:00

When President Bush's critics lambasted him for talking about God's Providence, I had trouble joining in, since almost every morning, I pray, right out of The Book Of Common Prayer, "In all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose." Which bring us to Tim Tebow, about whom theology professor Owen Strachan sounds, well, Anglican:

I believe that God is overseeing all of Tebow's passes, but he's also overseeing the typing and reading of this paragraph. He's overseeing the Denver Broncos, but he's also overseeing the Boston Celtics (much as it may seem otherwise at present), the Museum of Modern Art, and the playtime of your nephew. He's in control of all things. In this sense, which is called "secondary" causation (God's oversight of all things), the Lord is directing Tebow's life.
But is God directly intervening on the football field in the same way that, for example, he did to cause the virgin birth of Luke 2 (in what is called "primary causation")? That I don't know. It's not clear to my human eyes how this all shakes out. I do know that the Lord is working everything out according to his wise and mysterious counsel which, try as we might, we cannot fully understand.

We Are Stardust, We Are Golden, We Are Doomed

2012-01-14T20:14:00.000-08:00

Gregg Easterbrook on the material word's be all and end all:

Researchers think they have a good idea of what happens inside the sun. Hydrogen, the lightest element and the sun’s primary constituent, fuses to become helium, releasing energy. Eventually, long after humanity has gone extinct or evolved into some other form, Sol’s hydrogen will be consumed. Then the helium will begin to fuse into medium-weight elements. An eon after that, the medium-weight elements will begin to fuse into metals. Ultimately Sol will explode, scattering heavy elements into the cosmos. It’s thought that all the heavy elements of the universe were forged within stars that later exploded, supernovas having been more common when the firmament was young. The Earth, your body—both are composed of elements made inside ancient stars that exploded.

Bruce Juiced

2012-01-14T20:01:00.000-08:00

Bruce Springsteen became a superstar in the mid-1980 as the anti-Reagan, a working class patriot expressing a hermeneutic of skepticism about authority. Insiders say his upcoming album has the same energy:

"He gets into economic justice quite a bit," a source with knowledge of the upcoming album told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's very rock'n' roll. He feels it's the angriest album he's ever made. Bear in mind, though, that [Springsteen] wrote and recorded the majority of the album before the Occupy movements started, so he's not just setting headlines to music."

Get Me To The Grand Canyon

2012-01-14T15:18:00.000-08:00

St. John's Church, photographed with the AutoStitch Panorama app for iPhone. Hat tip to School Committee member (and Nixon confederate from bygone days) Noah McMahon

NOAA Snark

2012-01-13T21:44:00.000-08:00

Presidents usually avoid being critical of predecessors. But Barack Obama was yucking it up about Richard Nixon today as he announced his government reorganization plan:

There are five different entities dealing with housing. There are more than a dozen agencies dealing with food safety. My favorite example—which I mentioned in last year's State of the Union address—as it turns out, the Interior Department is in charge of salmon in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them in saltwater. (Laughter.) If you're wondering what the genesis of this was, apparently, it had something to do with President Nixon being unhappy with his Interior Secretary for criticizing him about the Vietnam War. And so he decided not to put NOAA in what would have been a more sensible place.

Obama may have heard the story from William Daley, a Clinton Commerce secretary who just quit after a year as White House chief of staff. If you look at the dates alone, the accusation seems to add up. After the Kent State shootings in May 1970, Interior secretary Wally Hickel wrote a letter to Nixon criticizing him over the Vietnam war and urging him to spend more time listening to young people. That Nixon seethed for months is well known. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was created as part of the Commerce department in October. Nixon fired Hickel in November.

But there's a lot more to the story than that. According to NOAA's official history, the new agency was parked at Commerce on the recommendation of Commerce secretary Maury Stans, a Nixon friend since their Eisenhower years, in anticipation of a dramatic plan to streamline the federal government not unlike the one Obama proposed today. Nixon's was the brainchild of Roy Ash, who died last month:

One of [Ash's] proposals was to replace the Department of Interior with a new Department of Natural Resources. One of the elements of the Department was to be a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which would combine some elements of the Department of Interior with the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA) of the Department of Commerce. Then Secretary of Commerce, Maurice Stans, noting that ESSA would comprise more than two-thirds of this new Agency (some 10,000 employees and an estimated FY 1970 budget of approximately $200 million) countered with a proposal to, at least initially, consolidate and house NOAA within Commerce and transfer it to the proposed Department of Natural Resources at a later date.

NOAA's historians attribute Commerce's win to the logic of Ash's proposed natural resources department (an especially good idea today), Stans' persuasiveness (which I experienced many years later when he was raising money for the Nixon library), and "perhaps" tensions between Nixon and Hickel. Given all that, it looks as if 44 took a cheap shot at 37. If Nixon had succeeded in getting his reorganization plan through a Democratic Congress, NOAA would have ended up right where efficiency wizard Ash wanted. When the Republicans get done with his proposals, we'll see if Obama's still laughing.

That Would Be 1982, BTW*

2012-01-13T14:32:00.000-08:00

On Thursday a group of conservative religious leaders, including New York's Roman Catholic archbishop, Methodists, Lutherans, Southern Baptists, and the former Episcopal bishop who is now "archbishop" of the "Anglican Church in North America," published an open letter against gay marriage. They warn the like-minded that the government will try to make them knuckle under, not by forcing them to perform marriage ceremonies for gays and lesbians, which the signatories consider unlikely, but by punishing churches that deny benefits to gay couples, state-licensed adoption agencies that won't place children with the same-gender married, and state-accredited marital counselors who won't provide services to them.

Fred Clark, a Baptist Gen X blogger, doesn't just worry about how this kind of message from Christian institutions alienates gays and lesbians. He's afraid that eventually, it will alienate everybody. He writes:

Public statements like this exist only to take sides, draw lines and build walls. This letter serves no prophetic or pastoral purpose. But it is — unintentionally — useful and helpful for identifying the dead-enders determined to make exclusion and condemnation the hallmarks of their communities.
This pronouncement is an explicit “Unwelcome” sign hung on all of their churches.... [T]hat cramped inhospitality applies not just to the GLBT folks they’re demonizing here, but to “all Americans who dare to differ” with the letter’s signatories.
So in a sense what these signatories have just done is they have turned to nearly every American born since, say, Thriller came out*, pointed a long crooked finger and declared, “We don’t want your kind in our congregations.”

Live Or Die?

2012-01-13T10:36:00.000-08:00

On Sept. 14, 2001 at Washington National Cathedral, an Episcopal installation, President Bush's national security adviser, Condi Rice, was inspired by an apt departure from The Hymnal 1982. As she writes in her memoir, No Higher Honor:

I am the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and my mother was a church organist. Music has been at the center of my life since I was born. I cannot to this day sing "O God Our Help in Ages Past," without flashing back to National Cathedral. I focused on the music and the extraordinary words of our great national songs. What had begun as a day of sadness ended, for me, with a sense of rising defiance. The last hymn was "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The original words of the Civil War hymn had been "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." Over the years congregations (hoping not to sound offensive, I guess) had changed the words to "As he died to make men holy, let us live to make men free." Much to my surprise, we sang the original version. As the military choir sang the climatic "Amen, Amen," I could feel my own spirit renewed. We'd mourned the dead. Now it was time to defend the country.

"Change The Sheets," Kathleen Edwards

2012-01-13T10:15:00.000-08:00

From her new album, Voyageur. Review here.

Then Obama Will Beat Me By THIS Much

2012-01-12T23:32:00.000-08:00

Now that angry Newt Gingrich's super-PAC has fired back at archenemy Mitt Romney with a video about the fortune he made shutting down unprofitable companies (shocking behavior in a Republican, just shocking), Andrew Sullivan thinks the frontrunner could be in trouble:

I simply cannot imagine a worse narrative for a candidate in this climate; or a politician whose skills are singularly incapable of responding to the story in any persuasive way. This ad is powerful. Romney has already seen a drop in South Carolina. I suspect he'll drop some more. And I suspect once the potency of this line of attack is absorbed by the GOP establishment, there will be some full, if concealed, panic.

Another Last War Of Watergate

2012-01-12T22:55:00.000-08:00

Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman's ex-aides went to war against John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, in 2009, with a big boost from another of their own, Sen. Lamar Alexander. Now Dean has fired back in an account of the release of Nixon's June 1975 Watergate grand jury testimony:

There was an attempt to file an opposition...and I was surprised by its source: former Nixon White House junior level aide Geoff Shepard, who had worked on the staff of the Domestic Counsel.
Shepard, who graduated from law school, spent his career in the insurance industry after leaving the White House. More recently, he’s become an active Nixon apologist and conspiracy buff, who published a book titled: The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President, Inside the Real Watergate Conspiracy (2008). I have not read the book. When I first learned of it, I happened to be talking with the person for whom Shepard worked at the Nixon White House. He told me that he had warned Shepard that he was, in essence, making a fool of himself with his account. This was advice from a person who is intimately familiar with Watergate and has written about it. It was correct, but this fact has not deterred Shepard from proceeding accordingly.
In a similarly fatuous fashion, Shepard tried to intervene in the Public Citizen case I described above, to oppose the petition to unseal Nixon’s grand jury testimony. However, Judge Lamberth denied his request. Shepard then totally flip-flopped and filed a petition requesting the court unseal virtually everything relating to Watergate held by NARA, all the grand jury proceedings, all the Senate Watergate Committee material, the records of the House Impeachment Inquiry of Nixon, and all the WSPF trial materials relating to Watergate. Shepard’s petition appeared to be an effort to stall the effort to unseal Nixon’s testimony. But it failed. When granting the motion to unseal Nixon’s testimony, Judge Lamberth issued an order denying Shepard’s request(s), while pointing out their complete failure.

When Kennedy died in August 2009, I wrote:

In May 2008, when we learned that Kennedy had cancer, a former Nixon White House aide, Geoff Shepard, published a book accusing him of having manipulated the Watergate scandal for the sake of a, well, Kennedy restoration. In the annals of publishing, a stroke of bad timing. With the country awash in sympathy, I decided it would be in poor taste for the Nixon Foundation to host a planned book event for Shepard with the federal Nixon Library. The gesture endeared us neither to the author nor the feds, but it seemed like the right call at the time.

Pastor Pay

2012-01-12T21:44:00.000-08:00

Rabbis: Not too shabby.

Will Iran Risk Its Entire Surface Fleet?

2012-01-12T20:51:00.001-08:00

The New York Times on what is likely to happen if Iran tries to blockade the Strait of Hormuz:

Estimates by naval analysts of how long it could take for American forces to reopen the strait range from a day to several months, but the consensus is that while Iran’s naval forces could inflict damage, they would ultimately be destroyed.
“Their surface fleet would be at the bottom of the ocean, but they could score a lucky hit,” said Michael Connell, the director of the Iranian studies program at the Center for Naval Analysis, a research organization for the Navy and Marine Corps. “An antiship cruise missile could disable a carrier.”

The Endless War With Iran

2012-01-11T22:04:00.000-08:00

As pressure mounts for a U.S. attack against Iran's nuclear capability, bloggers at the National Interest, published by the Center Previously Known As Nixon, wonder when the war would end:

How do attack advocates propose to stop the Iranian nuclear program if Tehran refuses to roll over after one round of attacks? There are two logical responses to this question. One is regime change, presumably through invasion. But there are significant downsides to invasion, not least that such a war would likely prove protracted and costly... The other is that the United States should be prepared to conduct repeated strikes over a long period of time to ensure the Iranian nuclear program is kept down.

"Nixon's Baby"?

2012-01-11T21:58:00.000-08:00

The space shuttle.

"Merry Christmas," Said The Jew And Muslim

2012-01-10T20:47:00.000-08:00

Deb Neal, my Diocese of Los Angeles colleague, is serving as assistant to the Episcopal Bishop of Jerusalem at St. George's Cathedral in East Jerusalem. She's written a moving post about Christmas in the Holy Land, including the trip back to Jerusalem from Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity on Christmas Eve:

And because God is Good, and to remind me what it is really truly all about, and to make the evening truly blessed, as we passed through the horrid wall on our way home, the young Israeli guard wished me Merry Christmas. As you can imagine, I welled up and thought: This is where I see the hope. And oddly enough, the only other person to say Merry Christmas to me (other than in the church) was a Muslim shop keeper in Nablus. Aaah, Peace and Goodwill to all. I like it!

"Tatoo," Van Halen

2012-01-10T20:29:00.000-08:00

Are you a brown sound hound? David Lee Roth's first song with the Pasadena boys since 1984.