text:
Romney's Death and Taxes
The Santorum Joke
Notes From a Shipwreck Year
Gingrich, Mel Gibson Divorce News
Firing an Icon, Pauline Kael
A Year of Block-and-Blame: What Next?
Romney's Rewrapped Gift
Tea Party Goes to the Dogs
"Take Heaven, Take Peace, Take Joy"
Is Eric Cantor Running the Country?
A Tale of Two Americas
Ron Paul in an Empty White House
American Manhood: Piety and Testosterone
Goodbye Gingrich?
Bachmann Does Norma Desmond
Slouching Out of Iraq
And the Winner Is...Rick Santorum
Democrats' Holiday Hardball
Obama Enigma
Presidential Fidelity: History's Mixed Verdict
Double Dose of Political Inertia
Romney-Gingrich Mudfight
Romney, Gingrich and a Constipated Congress
Newt's Kingmaker Murdoch
Pearl Harbor, 70 Years Ago Today
Impeaching Gingrich, Right and Left
Cain and the Death of Shame
A Composite President: Chinese Menu
D.C's. Secret Santas
Straight-Face Lies, Case Closed
GOP Straight-Face Sweepstakes
Really Bad Idea of the Year
Best Leftover Turkey Recipe Ever
Turkeys, D.C.
JFK, November 22, 1963
A Holiday for the Birds
Blood Memories of Europe in Crisis
Newt Goes Dickensian
Searching for Something Human in Washington
The candidate's son Matt steps into a brouhaha by answering a question about his father's refusal to release tax returns by being flip about Obama's birth certificate.
Bad move. The elder Romney has a valid Michigan birth certificate, but there is also the question of a death certificate, officially stamped on his passport ("He is dead") by the French police after a lethal auto accident while he was a missionary there in 1968.
If the Birthers can see a Manchurian candidate scenario in sunny Hawaii, how much more plausible is the substitution by the devious French of a 21-year-old imposter with plastic surgery, waiting to emerge decades later and moved into the White House to foist foreign ideas on America?
To make their case for a fake Romney today, Iowa Birthers could cite all those flipflops on major issues, proving that he is not a genuine Conservative but an undercover agent who will do anything to get elected in order to confuse and undermine America.
Bring on Donald Trump's team of crack investigators and tell the Romney boys to cool it.
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 3:08 PM 1 comment:
If Mitt Romney wins in Iowa next week, he could find nipping at his heels the runt of the 2011 litter.
Two weeks ago, in post-debate stupor, I woozily compared the GOP race to an action movie:
"If the Great Screenwriter in the Sky is following the...plotlines, after all the car chases, explosions and reversals, the eventual nominee is clear: Rick Santorum. He's been a bit player who has never had a big scene and, by all conventions of the genre, has to be revealed as the powerful genius who has been pulling all the strings."
Now, with Ron Paul finding there is no statute of limitations on racist rant, life is imitating my lame joke with Santorum running a close third in a new poll.
This is the same Santorum who, after making headlines for zany comments on subjects ranging from Catholic priests' child abuse to the Middle East, lost his bid for reelection only five years ago by 41 percent to 59, the largest margin of defeat ever for an incumbent Republican Senator in Pennsylvania.
Yet, here is a serious analysis that gives him a rising chance of actually winning the Caucuses based on his current momentum as desperate Rick Perry runs ads accusing Santorum as "proud of feeding at the earmark trough in Congress."
If the Joke candidate ends up close to the hard-charging Romney next week, it may prove that Iowans have a sense of humor after all. Or would it be desperation?
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 4:48 PM No comments:
Reading bloggers' own favorite posts of 2011 is a reminder of how much political and social sanity has been lost in this Tea Party world. Satire and rage abound.
Yet it's cathartic to read these notes in a bottle from survivors and realize we are not alone in this shipwrecked world.
Such comfort is provided by keeping alive a tradition started by the late Al Weigel, who wrote brilliantly under the nom de plume of Jon Swift and was tireless in promoting the work of others, an effort now being maintained by Batocchio at the Vagabond Scholar.
There you can find what bloggers consider their year's best posts, a fascinating mosaic of commentary on what we have been living through. GOP presidential candidates to the contrary, the human mind is still alive and well in America.
With a sense of inevitability, I chose a political post but was tempted by others on a range of subjects—-aftermath of Tuscon, the fragility of human life in the face of Nature, and a memoir of two friends, authentic public figures a world apart.
This comes with my best wishes to all for a saner 2012 and special thanks to Joe Gandelman, who allows me to be part of his civil community on The Moderate Voice, a tireless band of resisters to online vitriol and viciousness.
Happy New Year and good reading!
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 10:55 AM 1 comment:
Breaking up is hard to do, but much more expensive in today's Hollywood than rural Georgia of three decades ago.
Mel Gibson is finally divorced from his wife of more than 30 years and mother of seven children after turning over an estimated half of his $850 million in movie earnings.
At the same time, the nation's other Lethal Mouth seems to have been lying about his first divorce three decades ago as CNN unearths Georgia court documents showing that his wife wanted to stay married.
Even worse, the first Mrs. Gingrich's petition states: "Defendant shows that she has adequate and ample grounds for divorce, but that she does not desire one at this time."
Former friends say they took up collections for the family, because Gingrich "wouldn't give them a dime" in the first months of the separation, and there were "no lights, no heat, no water, no food" in the home. "We had a food drive at First Baptist Church," says a former fellow professor. "The deacons went down and stocked her pantry."
Before the advent of no-fault, divorces were admittedly messier than they are now, but as the husband of a lawyer-mediator and co-author of a book about how women are treated in marital breakups, I can testify that the first Gingrich divorce seems par for the course back then: Get a tough lawyer and starve out an unwilling wife, even if the kids go hungry, too.
It's heartening to see the former Mrs. Mel Gibson get a just share of her loathsome former husband's movie loot, but then again, he isn't Newt Gingrich, who dumped two wives on the way to running for President on a platform of bringing back good old family values for us all.
A mutual grandparent at holiday dinner confronts me with the accusation that I fired a cinema icon in the 1960s. Guilty. So I may as well share my confession with the whole world.
I brought out the worst in Pauline Kael. She started irritating me the minute we met and never stopped.
Looking for a movie reviewer with intelligence and style when I became editor of McCalls, I had read and admired Kael's work in periodicals with small circulation. Another editor and I took her to lunch.
The ice in our drinks had barely melted when Kael went into a diatribe about the awfulness of mass magazines. When she paused for breath, I said, "I could tell you worse than that, but we've established how independent you are, so let me make a suggestion. When your friends accuse you of selling out, just admit you're doing it for the money."
We agreed on a year's contract.
Kael's first column was an essay on movie critics. It could have been titled, "Is There Anyone I Haven't Offended?" She described readers as boobs who expected critics to like what they like and reviewers as venal enough to do that and went on to assail education ("academic dry rot"), art houses and film festivals (patrons are "afraid to say what they think or just don't know what to think") and good taste (what's new and important is "in terrible taste").
That took care of everybody but Kael and her groupies, as she savaged movies from "Zorba the Greek" and "The Pawnbroker" to the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night."
In the following months, it got so bad that even Kael seemed aware of what she was doing, pausing during a round of demolition to observe that "a reader may easily say, 'She just doesn't like movies' and then start trying to figure out what's the matter with me."
"Dr. Zhivago," "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Born Free" went under her scalpel and did not survive. After eviscerating movies, Kael went at the people who made them with nasty comments on the taste and motives of Paul Newman, among others.
After five columns, I had enough. To complete her self-directed drama of Life Among the Philistines, Kael told reporters I did not honor her contract (I paid her for the year) and that I fired her for attacking "The Sound of Music" as "The Sound of Money" (actually I agreed and had told her so). Years later, when she was established at the New Yorker, Kael finally admitted to an interviewer that I was right on both counts.
I got some insight into what went wrong between us when she wrote about Herman Mankiewicz, a bitter man who collaborated on "Citizen Kane." Very drunk at a Hollywood party, he had vomited over the dinner table. "Don't worry," he reassured the hosts, "the white wine came up with the fish."
Kael, who shared Mankiewicz's contempt for the conventional, had to explain her firing by announcing "The Sound of Music" had come up with the sour grapes.
So I'm guilty, guilty, guilty. I didn't lose it at the movies, but over the unearned contempt of a self-made icon-to-be.
In the residue of Christmas spirit, a serious attempt to understand what's behind a toxic cloud that the Tea Party has cast over American government all year:
Yes, the economy has been bad, and many of us have been hurting—-from young people without jobs to the retired with no increases in Social Security and no place to earn interest on their life savings.
Yes, bailouts and stimulus have been very costly yet still not enough to turn the recession around, creating huge deficits.
Yes, government has grown more intrusive with massive health care reform and new regulations for financial institutions that control so much of the national wealth.
Yes, Barack Obama has not been a perfect president in a time of trouble and turmoil.
Yes, but...
Why must all these challenges mean government is the problem and not part of the solution, as it was during the Great Depression?
Next year's election will provide the answer. The contest, as E. J. Dionne puts it, is between "a tradition that sees government as an essential actor in the nation's economy, a guarantor of fair rules of competition, a countervailing force against excessive private power, a check on the inequalities that capitalism can produce, and an instrument that can open opportunity for those born without great advantages" and today's Republicans who "cast the federal government as an oppressive force, a drag on the economy and an enemy of private initiative."
Their most likely candidate, Mitt Romney, is now campaigning against the straw man of "an Entitlement Society," in which "government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk."
In our 24/7 media world, these opposing arguments may be treated as if they were of equal weight, even though the second is palpable nonsense. Just measure Romney's own rewards for financial juggling against those of any middle-class worker.
In these dark Washington days, however, there is a ray of hope. A full year of nothing more than block-and-blame by the Tea Party House minority has given voters a full picture of the consequences their continued dominance would have for the country.
An embattled six-term conservative, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, points out that in 2010 "people who claimed that they wanted somebody who was more of their tea party aspect...killed off the Republican chances for a majority" in the Senate.
Next year, as Dionne observes, Barack Obama may be running as "the conservative."
Update: Upping the 2012 ante, Newt Gingrich fails to make the Virginia primary ballot and, ever the historian, compares the event to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
"Block that metaphor!" The stakes are high enough without dragging World War II into it.
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 9:44 AM No comments:
We've all done it, and Mitt seems like someone who wouldn't hesitate to pass on a second-hand present. He did it to a voter yesterday.
Asked by a New Hampshire man who was being foreclosed by Bank of America even though he had made all his mortgage payments, a problem Romney has clearly never faced, the candidate suggested he go to court or occupy bank headquarters until he gets satisfaction.
"That would get their attention," Romney said.
Problem is, neither the Governor or his staff has been paying enough attention to the news, having missed a widely spread story of a Florida couple who did just that last summer and, accompanied by Sheriff's deputies and movers, went with court permission to remove desks, computers, copiers, filing cabinets and cash in the teller's drawers, before the bank finally anted up what it owed them.
Oh well, never mind, it's the thought that counts. And a Merry Christmas to all!
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 10:09 AM No comments:
Talk about misreading a mandate: The bitter enders give the President the best Christmas present of all—-pushing their block-and-blame strategy off a political cliff to make Barack Obama, previous evidence to the contrary, look like Harry Truman against "a do-nothing, good-for-nothing Congress."
It wasn't easy to get the President off his perch as "compromiser in chief," requiring most of the Senate GOP, Karl Rove and the Murdoch media to stop Boehner's gang from acting like a circular firing squad.
Even dour Eric Cantor is reduced to leaden levity: "I saw the president out yesterday doing his Christmas shopping. I saw he brought his dog with him. We're here. He could bring his dog up here. We are pet friendly. It will not take a long time. We could probably resolve the differences within an hour."
No sale. Nothing could stop this one from ending with the Tea Party going to the dogs. Happy New Year, guys, keep on woofing!
I can't gift-wrap this, but it's the closest thing to a Christmas treasure that I have to share. Decades ago, I published it twice in different magazines.
Eric Sevareid was a gifted writer who spent most of his life as a radio and TV journalist working with Edward R. Murrow during World War II as part of "a band of brothers" and later at CBS-TV in its glory days.
He was a hero and a role model to me and, in the light of the new Clint Eastwood movie, it's noteworthy that J. Edgar Hoover considered this prototypical Midwestern farm boy a threat to his vision of America.
Herewith, excerpts from Sevareid's essay:
"Christmas offers us peace in one hand but in the other it carries a sword. The peace it offers is the love we felt in childhood and may still feel again if we have lived our lives as we were instructed in our early days. The sword is our conscience, glittering as sharply as the icicles on the Christmas tree.
"Christmas is an anticipation for the children; it is memory for most adults. It fastens the grip of truth upon us and will not let us go. Implacably it demands of us that we regard our work and what we have made of our lives, our country and our world.
"By the glow of the soft lights, by the sound of child voices in song, piercing us with an almost unendurable purity, we are obliged to remember that our first and only commandment was to love, and we have not truly obeyed; that men were so commanded not to improve them, but to save them from themselves, and we have not truly understood.
"Of course, we say as the moment of truth approaches, 'Christmas is really for the children.' Suffer the little children to take this burden from us.
"Perhaps, were we to know the realities of our own deepest motivations, we would conclude that this is why we have made of the Christmas occasion an immensely complicated business. It is the sheer busyness of Christmas, not so much its commercialization, that has changed its forms and rituals. Perhaps we have lost not only the art of simplicity but the desire for it as well. But not, I think, in our deepest beings. And as long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, then Christmas is.
"The sophisticated may belittle the almost assembly-line transaction of the printed Christmas cards that swamp our parlors in piles and windows. It is impersonal, yes, as compared with the old-fashioned family trek down the street for greetings at the door. But each little square or rectangular printed card is a signal of human recognition, a reassurance that we live in part, at least, of their consciousness, however small a part, and so are not alone...
"We cannot live, in our families, in our nations or in the world, if we cannot open our hearts. I do not know how this compressed, elbowing and suspicious world is to go on in peace if this cannot be done. I see no ultimate security in any 'balance of power' or 'balance of terror' peace. We know instinctively that in the end only a peace through a balance of kindness will preserve us...
"There are a few words I read every time the Christmas season comes around...[perhaps] written by Fra Giovanni in the year 1513...which sometimes I think of as the most perfect passage in our language...
"'There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much that, while I cannot give you, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take peace. The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within reach, is joy. Take joy. And so, at this Christmastime, I greet you with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.'"
From Sevareid, long gone now, and me, wishes to all for a day of heaven, peace and joy.
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 9:00 PM 3 comments:
Washington's new impasse could ironically lead to a gift of sanity as the House Tea Party is finally revealed for the berserk faction it has been all year, holding the nation hostage to a scorched-government ideology.
Senate Republicans, after passing a short-term payroll tax extension by 89 to 10, are outdoing the President in denouncing them for "harming the view, if it's possible anymore, of the American people about Congress" (John McCain), "playing politics" (Scott Brown) and thinking of "political leverage, not about what's good for the American people" (Dean Heller, who replaced John Ensign in Nevada).
Speaker John Boehner is the public face of GOP irrationality, but he is clearly trapped by his own deputy, Eric Cantor, the leader of what the No.2 House Democrat describes as a "walk-away caucus...walking away from 160 million Americans."
For a long time, from the Health Care Summit last year to the debt-ceiling debacle that scuttled Boehner's Grand Bargain with the President this summer, Cantor has been at the head of those holding the Speaker himself hostage.
Now, he attacks Senate Republicans by charging that "the people of this country are beginning to wonder about the body on the other side of this Capitol and are wondering what the leader over there has against the middle class of this country."
Cantor has been picking fights with the President for two years now in his delusion that he will replace Boehner someday, but now he is taking on his own party as well.
As Obama approval rises and voters find Cantor's coal in their Christmas stockings, it may eventually stoke the fires in next year's electoral heat against his Tea Party followers.
"Enough is enough," the President said when he walked out in disgust on Cantor this summer. Now that Senate Republicans agree, Washington will have to find ways to get back to business.
I am haunted by the opening lines of an old novel: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
Lately, I have been watching hours of scratchy black-and-white film about my childhood years, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and seeing through very old eyes a different America, peopled in turmoil by those who don't resemble their descendants today.
Instead of fighting for bargains on Black Friday, they stand patiently in breadlines with gaunt faces and hopeless eyes, waiting for food. Instead of blaming government for their poverty, with 25 percent unemployment, they look hopefully to it for salvation.
In FDR's First Hundred Days, politicians work day and night, shuffling papers at warp speed to pass legislation in a frenzy to get the economy moving. Some of what they do will work, some will fail, some will be called unconstitutional, but there is little legislative in-fighting by politicians blaming one another.
Without 24/7 media chatter, there are parades supporting the National Recovery Act (NRA) but, behind the newsreel scenes, farm families are driven off their land by the Dust Bowl and city dwellers are sleeping in the streets.
In those days, my father worked in a Harlem pawn shop 60 hours a week for $16, a dark place where people sold their soles, trading dress shoes and suits or furs and jewels for cash.
When I was old enough, I would sometimes go with him on a Saturday for the fourteen hours he spent there. Tan-coated men behind cages squinted through jeweler's loops and raised their heads to shake them side to side at hopeful smiles and hopeless eyes across the counter. The patrons came parading through, most of them well-dressed, almost all black, carrying clothes, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras, binoculars, as hostage for the few dollars they had to have for a few days or weeks.
Some seemed down and defeated, but many were jaunty, with the aliveness of people dancing on the edge. Seeing me, they flashed white smiles from their dark faces, surprised and amused to find a kid among the forbidding figures guarding the pawnbroker's cash box. I always smiled back, trying to drink in some of their joy in that place of a sad business profiting from human misery that was almost universal.
In that different America, politics was more an expression of hope than a set of beliefs. Although my father worshipped FDR, his voting reflected a longing for something more.
In a 1960s hotel ballroom, I was on the dais at a dinner to honor Dr. Benjamin Spock for his efforts to avoid nuclear war. Sitting next to me, tall and thin and clear-eyed in his eighties, was Norman Thomas, the idealistic clergyman who became a perennial presidential candidate for the Socialist Party between the world wars.
As we bend over fruit cups, I tell him my father voted for him six times. Norman Thomas grins. "Ah," he says in a dry midwestern voice. "So he was the one."
In that other America, it was still possible for politicians to make self-deflating jokes.
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 11:07 AM 7 comments:
If the feisty Libertarian, who now leads in Iowa, should win the nomination, all of us who have qualms about 21st century government will be put to a test.
With Congress tied in knots and a narrowly divided Supreme Court, we have had a sneak preview of what may be coming—-total loss of faith in a flawed system that has more or less worked for centuries and, in an election between Barack Obama and Ron Paul, the choice of a continuing struggle to repair it or dismantle it completely and start over.
The positive outcome of Republican debates has been to weed out a series of frontrunners with little to offer beyond personal ambition and narrow the contest to Mitt Romney, the Zelig-like chameleon, and Paul, whose position on every issue is strong and predictable. Unless Jeb Bush makes a last-minute entry, that is the GOP choice.
In head-to-head confrontation, Romney will no doubt attack Paul as "zany," but some Independents and flexible Democrats may be drawn to his foreign-policy stance against endless wars as opposed to other GOP aspirants who want to annihilate Iran, confront Pakistan and get into a trade war with China.
For a party that has veered from Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, Paul has the virtues of being consistent and scandal-free.
For a nation that is reeling from a sick economy and Washington gridlock, however, he would raise a different question: Are we better off with a vacant White House than we are now?
The closest we have come to that was clueless Jimmy Carter, elected by voters after disgust over Watergate, and we know how that worked out. Paul is far from clueless, but some of his certainties would put our current unhappiness with American governance to the severest test.
Anarchy, anyone?
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 12:04 PM No comments:
When scoring athletes look upward and thank God for His help, why don't opponents ever shake their fists at the sky for being disfavored?
Debate over piety displays by Denver's Tim Tebow and a Barry Bonds conviction of using testosterone enhancers prompt broader questions about the definition of manhood today and its manifestations.
We are a long way from the culture's strong, silent heroes (Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Unitas, Clint Eastwood) to a generation of Dancing with the Stars on the diamond, gridiron, movie screens—-and everywhere else.
In politics, Mitt Romney is punished for trying to look presidential (i.e., dignified), while a cable mating show features an obnoxious dandy trying to impress a first date with condom wrappers bearing his name and likeness.
We are talking about the morphing of American manhood from what may have been idealized stereotypes (Atticus Finch and Shane) to id-driven child-men with no limits in their quest to score on the playing field, at the ballot box and in the bedroom.
That may be dismissed as a matter of style, but what has been lost in these equal-opportunity self-assertions is a component of the traditional ideal of manhood—-protecting not only those in your own family but, insofar as possible, the weak and helpless everywhere.
Men of my ancient generation may have exaggerated that masculine role in society, but in today's culture only Barack Obama is trying to hold on to a shred of it and being pilloried as a result.
Do we really want our grandsons to take as role models the likes of Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Tea Party crybabies in Congress?
His opponents sound like Occupy Wall Street protesters as the SEC files charges against six top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who seem not to have profited from Newt Gingrich's $1.6 million of advice as a historian.
The indictments could be a harpoon to bring down the GOP's white-haired whale, sharpening attacks on his self-enrichment with court cases rather than vague accusations.
Asked if those ties should disqualify Gingrich as a presidential contender, Rick Perry tells Iowans, "People are sick and tired of being ripped up by congressmen and senators who are in cahoots with Wall Street financiers, and that's basically what we have here."
This follows Ron Paul's debate attack on Newt's non-lobbying: "They went broke. We had to bail them out. So, indirectly, that was money that he ended up getting."
When Mitt Romney mildly observed that "people go to serve the people and then they stay there to serve themselves" and suggested that he return the money, Gingrich slid off the hook by retorting that Romney should give back "all the money he's earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over the years at Bain."
That kind of slick evasion won't wash now as the SEC's chief enforcement officer proclaims in bringing the cases:
"All individuals, regardless of their rank or position, will be held accountable for perpetuating half-truths or misrepresentations about matters materially important to the interest of our country's investors. Investors were robbed of the opportunity to make informed investment decisions."
Newt Gingrich may not have been among the masked men holding the guns, but he was around helping them with the getaway cars. Will primary voters be able to blank that image out of their minds?
Update: Even the Wall Street Journal joins the chorus: "Newt Gingrich's opponents aren't letting up in their criticism of his lucrative ties to the failed mortgage giant Freddie Mac after he resigned as House Speaker in the late 1990s.
"More damaging to his Presidential candidacy is that Mr. Gingrich doesn't seem to understand why anyone is offended."
With the leaders underplaying conflict, Michele Bachmann takes center stage to give an over-the-top performance worthy of Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard."
After Newt Gingrich twice accuses her of getting facts wrong, Bachmann harrumphs that "it's outrageous to continue to say over and over through the debates that I don't have my facts right when, as a matter of fact, I do. I am a serious candidate for president of the United States and my facts are accurate."
("You're Norma Desmond, you used to be big in pictures." "I am big, it's the pictures that got small.")
The former frontrunner, with wide-eyed stare, by tangling not only with Gingrich but Ron Paul as well, is reprising the refusing-to-face-reality role that has marked her five years in Congress, starting with a bit part at her first State of the Union, when she groped George W. Bush and did not let go.
A Minneapolis TV station reported that Bachmann "put her hand on Bush's shoulder. However, it wasn't just a tap. After he signed an autograph for her, Bachmann grabbed the president...
"After signing the autograph for Bachmann, the president turns away, but Bachmann doesn't let go. In fact, the video shows her reaching out to get a better grip on him.
"Bush then leans over to kiss another congresswoman, but Bachmann is still holding on. Bachmann then gets more attention, a kiss and an embrace from the president. A few seconds later, Bachmann's hand finally comes off the presidential shoulder."
With attention slipping away, the former star is trying to hold on by dragging down everyone else in camera range.
If I were Gingrich, Romney or Ron Paul, I would stay away from swimming pools in Iowa when Bachmann is around. She's ready for her closeup, Mr. DeMille.
Update: From Politifact: "During the Sioux City debate, Bachmann said that 'after the debate that we had last week, PolitiFact came out and said that everything I said was true.' That's simply not the case. We rated two statements by Bachmann from that debate and ruled one of them Mostly True and the other one Pants on Fire. So for claiming she had a perfect record, she earns another Pants on Fire."
Our departure, after nine years, almost 4500 deaths and trillions of dollars, comes not with a bang but a whimper of exhaustion and relief.
"Iraq will be tested in the days ahead," says Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, "by terrorism, and by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, by the demands of democracy itself."
No senior Iraqi official attends the ceremony of departure, marked by muted wishful thinking that contrasts with U.S. arrival of "shock and awe" to find Saddam Hussein's phantom nuclear arsenal.
What we leave behind is a dead tyrant and a fractured, fragile nation.
At this moment, it's fitting to recall what Robert Byrd warned in 2002 before the Senate voted to authorize the invasion:
"We may not always be able to avoid war, particularly if it is thrust upon us, but Congress must not attempt to give away the authority to determine when war is to be declared. We must not allow any president to unleash the dogs of war at his own discretion and or an unlimited period of time.
"Yet that is what we are being asked to do. The judgment of history will not be kind to us if we take this step."
In 2007, with the war seemingly lost, George W. launched a Surge of more troops and more money, under the counterinsurgency leadership of Gen. David Petraeus, which stabilized Iraq enough to make possible today's departure if not in victory, at least without dishonor.
Most of us who opposed the war when it started, including Barack Obama, also resisted the Surge, but it worked well enough to make this day possible.
As we leave Iraq, there is enough sadness, guilt and regret to go around, but what's important to remember is that "wars of choice" are costly in blood, treasure and American morality.
I dozed off last night watching one of those Liam Neeson action movies in which he wrecks cities for reasons too complicated to explain and switched channels to find more of the same in the Republican demolition derby.
Ron Paul is surging in Iowa to bump the tailpipes of Gingrich and Romney while the first frontrunner Donald Trump has been waved off the track, canceling his debate and promising to "leave all of my options open because, above all else, we must make America great again!"
In the stands, superfan Christine O'Donnell is cheering for Mitt, who is "pleased to have her on my team," with the witch-like logic that "he's been consistent since he changed his mind."
If the Great Screenwriter in the Sky is following the action movie plotlines, after all the car chases, explosions and reversals, the eventual nominee is clear: Rick Santorum. He's been a bit player who has never had a big scene and, by all conventions of the genre, has to be revealed as the powerful genius who has been pulling all the strings.
If that doesn't play well at future GOP screenings, they can always go for a vampire-flick resolution—-reviving the dead—-by bringing back Herman Cain or Jon Huntsman Jr.
And if desperation sets in, does anyone know if Liam Neeson is a registered Republican ?
Update: Romney tells New York Times editors that Gingrich is "zany." As always, he is a master of understatement.
After a year of being held hostage by Tea Party naysayers, the party that controls the White House and Senate is finally gift-wrapping a package of gotcha for their tormentors.
At the President's urging, Senate Majority Leader Reid has told Speaker Boehner he will not hold a vote this week on government spending until there is agreement on the payroll tax and unemployment compensation issues, for which House Republicans have insisted on paying with cuts for federal workers and Medicare beneficiaries instead of taxing the income of the richest Americans, as Democrats propose.
A White House aide explains, "When the president said Congressional Republicans weren't going on vacation until they passed this middle class tax cut, he meant it. They don't get to finish their business until the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance are extended."
In a reversal of the debt-ceiling crisis, Democrats can pass a stopgap government spending bill to go past this Friday's deadline and hold Congress in Washington next week to hammer out an agreement on the other issues.
This time, instead of the prospect of downgrading the government's credit rating, the penalty will be getting home late for the holidays. But for Americans, who now fear Big Government at record levels, that Grinch-like price for Congress may not be too troubling.
Update: Boehner holds his troops together to pass what Reid calls "a pointless partisan exercise. The bill is dead on arrival in the Senate. It was dead before it got to the Senate."
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...
Watching the President on 60 Minutes last night raises wonder at why more Americans aren't rallying around this highly intelligent, energetic, fair-minded man.
The answer may be in the question itself. Contrasting Barack Obama's demeanor with the rage and unearned self-regard of his would-be successors, Congressional critics and Murdoch media attack dogs—-and his low-key response to that rabid criticism--may tell us as much about low approval ratings as his own performance.
Informed of a new poll showing that "People like you. They respect you. They think that you're working hard. And they realize that you faced an enormous amount of trouble and problems, many of them inherited. And you're approval rating is four times higher than the Congress," the President responds wryly, "That's a low bar."
Then the bad news: "But they're not happy with the way you're doing your job. You've got 75 percent of the people in the country think it's headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-five percent. And 54 percent don't think that you deserve to be re-elected."
Most politicians would respond defensively, but this President coolly observes, "We've gone through an incredibly difficult time in this country. And I would be surprised if the American people felt satisfied right now. They shouldn't feel satisfied. We've got a lot more work to do in order to get this country and the economy moving in a way that benefits everybody, as opposed to just a few."
Even as he goes on the attack against Congressional stonewalling, Barack Obama is trapped not only by his even temperament but the reality that a 2012 opponent is still unchosen and that GOP debates demonizing him will go on for months to come.
Asked about them, the President once again wryly observes that Gingrich is "somebody that has been around a long time and is good on TV, is good in debates" and Romney has "shown himself to be somebody who is good at politics as well. He's had a lot of practice at it."
Noting that "they will be going at it a while," Barack Obama is in the delicate position of calibrating how much and how long to allow himself to be tarred without directly responding or stepping up the counterattacks of his surrogates.
Will his wry be enough to contain all that GOP baloney?
The least passionate segment of last night's debate was a brief round on personal family values.
Without glancing at Gingrich, his adversaries gave toneless answers, citing their own long marriages and "character" as an issue, with only Rick Perry, suave as always, expanding on the subject:
"Not only did I make a vow to my wife, but I made a vow to God. That's pretty heavy lifting. That's even stronger than a handshake in Texas...If you cheat on your wife, you'll cheat on your business partner."
Gingrich, with a straight face, agreed that people should know "that this is a person that they can trust with the level of power we give to the presidency...I've made mistakes at times--I'm also a 68-year-old grandfather and I think people have to measure what I do now."
Subject closed? Looking back at White House occupants since FDR, however, history suggest a more nuanced answer to the correlation between presidential performance and marital fidelity.
Truman, Nixon, Ford, Carter and the two Bushes (as far as we know) were faithful, although Carter during his campaign gratuitously told Playboy he had "looked at a lot of women with lust in my heart."
Before and after being stricken by polio, Franklin D. Roosevelt was not. His romance with Lucy Mercer effectively ended the intimacy of his marriage to Eleanor and, in later years, Missy LeHand was his social secretary and "constant companion."
When Eisenhower was president, there were rumors of an affair with his World War II driver, Kay Summersby, who after Ike's death and shortly before her own, wrote a memoir about their relationship.
JFK and LBJ violated their vows early and often.
Sainted Ronald Reagan moved into the White House as the first divorced president, while Nancy worked tirelessly to remove all biographical references to his first Hollywood wife, Jane Wyman, who never spoke publicly about their marriage.
Bill Clinton's "bimbo eruptions" and impeachment thereafter (by Gingrich) require no elaboration.
Now, after the death of privacy, Americans might likely take in stride the first First Lady to acquire the position through adultery, although evangelicals are divided about the question of whether or not Gingrich has "repented enough."
To offset such criticism, Gingrich has now endorsed their "Marriage Pledge," promising to "support sending a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the states for ratification. I will also oppose any judicial, bureaucratic, or legislative effort to define marriage in any manner other than as between one man and one woman."
Looking back, such presidents as Truman (who slept well after dropping the first atomic bombs in history), Nixon and Carter may be seen as small, mean-spirited men without moral imagination or the humanity to be ensnared by uncontrolled passion.
Whether or not that applies to Newton Leroy Gingrich, there will be a lot of other evidence to consider.
Newton's First Law tells us objects stay at rest or continue in motion if nothing changes, an apt description of this year in American politics: an inert Congress and a careening GOP presidential race that keeps dropping former frontrunners off the turnip truck.
This was not the kind of Change Barack Obama had in mind when he was elected, but he has now gone through three years of pushing legislation against wall-to-wall GOP resistance that hardened into stone after the 2010 Tea Party takeover of the House.
As he starts to campaign for reelection, the President will have to persuade voters that inertia in American life has always worked both ways, as a deterrent to progress, to be sure, but also as a brake to driving off a cliff in the passions of the moment, a delicate balancing act.
In John Boehner and Newt Gingrich, if nominated, he will have twin symbols of what's wrong in American politics now, both kinds of inertia gone berserk.
Barack Obama will have to counter such ugly Newtonian mindlessness by going back to the wisdom of Emerson and Thoreau, with an ethos of American individualism that now seems like a message from another planet.
"All our progress is an unfolding," said Emerson, "like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit."
"How vain it is to sit down to write," Thoreau added, "when you have not stood up to live."
Telling Americans to stop and think may be a hard sell in the era of instant bloviating with a flood of 24/7 certainty on every subject, but it may be the only way to get the nation off a path to self-destruction.
The next two Republican debates, tomorrow night and Thursday, "are shaping up to be the most important--and nasty--yet."
Both come only weeks before Iowa caucuses on January 3rd, with primaries soon after in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. These debates, predicts the Caucus, "are likely to be slugfests as desperate candidates search for a magic bullet to improve their political fortunes in the short time that is left.
"The best predictors for the tenor of a presidential debate are the hours and days that precede it...And the 2012 campaign for the Republican nomination has suddenly taken on a much harsher tone."
In this mudfight, David Brooks observes, "we have one man, Romney, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1950s, and another, Gingrich, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1960s. He has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with '60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance...
"It's really too bad. We could have had a great debate about the progressive-conservative tradition. President Obama is now embracing Roosevelt. Gingrich has tried to modernize this tendency.
"But how you believe something is as important as what you believe. It doesn't matter if a person shares your overall philosophy. If that person doesn't have the right temperament and character, stay away."
The Wall Street Journal is kinder to Gingrich as Peggy Noonan calls him "Inspiring—-and Disturbing," noting that "He is compelling and unique, and, as Margaret Thatcher once said, he has 'tons of guts.' But this is a walk on the wild side."
All this is capped by a Romney surrogate accusing Gingrich of being "not stable."
Does the GOP go with the buttoned-down stiff they could bring home to meet their parents or the wild guy on the motorbike who might run them off the road?
Let the games begin.
This is the week Barack Obama declared political war on an obstructionist GOP, invoking Theodore Roosevelt.
In Osawatomie, Kansas, the President cited TR who came there in 1910 and "was called a radical...a socialist—-even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women—-insurance for the unemployed and for the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax...
"Just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. 'The market will take care of everything,' they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and taxes—-especially for the wealthy—-our economy will grow stronger...
"Now, it's a simple theory...one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government...And fits well on a bumper sticker. But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the '50s and '60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade."
Barack Obama is no Teddy Roosevelt or even a Harry Truman who slugged it out against a "do-nothing, good-for-nothing" Congress and won reelection in 1948. But, regardless of whether he faces Romney or Gingrich, the 2012 issue is the same, and the question is: Will he fire himself up enough to meet the challenge of rallying voters.
As Republicans treat the payroll tax cut extension as just another occasion to hack away at social programs, GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who supports taxing high earners to finance it, is discouraged about how a bill could appeal to enough members to pass.
"It's going to be pointless if the House sends over bills that the Senate cannot or will not pass," Sen. Collins says, assuming leaders are negotiating behind the scenes.
That's a generous assumption, given her party's constipated failure to move on any issue all year, bringing Congressional approval ratings to new lows.
If this President is going to be a Teddy or Truman next year, he has a long way to go in turning up the heat before year's end and girding himself for even more of the same in an election year.
Mitt Romney has an uphill battle as he gets into the Fox cockpit to contest Newt Gingrich, whose cozy ties with proprietor Rupert Murdoch go back almost two decades.
"I'll be on Fox a lot because you guys matter when it comes to Republican primary voters," Romney tells Neil Cavuto in an interview as polls show him far behind Gingrich among Fox-watching Iowa caucus-goers.
Until he started running for President, the former Speaker was on the Fox payroll, but his shady relationship with Murdoch goes back to the 1990s when he had to return a $4.5 million book advance under pressure after it was disclosed that at the same time he had been meeting with the media mogul on legislative relief for his empire during a whirlwind of ethics violations that eventually led to Gingrich's downfall.
In 1997, the House voted overwhelmingly (395 to 28) to reprimand him with an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in its 208-year history that the body ever disciplined a Speaker for ethical wrongdoing.
Now, with his own empire itself under pressure for ethical lapses, particularly in Great Britain, Murdoch has lost none of his appetite for playing White House kingmaker with Fox lackeys giving Romney a hard time to advance Gingrich's fortunes.
It will be the severest test yet of Romney's blandness as he enters the Fox lion's den to take them on in Murdoch's last hurrah to get a pet poodle of his own into the White House.
Will Romney be able to roar?
Update: Gingrich is champing at the bit to line up a Fox team for the White House, promising to name a fellow contributor John Bolton as Secretary of State.
Bolton, who wants to bomb everybody, would match Newt's hair-trigger temperament perfectly.
We lived in a different America then. News of the Japanese attack came from bulletins that broke into radio programs and was spread by word of mouth over the phone, on streets of cities and house to house in small towns.
That Sunday, I was a 17-year-old college student with a part-time job in a New York hospital, standing next to a young man with a dazed grin, staring through a picture window at a nurse in a white mask holding up a swaddled armful inches from our eyes. She gently shook the sleeping baby into a red-faced wail, then drew the curtain.
In those days, fear of germs kept newborns in a nursery while mothers spent a week in hospital beds. The babies were brought in to be breast-fed, then carried back to their cocoons. During that time, the new father would get only one quick look, and my job was to lead him to the window. The babies all looked alike. The real show was on our side of the glass: a man's eyes flooding with pride, wonder and worry.
But on December 7, 1941, sudden death six thousand miles away shattered the tableaus of new life. Happy faces at mothers' bedsides turned to stone, nurses and doctors looked lost behind their masks of composure. My stomach churned as I climbed to the Third Avenue El to go home. As the train hurtled over familiar streets, I felt cold and exposed.
The next day, I was in the Great Hall of City College, holding a half-eaten sandwich, my eyes on a huge glowing mural behind the stage, a black-robed graduate amid flying cherubs and, in togas, the figures of Wisdom, Discipline and Alma Mater pointing the way to a bright future.
From a loudspeaker the voice of the only President I could remember (FDR took office on my ninth birthday) was telling of a day that will live in infamy and announcing we were at war. I was suddenly wrenched into a world beyond my familiar slivers of the Bronx and Harlem connected by a subway ride.
The following days were a thrilling blur of rumor and fear. A history professor stopped a lecture on Victorian life. "You'll hear the Japanese have poisoned the water and Nazi subs are off Staten Island," he said, with a reassuring grimace. "Nothing will happen. Go home, do your homework."
Every night at 8:55, breaking into the flow of radio comedy and dopey drama, the chilling voice of Elmer Davis told of battles in Europe and the Pacific. Older boys from my neighborhood were fighting in unimaginable places, and I would soon be with them.
World War II came to us in slow motion and seemed unreal until we read the next day's newspaper. Why, then, did that unseen war affect our lives so much more deeply than the 24/7 images and endless words about the Middle East, which now slide out of national consciousness?
World War II was everybody's war, fought by our fathers, sons, husbands, brothers and those of the people next door and down the street. At 17 then, in little more than a year, I knew I would be among them. We were all in it together.
Today, a New York Times editorial observes, "The youngest of the survivors are in their late 80s now. Our direct connection to that day will soon flicker out. Yet we will still remember, to pay respect to sacrifice, to honor bravery, to note the dear price of peace...
"Just as Americans will do today with flowers tossed into the oil-speckled waters of a peaceful harbor outside Honolulu, and as they do each September in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, they are summoning the memory of people cherished and dearly missed--and strengthening the unity of a nation well loved and worth defending."
If my friends and I had known we would be called "The Greatest Generation," we would have wondered what was so unusual about doing what we had to do. And it would have saddened us to know that our children and grandchildren would have to fight and die when the nation's survival was not so clearly at stake.
It would have broken our hearts then, and it still does.
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 2:08 AM 1 comment:
Thinking about Newt is exhausting—-all those policy reversals, all that profiteering from disguised lobbying, all that adultery while impeaching Clinton, all those crackpot gimmicks posing as intellect. Yet, there are many hands on both sides of the political spectrum to do the heavy lifting of deconstructing him.
Maureen Dowd takes a whack at it: "His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.
"He didn't get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany's credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it."
From the other side, GOP Sen. Tom Coburn weighs in: "I am not inclined to be a supporter of Newt Gingrich's having served under him for four years and experienced his leadership. Because I found it lacking often times...
"There's all kind of leaders that have one standard for the people that they are leading and a different standard for themselves. I will have difficulty supporting him for president of the United States."
Conservative columnist George Will hits harder, noting that Newt "embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything...
"There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich's unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a 'historian'), to say, 'If you want to put people in jail,' look at 'the politicians who profited from' Washington's environment."
From the center, Times columnist Frank Bruni notes that "Romney seems newly shaken, Newt-ly spooked. It must be wearing on him to stand as long as he has with his chest thrust out, waiting for his corsage while the electorate casts around for some better date to the prom. No wonder his knees, to judge by his own Fox News appearance last week, have gone a little weak.
"Romney's wobble gives Gingrich a window. Just watch him squeeze through it, pontificating all the while about the nature of portals and the history of glass. That Republicans don't mind a lecture is reassuring. That they're so open to this particular lecturer isn't."
Even with a Gingrich endorsement by the Union Leader, former GOP Sen. John Sununu of New Hampshire writes an op-ed in the Boston Globe to downgrade him and endorse Romney
In the White House, just as Jon Stewart on The Daily Show did, they must be praying that Gingrich turns out to be The One. There will be an oversupply of political harpoons to spear this Great White-haired Whale.
Update: In another dazzling display of bad judgment, Gingrich visits New York to pay court to a former frontrunner, even as leading Republicans express dismay at the so-called Donald Trump "debate" as potentially damaging to the party.
With Newt's talent for making the wrong friends, he doesn't have to worry about enemies and critics.
Shame is dead or at least comatose as two public figures refuse to retreat into embarrassment over mounting evidence of their sexual misconduct.
A would-be leader of the Free World, Herman Cain is surrounded by barbecue, bunting and bands in announcing "suspension" of his campaign after "continued hurt caused on me and my family" by numerous charges of harassing women as well as a long-term extramarital affair.
Cain's positive spin on disaster recalls a press conference decades ago by two entrepreneurs who had bankrupt a venerable publication that started with a slide
presentation titled "Moving Ahead with the Saturday Review."
Similarly, the former pizza mogul touts a "Plan B" that consists of denying everything while trying to hold on to media attention, as if his campaign wreck were the result of a natural disaster not of his own making.
Cain's disconnection from reality is echoed by the central figure in the Penn State scandal, Jerry Sandusky. Faced with 40 charges of child molestation, the former coach is pursuing what may be the weirdest legal strategy ever by giving interviews everywhere.
In the latest, he tells the New York Times that, despite being caught in a public shower with a 10-year-old boy, that he was only "a father figure" to disadvantaged children and prosecutors "just twisted that all."
Sandusky sums up the news cyclone that that ended the careers of legendary coach Joe Paterno and the university president with self-pity over the loss of his connection with kids, leaving only his dog Bo, "And I swear he understands...And you know I love him dearly for that."
Psychiatrists may have clinical explanations for such narcissistic behavior by Cain and Sandusky, but what comes to the inexpert mind is musical comedy. In "Chicago," after being caught in bed with two women, a two-timing lover asks, "Who are you going to believe? What you see or what I tell you?" His outraged companion pulls the trigger.
Would it be too much to ask the media to do the same about showering attention on the former candidate and the predator coach? Or have we all lost our sense of shame?
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 4:31 AM 2 comments:
If Americans could pick someone for the White House next year from a Chinese menu, what do opinion polls tell us about what they want?
The seesawing Republican race, along with Obama's falling favorables, suggest that voters' appetites are more jaded than they have been for decades. But if they could pick and choose traits, what kind of composite President would we get?
Resistance to Romney clearly shows a desire for something new, but if Gingrich is the answer, what's the question? Newt's surge suggests preference for a know-it-all sweet talker spiced with sudden surprises, like immigration compassion and Dickensian attacks on poor children, to a blandly predictable flip-flopper without Gingrich's say-anything panache to cover a record of reversals that makes Mitt's taste tame.
Yet thinking conservatives who want to win will hang on to Romney, immovable hair and all, as their best bet.
Ron Paul, who wants to wipe the table of almost everything, nonetheless offers a palate-clearing clarity on the follies of Newtness and continuing to pour trillions that might save the American economy into foreign wars.
Put Romney's hair, Gingrich's certainty and Paul's staunchness on the table, and what would voters want of Obama?
One clue goes back to early in the 2008 campaign when Maureen Dowd challenged him on his "toughness," asking, "Do you worry that you might be putting yourself on a pedestal too much? Because people also want to see you mix it up a little."
"When I get into a tussle," he answered, "I want it to be over something real, not something manufactured."
Bipartisanship was a noble goal, but this brilliant President has been slow to learn that you can't negotiate with nobody and the bully pulpit allows you to do the bullying, not the other way around.
Now that he is in campaign mode again, Barack Obama is going on the attack, and none too soon.
We don't get to pick a President from a Chinese menu.
Update: It's official. The presidential choice has dropped to the cheap takeout level as attention junkie Donald Trump returns to "moderate" a GOP "debate" after Christmas—-a late present for Barack Obama and the Democrats.
Jon Huntsman won't be there, another small step toward staking out his position as the only sane candidate in that race.
Al Franken, who used to be a comic and perhaps still is, has created a holiday solution to the Senate's civility shortage—-a "Secret Santa" exchange of gifts between the opposing parties.
Just as in grade school, 21 Republicans and 37 Democrats have drawn names from a Santa hat and will present each other with gifts worth $10 or less in mid-December. That won't violate lobbying laws, and there is something to be said for handing one another gift-wrapped packages instead of verbal hand grenades.
In their real (?) work, Congress is inching toward a gift for voters as Republicans reluctantly prepare to back a small part of the President's jobs plan by agreeing to extend a payroll-tax cut of $265 billion but without any ho-ho-hos, as they insist that the measure, as well as any extension of unemployment benefits, be offset by spending cuts.
Chief Grinch John Boehner assures followers that such a gesture would not mean abandoning Congress' overall approach:
"There's going to be $1.2 trillion of further cuts to meet our commitment, and I think having the sequester in place to ensure that we're going to get our spending problem under control is a good thing. But I would prefer, and I think all of our members would prefer, that we do this in a more responsible way."
If they decide to do Secret Santa in the House, somebody should gift-wrap a lump of coal for the Speaker.
Meanwhile, the President is in Scranton, telling voters he is filled with Christmas spirit and wants put $1500 under every family tree, if Republicans get on the sleigh this week. Warm up the reindeer.
The final nail in the Cain campaign's coffin is a disheartening reminder of how far Americans have come in being vulnerable to figures "telling public lies with the utmost sincerity."
Four years ago, John Edwards gave us a preview of hypocrisy taking a candidate close to the White House, but his mendacity was hidden by six years in the U.S. Senate and a substantive campaign, however undercut by his personal enrichment, to highlight growing income disparity in the nation.
Herman Cain's rise and fall shows how low the bar is now set—-a man with no elective experience, with no substantive proposals beyond an empty 9-9-9 slogan, with aggressive ignorance about foreign policy and no presidential qualifications whatsoever is brought down from the top of the opinion polls by what his lawyer accurately calls "private, alleged consensual conduct between adults."
No matter how much bravado he shows in aggressively denying that affair, Cain is caught between clear evidence of more long-term sexual misbehavior and his insistence that all charges against him are false. The issue is not whether he is an adulterer but a chronic liar.
In 1992, Bill Clinton, with Hillary standing by her man, could go on 60 Minutes and weather the Gennifer Flowers story, the kind of behavior that would later stain his presidency with impeachment, but Clinton had been a governor and Oxford scholar who was running a substantive campaign.
Now, with Herman Cain being brought down for perhaps the wrong reasons from a position he never should have occupied in the first place, prurient attention may navigate to Newt Gingrich's three marriages, two adulteries and financial misconduct during and after his tenure as Speaker of the House.
In the contest between Gingrich and squeaky clean Mitt Romney, voters may want to look at the character issue but only after making sure that the subjects are qualified to hold the office, nominate Supreme Court justices and send our young people to war.
Otherwise, what we get in the Oval Office will be our fault, not the those of the humanly imperfect candidates.
Update: Cain now tells supporters he is "assessing" whether or not to drop out, but the larger question is what on earth possessed him to enter the race and run it with so much ignorance and such blatant lies.
A tipping point in the Obama-bashing competition has now cost Mitt Romney endorsement by the only paper that counts in New Hampshire.
"Newt Gingrich is by no means the perfect candidate," says the Union Leader, adding "We would rather back someone with whom we may sometimes disagree than one who tells us what he thinks we want to hear."
This follows last week's debate, where Ron Paul seemed beside himself at what others were saying, and even Michele Bachmann, Our Lady of the Ludicrous Claim, was moved to call Rick Perry "highly naïve."
Gingrich is moving up in the straight-face sweepstakes, largely because he has the most experience in telling public lies with the utmost sincerity, or as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni puts it more politely:
"This presidential race is shaping up to be an especially mean and mendacious ride, and not just because the two Republicans currently in the lead, Romney and Newt Gingrich, have demonstrated a formidable talent for improvisation, starting with thorough revisions of their own positions on health care, climate change and such. They're a limber duo, primed to teach classes on political yoga...
"But their specific contortions and distortions are no more worrisome than the backdrop against which this campaign unfolds, one of toxic partisanship and breathless hyperbole."
When Republicans have finally settled on their least-worst option, the President's campaign will kick in, undoubtedly under pressure to respond in kind. But Barack Obama, who has lost political battles with Congress by hesitating to go for the gut, will be facing a crucial character test in how he responds.
His opponent will have survived a contest for the hearts of a mean-spirited minority of primary voters, who represent a fraction of Americans. Will the President recognize the opportunity not only to win reelection but bring back some civility to the political landscape?
Politics ain't beanbag, goes the old saying, but does it have to be mud-wrestling? We'll find out next year.
If you enjoyed how Ralph Nader put George W. Bush into the White House in 2000, you may love what a group called Americans Elect is trying to do in 2012.
The well-financed effort wants a "wide-scale draft movement for presidential candidates," but it looks more like hammering a "broken" political system and smashing it to smithereens.
Americans Elect aims, not to create a new party, but hold a "convention on the Internet," to take the choice away from primary voters and turn it over to the wisdom of those who select "American Idol."
Presumably, this would bring a process that has survived two centuries, including a civil war, into a new technological democracy that would truly reflect the will of the American people.
Loopier still, the group wants "a mixed-party ticket," requiring its presidential candidate to pick a running mate from the other party.
All this overlooks the fact that technology can't fix a mess that was created, depending on ideological bias, either in 2008 by the election of Barack Obama or in 2010 of Tea Party zealots who are holding government hostage in Congress or some combination of both—-or more likely still, a generation of voters that keeps throwing tantrums for instant gratification in hard economic times.
Americans Elect assumes only a minority of Republicans have gone mad, lurching from Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich in their search for a plausible candidate as some Democrats hold back enthusiasm for the reelection of their standard bearer. But there is no evidence that a Silent Majority out there knows better.
In all our free speech, including the Occupy movement, have the 99 percent proposed political solutions they are willing to support with the kind of sweat and hard work that created advances in the past?
Long ago, a social critic answered an audience complaining about those who produced a mass culture of low quality: "If you're looking for blame, what about those who watch and read and buy this awful stuff? If they responded to better, they might get it." (See Jon Huntsman.)
As Americans Elect proposes only more chaos, we may want to go back further to consider that "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."
Computers won't fix that.
Late Update: A week before Christmas, Americans Elect is on the ballot in 11 states and close to adding California as well as gathering signatures by year's end for ballot petitions in 30 states that allow the process to be completed this year and is confident of meeting requirements in the remaining states next year.
Chaos, here we come.
From years of editing women's magazines and tasting test-kitchen results thereof, herewith a way with leftover turkey that will keep you from cursing the oversized bird you bought.
TURKEY TETRAZZINI
Ingredients: 3/4 cup butter or margarine, 3/4 cup flour, salt, 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 quart milk, 2 cups undiluted chicken broth, 4 egg yolks, 1 cup heavy cream, 1/2 cup sherry, 1 pound thin spaghetti, 6 cups leftover turkey cut into cubes, 1 cup fresh or canned sliced mushrooms, 8 oz sharp Cheddar grated (2 cups).
Sauce: Melt butter in large pan, remove from heat. Stir in flour, nutmeg and salt until smooth. Gradually add milk and broth, stirring constantly. Boil 2 minutes until slightly thick.
In small bowl, beat egg yolks and cream. Beat in a little of the sauce, pour back into pan over low heat, stirring until hot but not to a boil. Stir in sherry.
Boil spaghetti, drain and return to kettle. Add 2 cups sauce and toss together. Divide in half and put into two 12-by-8-by-2 baking dishes, push back toward edges. Add 2 cups sauce to turkey and mushrooms, mix well and spoon half into center of each dish.
Sprinkle grated cheese, cover with foil and refrigerate 1 hour or even overnight. Preheat oven to 350F and bake, covered, 45 minutes. Spoon reheated leftover sauce over each serving. You can refreeze and have leftover leftovers.
Somewhat calorific, but then again, so are the bread and mayonnaise for turkey sandwiches, which won't taste nearly this good.
The President pardoned two birds yesterday after Congress went home for the holidays.
In the annual White House rite, he acknowledged the other fowl escapees, noting that "some of you may know that recently I've been taking a series of executive actions that don't require Congressional approval.
"Well, here's another one. We can't wait to pardon these turkeys. Literally. Otherwise they'd end up next to the mashed potatoes and stuffing."
Aside from his swipe at Capitol Hill residents, Barack Obama had one for the assembled reporters, telling them that the pardoned turkeys had been given media training for the press conference: "Learning how to gobble without really saying anything."
He has been gone now longer than he lived—-48 years to 46--and, in these days of Washington impotence, must seem unreal to generations of American born after his time.
A few years after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy wistfully told me that her husband was being remembered too much for how he died rather than what he had lived for. She was right. It was too soon then for Americans to appreciate what they had lost.
In 1960, I had made an unintentional contribution to Kennedy's election. After my magazine ran a piece by Eleanor Roosevelt, "My Advice to the Next First Lady," the "Tonight" show called me to ask Mrs. Roosevelt if she would appear with Jack Paar. To my surprise, she agreed.
On the way to the studio, I asked Mrs. Roosevelt, who had supported Adlai Stevenson and been visibly cool to JFK, what made her decide to take part in a talk show. "I want to help elect Senator Kennedy," she said.
On the "Tonight" show, she did just that, comparing Kennedy to FDR during his first campaign in 1932, inspiring voters and responding to their enthusiasm, and predicted he would make a fine President. In Kennedy's hairline victory, her testimonial may well have been significant, and he didn't disappoint her.
John F. Kennedy was the last president in memory still learning while in office. He admitted mistakes and profited from them.
Despite misgivings, he went ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba after being told Americans would be greeted as liberators and withdrew when he realized he had been misled, accepting "sole responsibility" for the fiasco.
As the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he put that lesson to use by overruling "experts" who wanted to bomb or invade Cubs and trusting his own instincts to avoid disaster.
After November 22, 1963 I wrote an editorial attempting to define the deep grief over his shocking death-—that beyond his attractiveness and intelligence, there was the loss of a leader "who was still growing—-in understanding, in skill, in compassion, in commitment."
Today's contenders for the Presidency are, in contrast, overwhelmed by challenges. For all our sakes, we can only hope that whoever wins next year can attain ultimately the stature John F. Kennedy did in the thousand days he spent in the White House.
Congress is raising the dysfunctional family Thanksgiving to new heights, not only by disagreeing over how to carve the turkey but throwing it into a shredder and leaving hard-to-digest scraps for the budget table.
This won't be a Norman Rockwell holiday even as one political observer notes, "We don't need to like each other. We need to listen to each other."
Not going to happen. As both sides of the family keep squabbling, old Uncle Newt shows up, drunk with poll power, to announce they're doing it all wrong. Back in his day, they just closed down the House and ate at McDonald's, even as his own tab for ethics violations was $300,000.
At the head of the table, Barack Obama has relatives yelling at him to give up his seat, while Mitt Romney waits for his portion, telling lies about the President while holding on to his nomination chair with both hands.
If you think Thanksgiving is a bummer, just wait until Christmas when payroll tax cuts and the Bush bonanza for billionaires are on the menu after the new year.
My old friend Norman Rockwell must be spinning in his grave.
British and German heads of state met this week to bridge the gap between them and "tried to paper over divergent views on European policy that have sparked a war of words between politicians and media in both countries."
For someone who lived through World War II, the picture of David Cameron entreating Angela Merkel conjures up Neville Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler—-and failing to stop the slaughter of millions of innocents.
Such blood memories may be impossible for most Americans to understand now, but those who can still bear witness are haunted by a history we have largely suppressed in order to live in our own time. Fairness is not part of the equation.
My own response was to Netflix a movie I have resisted watching—-about the theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who came of age when Nazis took over Germany and, as a devout Pacifist and proponent of Christian morality, opposed both a murderous regime and his compliant fellow ministers. He was finally imprisoned for taking part in a plot to assassinate Hitler and hanged only weeks before V-Day.
"Cheap grace," wrote Bonhoeffer, denouncing the comfort his Church was conferring on believers while turning a blind eye to the inhumanity of Nazis, "is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance...absolution without personal confession."
In that film, seas of adoring Germans heiling Hitler's rants provide a contrast to my memories of fighting through Germany as a foot soldier, seeing stragglers in ragged stripes, dazed gaunt figures wandering the roads and being picked up by Army trucks. We knew who they were.
During the days of Occupation, working with German civilians, I never met one who would admit to knowing about those concentration camps.
Yet, in contrast to the punitive post-World War I era that created an impoverished nation and opened the way the way for Nazi nationalism, the U.S. poured billions into Germany under the Marshall Plan and underwrote a recovery that led to the strongest economy in 21st century Europe.
Today's crisis is a long, long way from that era and Angela Merkel is certainly no Nazi, but Germany's foot-dragging as investors bail out of European bonds is threatening economic collapse.
Those of us with long memories would be comforted by seeing a former enemy recall Bonhoeffer's warnings about cheap grace.
An impression of Bumble the Beadle is Newt Gingrich's latest turn in a one-man show of Dickens impressions as he tells Harvard students that he wants to turn schools into workhouses by hiring poor kids as janitors:
"You're in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing...Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the schools."
With his doughy countenance, Gingrich is ideally suited for the roles of Fagin, Pecksniff et al for Tea Party tastes that run to 19th century melodrama. (They loved Eric Cantor as Scrooge after Hurricane Irene, holding out for tax cuts to offset disaster relief.)
Gingrich, who now pronounces the Republican race as a contest between Mitt Romney and himself, crystalizes all of Victorian hypocrisy, with a 21st century correction for inflation—-a six-figure tab at Tiffany, a mid-campaign Greek cruise that prompted his now-returning staff to quit and, most recently, the $1.8 million he earned as a "historian" consulting for Freddie Mac, the mortgage bank whose failures he now denounces Obama for.
Those Victorian critics who charged Charles Dickens with sentimentality and implausibility would be astonished at Gingrich's new web site that lists a long string of accusations against him and explains them away with all the deftness of the Artful Dodger.
Ever alert for a turn in political fortunes, even mainstream media are now joining in the Newtster's self-rehabilitation as the Washington Post debunks "aspects" of the story that he "ended his first marriage by serving his wife with divorce papers while she lay in a hospital bed dying of cancer."
By the next GOP debate, Newt Gingrich may show up dressed as Tiny Tim.
Posted by ROBERT STEIN at 12:25 PM 1 comment:
Another Congressional "Perils of Pauline" episode unreels with the Supercommittee jalopy dangling over the edge of a cliff as members try to freeze the frame beyond next week's deadline while ideologues left and right gabble about bad Grand Bargains, sequesters and the like. From the cheap seats in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney accuses Democrats of a "Faustian bargain."
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin throws both sides under her bus, appealing to ends of the political spectrum, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, to oppose Congress' "corruption and cronyism." From the safety of presidential sidelines, she rails:
"Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves."
Her screed appears in the Wall Street Journal, one of the Rupert Murdoch media from which she is drawing non-tax dollars to "enrich and shield" herself beyond any member of Congress' wildest dreams.
The rational mind reels at this cockpit of self-interest, self-justification and hypocrisy in the name of patriotism and searches for signs of human life in the debris.
What emerges is the image of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her astronaut husband Mike Kelly appearing on TV this week to talk about their lives and her ongoing recovery from being shot in the head last January, a story of love and courage.
Yet, even here, there is no escape from Washington meanness. Kelly writes in their book about the couple's disappointment that three months later, when Giffords was in rehabilitation in Houston, John Boehner came down for the NCAA basketball finals.
"Considering that she was a member of Congress and he was the highest-ranking member," Kelly notes, "we thought he'd ask to visit Gabby or at least give a call to see how she was doing."
But Boehner had already sent a get-well card, and that was the limit of empathy for a man known to break in tears while talking about his own rise from humble beginnings.
Meanwhile, it raises a question Kelly does not address. Were Boehner's tickets and travel at taxpayer expense, or did lobbyists pick up the tab?


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Николай Михайлович Малиев (1841 — не ранее 1916) — основатель кафедры анатомии Томского университета, профессор Казанского, Томского и Санкт-Петербургского университетов.

Биография
Из семьи приходского священника. Окончил с отличием Медико-хирургическую академию в Петербурге (1864). Защитил диссертацию «Материалы для сравнительной антропологии» на степень доктора медицины (1874). Работал в Казанском университете (с 1875) вначале прозектором, затем — приват-доцентом (1885—1888) при кафедре физиологической анатомии. Во время работы в Казанском университете неоднократно выезжал в экспедиции для антропологического изучения черепов удмуртов, башкир, марийцев, коми-пермяков и представителей других народностей. Создал выдающуюся краниологическую коллекцию (695 черепов людей разных национальностей) в анатомическом музее Казанского университета. Избран членом-корреспондентом Парижского антропологического общества (1882).

Назначен экстраординарным профессором (1.7.1888), ординарным профессором (1.1.1889) по кафедре нормальной анатомии Императорского Томского университета. С первых дней работы в Томске приступил к организации кафедры и подготовке её к началу учебного года. На первом этаже учебного корпуса был устроен секционный зал, комнаты для инъекций трупов и хранения анатомических препаратов. На втором этаже были размещены анатомический музей, кабинет профессора и оборудована аудитория на 75 человек. В 1889 — избран заместителем председателя общества естествоиспытателей и врачей в Томском университете и назначен редактором «Известий Императорского Томского университета». Был секретарём Совета (деканом) медицинского факультета (1890—1895). Передал кафедре анатомии около 200 книг и журналов по анатомии (1896). Внес большой вклад
в создание анатомического музея университета. Был искусным препаратором и за время работы в Томском университете создал большую коллекцию анатомических препаратов (597 экземпляров), которые были размещены в музее. Ушёл в отставку по выслуге 30 лет (1897), но продолжал читать лекции в университете. Работал в Санкт-Петербургском университете приват-доцентом кафедры зоологии, сравнительной анатомии и физиологии (1897—1916). Дальнейшая судьба Н. М. Малиева неизвестна.

Литература

 Юсупов Р. М. Малиев, Николай Михайлович // Башкирская энциклопедия. Том 4. Л – О. Уфа, 2008. С. 99.

Ссылки

Преподаватели Императорского Санкт-Петербургского университета

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What Are Pheromones And The things they Do
Fact that seems to get overlooked all too often is that we humans are animals. It's due to this that we are subject to conduct themselves in animalistic methods at least some of the time. Our bodily evolution has not taken all of us that far from the trees and that's why pheromones remain a strong factor in helping us function. It really is this kind of along with other 'instincts' that are enabling us homo sapiens in order to keep on mating.
Luckily we are still able to the court each other as well as go through the age old mating rituals.
The truth is though that many of us have no idea how we are achieving that which you achieve.
Ok, so think about how a dog knows that another is in temperature without being able to see the other dog.
It really is to do with airborne particles that are floating around and are picked up by the nose.
Humans continue to be capable of picking up on these particles but simply because the social etiquette has evolved. As a result, we control the reactions when we find someone desirable. Our capability to determine whether someone is attractive via smell remains with us all. Humans nevertheless solution through their own sweat, a particle that tells the opposite gender that we are an attractive partner and are ready to mate.
Pheromones to Attract a Woman
Pheromones are good at affecting people's responses. There are several forms of pheromones, each with separate purposes or different reactions. A number of such reactions include a signal for food, sex, and danger. Different kinds of pheromones have different influences on the behavior. Get more information on pheromones to attract a woman for Men.
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Every single day they were expected to work out so that they sweat heavily.
At the End, a Group of Women Were Asked to Sniff the Actual Underarms of the Topics
They were told to rate each from one to five with the most sexy being five and the least alluring being one. Almost all the results varied the roughly the the same amount aside from one exactly where all the women rated the man four or previously mentioned.
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This was a perfect example of the women having the ability to choose the best partner through the use of their nose.
They then had to find a way to verify these results against something other than scent.
More tests had been carried out and they found that the man who had been selected as the sexiest within the smell test was more handsome also.
They tested the face for evenness as well as other factor that made men appealing.
So they had proved that we still have a use for pheromones in our mating patterns.
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Glamour and Blitz: a woman in security in the Middle East
By: Maria Fjeldstad
In this blog, security manager Maria Fjeldstad reflects on her experiences as a woman working in security in the Middle East and considers the importance of female perspectives to achieve an inclusive approach to security that recognises and mitigates the risks faced by individuals.
I find myself at crossroads in my career, as my diverse background and desire to provide a safe and secure environment for those in need has exhausted its mission in the corporate world. I hope to put my skills and experience to better use in the humanitarian sector, where safety and security remain fundamental rights that many strive for. As I reach out to peers worldwide for advice, there are two types of reactions when I tell people I work in crisis management, business resilience, and security in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). One is that of dismay: Isn't it dangerous? Do you, as a woman, have any rights? Do you have to cover up? And one is of disbelief: Isn't UAE one of the safest places in the world? Do you even have anything to do?
While none of these reactions are wrong, they are in no way right. In an environment of challenges and yet immense opportunity, in the oasis of safety that is the UAE, surrounded by conflict and instability so often associated with the Middle East, I would like to share my story. It is a story of navigating the intricate landscape between the most luxurious places in the world and those most dangerous while working in a male-dominated safety and security field. I hope to show how I navigated these spaces as a woman and how corporate security experience can benefit the humanitarian field.
Women in security: outnumbered yet empowered
I came to Dubai in 2012 after finishing my degree and subsequently working as an intelligence officer with a UK police force, INTERPOL, and then with a rapidly developing private security startup. I later stepped into corporate security, crisis management and business continuity, where I have remained since. Home to around 200 nationalities, the UAE does not only provide corporate business opportunities, but also hosts entities responsible for social and humanitarian work within and outside the country. Security professionals from all over the world support both corporate and humanitarian efforts in high-risk environments across the region. There is, however, a common trend: a vast majority are men: ex-army, ex-police, ex-contractors. There is more gender equality in Europe, which means that I, as a woman of academic background with civilian experience in public, intergovernmental, and private sectors, am like many. But here, there are not many like me. I took the chance.
Joining the OSAC UAE Dubai Chapter provided important resources and opened the door to liaise with professionals operating in the same risk environment. I even served as the Private Sector Co-Chair in 2019-2022, supporting more female members and a stronger focus on diversity. As I saw more women engaged in security forums, I also saw past the derogatory looks and comments of "this is not a matter for a girl" sort. Instead, I sought strong men and women in the field in the region who were eager to pass on their wealth of experience. From Saudi Arabia to South Africa, Pakistan to Turkey, my male and female counterparts and business stakeholders received my background with respect. On the one hand, I was surprised, and on the other hand, I acknowledged that I had underestimated the region and its goal to promote and empower women in the industry.
Diverse security staff for inclusive security practices
Whilst cultural aspects may still dictate more conventional career paths for women in the Middle East, there is a growing recognition, at least in the corporate sector, that a woman may be better suited to identifying the risks faced and mitigation measures required to keep other women in the sector safe. A simple example is: what do I, as a woman, wear travelling to Saudi Arabia now that an abaya is not the only answer? Gender segregation requirements may mean that more vulnerable female communities might not be able to access appropriate support or voice their security concerns openly.
Over the past decade working in the Middle East, men and women navigating the region have relied upon both I and my female counterparts in security for support. My story is one of success, partly owed to the supportive network and environment, but also my own resilience and perseverance – as the road was far from free of challenges and obstacles. Others may not be as lucky. However, the same can be said for women's empowerment and opportunities in every region and profession. My takeaway is not to let negative experiences discourage you and not to let anyone's doubt in your abilities make you doubt yourself. I would not be where I am if I did.
This region, like others, needs women in safety and security to provide a better environment for the communities that they work alongside, as these too include women. To better achieve outputs and results and have a more beneficial impact on society, humanitarian security staff need to be as diverse as the staff and communities they work with. Otherwise, we will never reach our goals, in either the corporate or the humanitarian space.
Maria has worked in the corporate security, crisis management and business resiliency across the wider EMEA region over the past 10 years while being based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Prior to relocating to the Middle East, Maria worked for a local UK police force as an Intelligence Officer and served a short term project with Interpol, focusing on combatting environmental crime in Africa and beyond. When she completed her degree in Criminology and Psychology, her mission was to be able to help and support communities in need. Although her career has taken a different turn, her Ukrainian heritage mixed with Scandinavian upbringing and experience of working around the world is now shifting her focus to her original goal and the desire to move into the humanitarian field.
Managing a Cyber Security Crisis: digital resilience in the aid sector
While digital tools undeniably facilitate humanitarian response, the risk of connected societies and access to data leaves organisations vulnerable to cybercrime attacks. In this blog, CyberFish's Berta Pappenheim explores how effective cyber crisis management differs from traditional crisis management responses and how organisations can build digital resilience to limit their vulnerabilities in the digital realm.
Collaborating, Learning, and Breaking Down Silos: GISF's Autumn Forum 2022
20-22 September saw another successful GISF forum bring our members together. Focusing on a theme of collaboration, the three days explored vertical and horizontal coordination opportunities across the humanitarian security sector. Discussions ranged from partnerships to working with governmental bodies and provided a mix of panel-led sessions and peer-to-peer engagement in smaller groups. It was my first in-person forum, and I was pleased to meet several GISF members and see the importance of collaboration in our sector first-hand.
Effective Security in Emergencies: responding to the Pakistan floods
Recent flooding has devastated Pakistan, leaving up to a third of the country underwater and millions impacted. As climate change induces more and more extreme weather events across the globe, organisations find themselves frequently preparing emergency responses, each with new security challenges. In this blog, ShelterBox's Tim Law reflects on how his organisation rapidly prepared to respond to the flooding in Pakistan and what he has learned about effective security planning in rapid onset emergencies.
South Asia 2022