Cogitamus

Lou Reed R.I.P.

 

"Dime Store Mystery" - Lou Reed

I was strangely shocked to awake this morning to hear that Lou Reed was dead at the age of 71.  It seems more shocking in a way that he lived so long I suppose.  But nonetheless, he seemed like a guy who likely still had more life and art left in him.

Like a lot of people in my age cohort, I first became aware of him through the Rock 'n' Roll Animal and Transformer albums, neither of which was necessarily representative of his most compelling work.  From there, though, I learned of the Velvets and what seemed to a suburban teenager to be a strange and dark world.  I remember hearing Sister Ray for the first time and being struck by its audaciousness.  In the wasteland of mid-70s rock, this was revelatory stuff.

I didn't see Reed perform until 1989 on the New York tour and that performance was a bit of a mixed bag.  The venue -- the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore -- was not conducive to the kind of gritty music that he made and there was a sense of distance in the performance.  Many years later -- and I'm so old I can't tell you when it was -- I had the pleasure of seeing him at the 9:30 Club in DC where he featured a lot of the V.U. songs, including a deeply moving "Pale Blue Eyes," performing with a really tight band featuring Fernando Saunders on bass.  He seemed -- dare I say it -- rather happy, reveling in the crowd's affection, playing brilliant guitar riffs, enjoying his band mates, and, one got the sense, rather proud of the songs.  It was a good night for everyone.

The last time I saw him was a couple of years ago, not in concert, but amusingly enough, walking out of the terrier exhibition at the Westminster Dog Show.  I think I gave him a slightly wide eyed glance as he walked toward me and he looked vaguely uncomfortable.  I said, "hey, how are you" and he nodded and walked on.  (If I had real poise, I would have said, "what did you think of the Kerry Blue Terrier -- I think he got robbed.") 

Reed was an uneven songwriter, a limited singer, but when he was on he was about as good as it gets.  Oh, and, to my ear anyway, he was a really compelling guitarist with great rhythmic riffs and stinging leads.  As Roy notes in his appreciation, much of what is admirable in Reed as an artist is his willingness -- which I think he shares with Bob Dylan and Neil Young -- to make a fool of himself, to take risks, and the way that he wielded his persona to his advantage, rather than be dragged down by it.  Sorry to see him go.   

A friend of mine just speculated that Lou's last words were: "Keith Richards lives."

 

Disaster Averted -- for Three Months -- and Open Thread

I am happy to report that my predictions of disaster have proven to be wrong.  Mitch McConnell -- who seemed to actually grasp the impending doom -- worked out something with Harry Reid that managed to garner 80 votes in the Senate -- but not the votes of Cruz, Rubio, and Paul.  Boehner folded completely and threw the Hastert Rule out the window.  Pelosi delivered her caucus unanimously, while 144 Republicans voted against it and just 87 supported it.  Paul Ryan voted against.

We get to do it again in three months.

I am pretty pleased at how the President and the Democratic leadership in the Congress conducted themselves.  They really did stand firm and did not deliver any face-saving compromise to get the Republicans back off the ledge.  Hopefully this will make the process a bit less fraught when they do it again in 90 days.

It will be interesting to see if any lessons have been learned by Republicans in this process.  I am now cautiously optimistic that we will not see a repeat in January.  The Democrats should feel pretty good about how they played their cards and should be able to do so again with greater confidence next time should the need arise.

Question: Why do the Republicans not view the huge jump in the stock market as a result of the resolution of this stale mate as indicative of the wisdom of markets in these matters?  

In other news, Corey Booker won a solid if not overwhelming victory tonight in the New Jersey special election for Senate. 

What else is happening out there?

Dangling by a Slender Thread

Yeah, I predicted that these crazy bastards in the House would do this.  And yet, somehow I can't quite believe it.  It will be interesting to see if Boehner relents at the last minute and lets the House consider whatever it is that the Senate passes.  Of course that presupposes that crazy Ted Cruz lets the Senate consider a bill under unanimous consent.  Otherwise, the Senate too will be paralyzed while the debt ceiling is breached.

As I have said many times -- and no doubt will again -- the Republican Party of today is unprecedented in post-Civil War American politics.  It is a Leninist party, with no concern for empiricism or pragmatism, but devoted instead to abstract ideology and a vicious will to power.  It is a party controlled in large part by people who hate a good chunk of American society and are utterly unmoved by its suffering.

It is going to be an interesting couple of days. 

What do you all think?   

 

 

Really Important People Saying Really Stupid Things With Real Consequences

Let's lead off with a hearty fuck-you to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy:

"Any society that relies on nine unelected judges to resolve the most serious issues of the day is not a functioning democracy," Kennedy said Thursday at the University of Pennsylvania.

"I just don't think that a democracy is responsible if it doesn't have a political, rational, respectful, decent discourse so it can solve these problems before they come to the court."

Then maybe you shouldn't go out of your way to fish for cases to grant cert. to cases that would enable you and your buddies to overturn the resolutions that the elected branches of government have already arrived at, from campaign finance and voting rights to gun control.

Kevin Drum put it nicely: "Anthony Kennedy Denounces Anthony Kennedy's Supreme Court Jurisprudence."

Second up, House Speaker John Boehner:

"I don't want the United States to default on its debt," he said. "But I'm not going to raise the debt limit without a serious conversation about dealing with problems that are driving the debt up.  It would be irresponsible of me to do this."

OK, so it would be irresponsible to raise the debt limit without having this 'serious conversation.'  And it would be irresponsible to make the U.S. default on its debt.  

Which one would be more irresponsible?  In our world, making the U.S. default on its debt would be far more irresponsible.  But in the world where Boehner and his Tea Party friends reside, apparently that choice is the less irresponsible of the two.  Even though this hostage negotiation wasn't even about our (diminishing!) budgetary problems until just a few days ago.  (Remember when it was all about Obamacare?  That's so last week.)

So John Boehner is willing to blow up the country for...whatever he thinks he can get this week.

Can't we just give each House Republican a suitcase with $10 million and a plane ticket to some country without an extradition treaty with the U.S.?

Finally, the Obama Administration.  No quotes, but they've been routinely ridiculing the notion that they have options to dispense with the debt ceiling crisis.

With the shutdown, the Administration really doesn't have much in the way of options.  If Congress doesn't appropriate money, the Administration can't spend it.  There may be some minor choices they could have made differently (I'd still like a coherent explanation of why they decided to basically shut down the Mall) but that's the level of discretion they had.

The debt ceiling is different, though.  Multiple options have been proposed that at least arguably resolve the matter.  There's the Fourteenth Amendment argument (though that may be limited to paying interest on government debt and paying off the instruments of the debt as they mature), there's the conflict-of-laws argument (that the debt ceiling will force Obama into breaking a law, and the only question is which one, so he gets to choose, so he might as well choose to violate the debt ceiling), and of course there's the trillion-dollar platinum coin, whose main problem seems to be that it sounds silly.  (Well, it does.  But if seriousness puts us in a crisis, and silliness extricates us from it, I'm all for silliness.)  

Treasury keeps saying that the Fed won't accept such a coin, though the Fed itself has been silent on the topic.  But maybe rather than heaping ridicule on all the possible options, the Administration should be making the case for all of them.  

Because the debt ceiling crisis is one that should be avoided by any legitimate means.  If you have an opportunity to rescue the hostages in a hostage situation without anyone getting killed, then you do it.  It's not about whether the Administration should throw John Boehner a lifeline; it's about the full faith and credit of the United States of America, and about the not fully known but probably severe consequences of hitting the debt limit.

And if the Administration has an 'out' in its back pocket, there's no reason to keep that fact hidden.  There's no reason to be part of threatening the nation with a major crisis if there's really not going to be one.  Just make arguments for all the Administration options, and then if Congress fails to raise the debt limit in time, the only question would be which method or rationale the President would use to dispense with the debt ceiling.  

[And just for the record, I'm not equating both sides here.  The GOP is the hostage taker.  This situation is entirely of their making.  They are the bad guys, trying to achieve a bad purpose - trying to deny to tens of millions of Americans the opportunity to buy affordable health insurance.  The Administration, by comparison, is merely failing to take advantage of its options to rescue the hostages.  It makes me bang my head against the wall, but the main thing is there shouldn't be any hostage-taking in the first place.]

Triumph of the Will

The government shutdown and possible debt limit fiasco -- I think it more likely than not that Republicans will precipitate a default -- just reinforce the difficulty I am having with grappling with the day to day of politics at this point.  I have a difficult time even going online these days and have retreated to old-fashioned things like reading books and going to movies instead.  The problem is, at least as it looks to me from here, is that there is not going to be any end to this madness any time soon.  In short, I do not see Republicans moving in meaningful ways on these kinds of issues any time soon.  Indeed, the complete and utter triumph of the nihilistic right within the GOP means that those elements within the Party who are still contesting the New Deal are going to be in the driver's seat for the foreseeable future.

Despite the fact that in the aggregate the positions they are taking are unpopular with the public, it is doubtful that there will be meaningful electoral consequences to the right for quite some time.  Nothing suggests that the Republicans will face a serious threat to their House majority in 2014 and it is quite plausible that they may take back the Senate.  I suspect that they will fall short, but gain seats, the kind of outcome that will continue to reinforce this obdurate behavior.  Should the Democrats win the presidency in 2016 -- always an uphill fight after two presidential terms -- it may prompt some sobriety in GOP circles, but I suspect that in the House that no great change will occur, even if they lose their majority, which I think remains unlikely.  The sorting of Americans into like-minded political enclaves and the increasing correlation between cultural and political identity in this country suggest to me that white rural and exurban Americans will continue to overwhelmingly back Republicans in the near term.

As a result, I don't think that we will see a truly meaningful shift in the electoral balance of power until demographic changes really take hold and new congressional districts drawn after 2020.  In the meantime, look to the right wing to try and grind down progressive opposition by using obstructionist tactics and voter suppression in an attempt to discourage political participation and the belief that politics can be a meaningful path to better the lives of ordinary people. 

In other words, I think that today just marks one in a series of likely governing crises that will become the norm over the next several years, particularly if the Democrats continue to hold the presidency.  A gutless and mentally flabby mainstream media will continue to engage in Chuck Todd-esque neutrality -- both sides are to blame -- and the disciplined minority -- however objectively crazy -- will continue to leverage the many veto points in the constitutional system to prevent effective governance, in the process proving its point about the lack of efficacy of government action.

I wish I saw some other scenario playing out, but I truly don't.  I am afraid the disaster of the 2010 mid-terms is going to live on in a way that is almost unprecedented for such a politically ephemeral and aberrant event.  

Your thoughts?  Consider this an open thread as well.  

Update: This New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza has details on the demographic data of the congresman driving the government shutdown.  To say that this is not a very representative group of reppresentatives is an understatement.